Ep. 72- Empathy, Witnessing, and the Challenge of the Holocaust with Carolyn Dean

How do we approach witnessing the Holocaust? Are there appropriate or inappropriate ways to do this? Does witnessing make us more empathetic or more indifferent?  These are just some of the questions we addressed in this episode with Carolyn Dean.

We also talked about the role of images in teaching about the Holocaust as well as the role of empathy in bystander behavior.

Carolyn Dean is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History and French at Yale University. 

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Waitman Beorn (00:00.823)
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Born. And today I have a really fascinating guest, Carolyn Dean, to talk about a lot of really conceptual issues about witnessing the Holocaust, empathizing, sympathizing with victims. Where does this place us as sort of people that are imbibing the experience, but also what does this do? What has it done?

in scholarship as well as the law and in courtroom. There's just a lot to talk about. I'm really excited to have Caroline on. So thanks so much for coming on.

Carolyn Dean (00:39.177)
Thank you. Happy to be here.

Waitman Beorn (00:40.419)
Can you just start by telling us, because it's a really interesting sort of wedge that you're driving, that you're approaching into this topic. And I'm just curious if you could talk a little about how you got interested in the particular sort of validity or import of empathy and witnessing.

Carolyn Dean (01:02.926)
Well, I guess I was, mean, it kind of came through the back door. think I was really interested in other questions, particularly something I'm working on now, which is the question of bystanders and how bystand, what it means to be a bystander, which is a notoriously difficult question to answer. And that, that has been a kind of abiding concern that I've had. And I am writing a book about it now, but which I wasn't ready to write at that time. So I.

began to be concerned about how, I guess I was concerned about the ways in which at that time Holocaust memory was being, was there, there were sort of, were better versions of it, worse versions of it. So you had, you know, with all the commercialization of the Holocaust, which Schindler's List came out in 1995, I guess it was. And there was a very controversial exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York, which

involved photographers who would overlay pictures of Jewish victims in camps. He would put Coke cans in their hands, things like this. There was a whole discussion and debate about what appropriate representation was. What was the appropriate form for Holocaust representation with the assumption being that the more austere

the more minimal, the more sparing the representation, the more effective in the sense that representations of what is horrible don't need to be exaggerated and they don't need to be overly realistic and even too much realism can be a problem. And that's not necessarily the way in which survivors immediately after the war thought the Holocaust should be represented, but it's certainly

predominated in our time by the 1980s. So was interested in trying to address what kinds of art forms were appropriate to the event, to representing the event. And I was interested in the debates themselves and what they told us about ourselves, in particular Americans in the late 20th century.

Waitman Beorn (03:18.893)
I mean, and this is just a really fascinating topic and it touches on and hopefully we'll talk about some of these things in the context or in the course of the podcast. But, you know, it has to do with and I like that you're sort of already dealing with this idea of appropriate. What is appropriate? know, what is in a certain sense, what is reverent enough is another way to kind of think about it. You know, what is not what is respectful enough? But then this is already a fraught sort of

Carolyn Dean (03:43.608)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (03:48.649)
I thought sort of challenge to have, you know, particularly when we're talking about, the writing of history, which is another thing that we'll talk about, you know, how do we, how do we write this? you know, what is the role of emotion in, in writing? And this is something that again, we'll, we might touch on this later. I think that those of us that teach the Holocaust, you know, there's always this question of, you know, are we, do we try to,

Do we try to get people to have an emotional response in teaching? And do we show images or have other kinds of material that creates an emotional response? And is that genuine or is it too much or is it too little? I think is one of the things that is always a challenge. let me start with this question of empathy.

And what is empathy? And what is empathy in the context of the Holocaust as you're approaching it? And then the secondary piece, of course, is there a distinction between empathy and sympathy?

Carolyn Dean (04:50.808)
Mm-hmm.

Carolyn Dean (05:04.716)
Yeah, sure, sure. That's a common, I mean, obviously the two, to our ears now, I think the two are basically interchangeable, but we use empathy much more frequently, right? And I'm sure most of your listeners know, but people might not, that sympathy was originally used in the way that it has come to be thought about.

by Adam Smith in his theory of moral sentiments. And Adam Smith, who is the great theorist of capitalism, of course, was also a sentimentalist. And he thought that capitalism needed to be, to some extent, softened, that there needed to be some moral foundation that would regulate the worst impulses of those engaged in

capitalist enterprises. And so he wrote about sympathy, by which he meant the likeness that we have to each other and to other people who are like us, meaning quite literally who we can identify, with whom we can recognize. So sympathy often meant people who

are like us in the sense that they're the same social class, right? Or they're the same nationality. So Smith and many other enlightenment thinkers, they never thought that we would sympathize with people who were far away, right? They threw up their hands. said, well, no, but at least sympathy as an emotion would guide us toward thinking about

how we should behave morally toward other people. I think, so I guess the best way of summing it up would be to say it was kind of a fellow feeling, right? But it could also be distant because you could sympathize with people abstractly. So there was this idea of a neutral spectator that he had who would look at the world and try to assess the proper response to other people.

Carolyn Dean (07:20.397)
based on a moral reaction, a kind of sympathetic reaction. And this meant that you could sympathize with, mean, some of the pitfalls were that you could sympathize with, as I said, someone of your own social class, but not someone who was a laborer, for example. I mean, these are criticisms made about sympathy as a kind of instrument of philanthropy, right? That philanthropists, you know, there's a famous letter by someone who someone quoted.

of a sentimentalist in the 18th century who said, we would have to invent the poor if they didn't exist for this, because of the sweetness of feeling sorry for them. Right? So that, that was, that's not so great. You know, that was, that sort of is the asymmetry of the philanthropic relationship right there. Right. And so empathy was invented much later. came from German and it was a word that

Waitman Beorn (08:00.291)
.

Carolyn Dean (08:19.045)
meant to feel in. meant that it was supposed to be originally came from art history of all places. And it meant that you were supposed to be able to look at a painting and somehow take what was something very abstract and abstract form and somehow feel your way into it. All right. That's where it that's kind of where it originated. And eventually in English, it was translated by psychologists and

as a way of talking about our relationships with other people and our ability to feel into other people. I think the difference between empathy and sympathy, at least now in the way we use it, is empathy implies that we can feel our way into other people who are very different from us. And it kind of goes hand in hand with a world in which we

are witnesses to global suffering. We're not just witnesses to our local, what happens locally. Obviously, this is, have our sense of atrocities happening and our, even a sense that we are somehow responsible for atrocities is now global. Even if we might prove indifferent and we might prove less.

to have less of an ideal responses we would like, we would like to care more, et cetera, et cetera. Ideally, we're supposed to empathize with people who are very different from us and very far away from us. That I think is quite different. I hope that.

Waitman Beorn (09:57.717)
is no, it does. And I wonder if I've been using it wrong because, you know, one of things that my advisor told me back when I was a PhD student, cause I was working at that time, you know, predominantly on, on, on perpetrators. And he said that he said that we have to be able to empathize with them, but not sympathize with them. Meaning I think in his depictions that, you know, they can't be monsters, right? They can't be aliens. They're, they're people. And we have to, we have to

Carolyn Dean (10:05.781)
Thank

Carolyn Dean (10:26.806)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (10:27.075)
to the extent that it's possible, know, kind of be able to imagine what it was like for them and what they were feeling and how they were making decisions, they were making decisions. And versus sympathy, which is, know, for example, obviously with the victims, obviously we feel sorry for them as well. There's there's sort of a, you know, I don't feel bad for the perpetrators, but I do have to try to understand them. is that accurate or have I, am I,

conflating two things that are that are not the same.

Carolyn Dean (11:00.127)
Not at all. think that's a great example, actually, because in fact, it's, you know, it obviously there's a whole you're obviously aware of this a perpetrator studies now, right. And, and they were scandalous for a while, as you know, and they have become far less so. Though the voyeur is the possibility of voyeurism is is obviously always a question that that anyone who has to work in that field has to contend with, right.

But clearly we need to be able to try, I'm not sure that we ever can, but we need to be able to try to at least imagine what somebody capable of something like that may have thought they were doing. But do we want to sympathize with them? That's quite different because it implies a fellow feeling. you can feel for that. mean, you can feel if, you know,

in the way that you feel for people who do horrible things and they've had a horrible childhood or something. But it tends to, the problem is that you don't want to ever, you can't forgive those kinds of things, right? I mean, some people would argue you can, but so that seems to me just right. I mean, I'm not sure that there's any really clear cut difference. I think the two have just been used differently at different times. They come from different...

They have different origins, different sources, and empathy just seems to me a word that works for our present and has worked because of technology, because of expectations about the responsibility we bear for other people. Certainly in the late 19th century, nobody thought bystanders should come to the aid of victims. They were by definition passive observers who

were innocent if they happened to be caught up in something, but they were not really expected other than for reasons of serendipity or temporary, you know, good feeling to actually help anybody in need. Ideally, they would, but most people never did. And there was no cultural expectation. They would. And if you think about where we are now, we have

Carolyn Dean (13:20.998)
bystander intervention programs. mean, obviously these are all under attack now, but the idea that bystanders are somehow responsible for what is done in their name clearly is a very modern, very recent development. So I'm not sure that, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (13:38.084)
Absolutely. I mean, it's also sort of been codified, international law with the whole idea of the responsibility to protect, sort of takes that to a sort of governmental political level, you know, that one is obligated to care. And then that sort of, as you point out, I think is a societal thing as well, you know, that we are obligated to care, for example, that, you know, our cell phones contain conflict minerals that are

Carolyn Dean (13:47.382)
Mm-hmm.

Carolyn Dean (13:52.639)
Absolutely.

Waitman Beorn (14:07.831)
You know, violence. mean, you know, it's on the one hand, you know, are we guilty in a certain level, perhaps, but we certainly can't just say, it's not my problem where, you know, it's not my problem to even worry about, you know, which I think is is kind of a related related piece of this. You talk about the failure of empathy. And so I'm curious, you know, before we get into the into the weeds about

about this. What do you mean by that? How would you sort of describe that?

Carolyn Dean (14:43.756)
Yeah, I guess I would say now that I shouldn't have said that when I said it, because I'm not sure what it really means. I think you're absolutely right to ask the question because I'm not sure it's a very serendipitous formulation. It kind of doesn't really say anything. I think what I was trying to do is figure out again, how do we arrive at the right attitude toward

images of suffering? How do we know how to position ourselves relative to them? How do we witness in an appropriate way? I'm not sure that those questions are answerable because they're always going to change depending on the context, Just in the same way as what was deemed an appropriate representation of the Holocaust has changed over time. certainly,

one could argue that there are some forms of representation that are more germane to the event, more reflective of the event, are more reflective, but we would like people to learn from having encountered this historical reality, right, of this level of atrocities, which is so complex, that

and that we can ascertain that there are some forms of representation that really are more effective than others. The problem is we almost can never settle on any of them because all of them come with problems, all of them, right? No matter how creative you are, I think the minimalist version, kind of what a historian called nominalism, you know, it started out with World War I, the names on it.

tombs, right? The World War I, the monuments to the fallen soldiers were because they couldn't be buried in graves, right? They had no cenotaphs. They literally had to, they just etched their names in stone, but in a monumental context. And what's happened with the Holocaust is those, we've kept that form of representation, right? This kind of minimalist,

Waitman Beorn (16:38.178)
Mm-hmm.

Carolyn Dean (17:06.002)
listing of names that in itself is overwhelming, just the names themselves. That has been this kind of austere representation, which is everywhere. It's Maya Lin's, the Vietnam Memorial uses that. Many Holocaust museums, Yad Vashem has a wall of names. All of this has been deemed a very effective

way of conveying dignity and respect for victims and also of in some way conveying the horror of the event without anesthetizing people to pain. Because if you see too much, if the visuals are graphic, often people can be anesthetized to it after they see it over and over. As we know with images of the Holocaust, people start, they become

they're iconic and they stop having an effect, right? Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (18:08.867)
I think this is really interesting, this idea of an effect and what is effective. Because I guess it raises the question, and this is different for different audiences, because you talk in your books, you talk about a legal context, but also about sort of a third party context like us, going to museum or whatever. So there are lots of different contexts. what are we trying to do with

Carolyn Dean (18:14.592)
Good.

Waitman Beorn (18:38.531)
We'll say imagery in this case, right? Because I think that follows nicely on from what you were talking about. What is the effect that we want a museum visitor to feel have take away from an image, for example, about the Holocaust?

Carolyn Dean (18:57.737)
Right. Well, I mean, any curator wants somebody, I mean, it's an impossible task, right? First of all, because what the usual answer to that question, if I can say there's a usual answer, I'm not sure there is, but you know, the sort of right answer would be, we want you to walk out of the museum and take what you've learned in this museum and use it to think about other events so that they would be stopped. The kind of...

never again kind of admonition, right? Certainly that is, if not the stated goal, it's certainly informally, implicitly the goal of most memorial museums, right? That you go in and you're supposed to look at what happened and there are all kinds of strategies to get you to really think about it. Think about the Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC gives you the name of someone.

and you follow that person throughout, you don't know what happens to them until you, the end, right? So there are all these strategies of empathic identification that these exhibits might draw on. And so, but the question in the end is, okay, that's certainly a laudable goal, but what it really requires is that I take these images and I somehow

have to metaphorically displace them and see them somewhere else. I have to see that some other event is like the Holocaust. And then I have to be vigilant in response to it. have to recognize it. So that seems to me what, you know, and if that doesn't work, then we've failed, right? Our empathy has failed. The problem is, that it clearly hasn't, right? So.

Waitman Beorn (20:48.109)
Yeah.

Carolyn Dean (20:49.331)
Right? mean, that's why people say never again with all the cynicism that they do now, right? Because it never stopped a genocide, right? All this Holocaust memorialization never has. And that has come up again very recently in the context of the, obviously, the war in the Middle East, right? The recent war. you know, and I guess this is so the fact that this is still a question.

in spite of all the visitors to museums. It just means that it's intractable, I think.

Waitman Beorn (21:26.659)
Well, and there's the challenge of which I think, you know, as someone that is currently teaching a comparative genocide class, you know, the the of the Holocaust as as ruler, you know, as as the rubric, you know, the the everything has to stand up against the Holocaust as a model, which is, you know, not not particularly useful, I think, because the Holocaust was was neither the first genocide nor the last. It is is is unique in the way that all genocides are unique, but it's also similar.

Carolyn Dean (21:33.489)
Mm.

Carolyn Dean (21:39.839)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (21:56.322)
in many ways to lots of other genocides, right? And so I think it's really interesting the comment that you're making that, you know, if I don't see people on a train, you know, being deported in Sudan, then I don't, I may not, it doesn't click because it's not visually a like for like kind of comparison, right? Whereas for example, during Bosnia, right? When they had some of the images of the people who were imprisoned, you know, behind barbed wire emaciated people, like that sort of

Carolyn Dean (22:14.24)
Right.

Carolyn Dean (22:22.539)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (22:25.347)
that may have hit the spot in a different way. But again, it's also, there are lots of other issues with regards to that that are challenging. I like this idea that what is the image supposed to be doing? And I want to come back to something you said about the sort of anesthetizing piece. Because this is something that obviously is

is specific to the Holocaust, also general to society, right? This idea that you hear all the people talk about, all the talking heads will say, know, children these days are, you know, inured to violence because they see so much violence on TV or people in general with regards to genocide are less shockable, I suppose, because we've all grown up in a world in which the Holocaust happened and Bosnia happened, Rwanda happened. So we've seen these images.

Carolyn Dean (22:53.131)
Thanks.

Carolyn Dean (23:04.734)
Right.

Carolyn Dean (23:19.474)
Okay.

Waitman Beorn (23:21.283)
And I'm curious the extent to which you think that's actually true that people, if you show students a horrible photograph from the Holocaust or from Rwanda or from whatever, it is actually, that they don't get it or that it doesn't have an emotional reaction. How do we judge that? How do we know that?

Carolyn Dean (23:36.416)
Okay.

Carolyn Dean (23:41.439)
Well, that's a, that's really tough. I think what's in, but what's been interesting, I don't know what you find when you teach, but what's been interesting for me teaching is that people, they really don't know very much about the Holocaust for all that we think we know, right. Or all this, the so-called saturation of our, cultural memory with Holocaust memory really don't know very much about it. And what they know.

What they know is the iconic images, whether it's the train tracks, the men in Bergen-Belsen, the Margaret Burke White photographs, the various icons that we have. Their image of what the event was really is, though that's obviously changed over time, really is people being gassed and starved.

Waitman Beorn (24:15.011)
Mm.

Carolyn Dean (24:40.158)
how that happened, what happened before, that there were lots of different ways of dying, that the Holocaust was an event that only is an event in retrospect, because obviously it's a complex set of, it basically describes some very complex developments that happened over quite a long period of time, what not from history, but you know, from 1939.

But in Germany, you could argue beginning in 1933, right? 1939 to 1945, in a huge arena, Many different languages and cultures and many different kinds of experiences from hiding, right? Even survivors. We know that only recently there was discussion of the Jews who were able to flee into the Soviet Union and were protected there.

and the question or, got thrown into Gulag, Gulag in the Soviet Union. But there was a, there was a whole discussion of these people had been. Embarrassed, not embarrassed, but they didn't want to call themselves survivors because after all they didn't have the same experiences as the people who obviously survived Auschwitz. Right. So there was even a hierarchy of survivors. Right. And so this is a long-winded way of saying, I guess that,

that I found pedagogically what's most effective is, are two things. Giving them diaries or something to read, that in which someone talks about an experience like Victor Klemperer, that they had never thought about was absolutely an essential part of the Holocaust. So Klemperer writes about the way in which everyday life in Nazi Germany comes to squeeze.

the juice, so the whole process of expropriation. What was that like from a victim's point of view? It's not like someone came in and just took something. Basically, was this very process in which all of these civil society is involved, right? In kind of making it very difficult for him to keep his home. so I think that has been very reading kind of diaries that are very articulate about that experience has been very

Waitman Beorn (26:51.363)
Thank

Carolyn Dean (27:06.472)
successful and the other thing is we have the Fortunoff video collection, we're very fortunate at Yale and you can show, they will come and present and I always have them present in my class and that is something to hear survivors speaking is just, is extremely effective. So now will that, will it always be that way?

I mean, that is the debate we're having about these holograms, right? These, you know, the living survivors who have given these interviews and then are deceased and then they reappear, right? Through machine learning, right? Language models. And there are debates about that. So I think that the question in a way, I guess I'm reframing the question to be, you know,

Waitman Beorn (27:37.109)
you

Carolyn Dean (28:00.683)
the question that is confronting everyone who cares about sustaining this memory, right, of the Holocaust, which is how do we do it when all the survivors are dead, when people have moved on, when there have been, as you noted, all these other genocides, and the Holocaust is no longer as paradigmatic as it used to be. We have generations of people who don't know anything, right?

and for whom other events are much more relevant. So, you know, what does it even mean to remember at this point? And why do we want to remember exactly? So I think it's impossible again to extricate your question from these other questions that are kind of brewing at the moment, if that makes sense.

Waitman Beorn (28:48.291)
Absolutely. I think it's really, really interesting that we both started talking about images, visual images. And I agree with you to a large extent. Then we talk about what is most impact for students. You mentioned a written source and an audio source. I mean, in a certain sense, OK, yeah, oral history is also video. You can see it. But I think it's really interesting because I kind of had the same experience, which is that

Carolyn Dean (29:07.231)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (29:17.277)
you know, when I was a younger, when I was a younger teacher, I think I probably did try to sort of shock students, you know, with images that I thought were particularly powerful, which I, which I would not do now. I think that, but I, you know, we all come from someplace where we learn. Whereas now I could find a piece of testimony, you know, written, that would be far more shocking and far more powerful emotionally.

you know, then sort of a stock image. And just as you've you've suggested, you know, where someone talks about their experience or says, you know, just relates the horrible things in detail that happened to them, you know, when it's in your mind, it's not it's not something that you can sort of gloss over because you have to sort of in a certain sense, imagine it yourself because you're reading it or you're hearing it. And so you can say something.

Carolyn Dean (30:09.296)
No, I wanted to ask you, what did your students do when you showed them the shocking images?

Waitman Beorn (30:14.499)
Well, I it's hard to say. like I didn't see, you they didn't get up and run out or anything like that, you know, and I have, you know, very quickly came to the decision that, you know, that they should be very judicious. I should use them very judiciously in a way that I hadn't probably when I was a TA or something as a grad student, you know, thinking that I was going to come in there and really show them, you know, show them the Holocaust as it were. You know, I've thought

Carolyn Dean (30:20.904)
it.

Waitman Beorn (30:42.913)
I thought differently, for example, nowadays about even showing victims. There are some very famous photographs, one at Liepāja and in Latvia, there's one in Ukraine that sort of has, it's really, from an historical perspective, the photographs are really important because they show, from the perpetrator's perspective, document the process of a mass killing.

But I don't tend to show them very often because I think that they're in a certain sense victimizing the victims again. You know, because you have these women, women and children mostly, you know, who are being photographed in various stages of undress. You know, this is clearly literally the worst day of their life, the most embarrassing for them, all those kinds of elements. And so I don't show those, you know, to students because I think there's something, you know,

Carolyn Dean (31:17.129)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (31:40.676)
to not victimizing the victims again. Or at least not without a good reason behind it. If you go to museum, mean, for example, Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Memorial Museum made different decisions about this. Same set of, actually same set of photographs. One museum shows it, one museum doesn't. And I think that there are compelling reasons for both, particularly in a museum context. I'm not sure that there

Carolyn Dean (31:48.265)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (32:07.497)
Much of the trade off is a winning one in the classroom for the reasons you suggested and the ones that I've suggested that, you know, we can can generate a response and emotional connection to the to the people without without showing those images. And so. We don't need to. If that makes sense. And the only the only I mean, and again, I want to talk more about your work. It's not about me here, but the

Carolyn Dean (32:14.888)
Yeah.

Carolyn Dean (32:27.335)
Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (32:37.663)
The only sort of particularly graphic thing that I ever show is I show the the Leopold Latvia film of the the unsung group and shooting there of the I don't know you're familiar with this one with like the the people going it's only about a minute long. You know, the Jews are led into a pit, multiple groups and they're shot. There's all kinds of people running around even and I showed that because it's literally the only only thing of its kind. But I show it mainly not for the

the violence taking place, for the, precisely the way you kind of talked about earlier, for the bystander stuff, know, all the people watching, you know, and the little dog that's like running around in the foreground and yipping, you know. And I can't think of a better way to sort of introduce that element than with that particular, I mean, I'm not sure there are better ways, but I think it's useful in that sense. But it does bring me to sort of another question that I'll...

Carolyn Dean (33:13.319)
Yeah, absolutely.

Waitman Beorn (33:34.5)
I'd like to hear you sort of talk about because it's something that that we all talk about those of us that study this and teach it. And that's this connection between this idea of voyeurism and and the Holocaust. And you do some really interesting work talking about sort of pornography and the Holocaust. Not not not pornography in the in the in sexual sense directly, but this idea that there's something pornographic about the ways in which some people

Carolyn Dean (33:39.507)
You

Waitman Beorn (34:04.035)
view both visual images of Holocaust, but also sort of the historical event in and of itself. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about that.

Carolyn Dean (34:17.161)
Sure, I I think again, it was a way into this question of representation and what is good, what is bad representation. I say that with scare quotes, right? Bad and good representation of the Holocaust. And I was really struck by the extent to which people who did not like the way a particular image was being used kind of deployed the term pornography to obviously

criticized the usage of that image. And obviously what they meant was there was something obscene about it, right? There was something, whether they meant, and they were, as you just alluded to, they were obviously in many cases accusing the people who were showing the images of voyeurism of some sort of appealing to our own worst instincts. So,

These were not, mean, Claude Lansman, who is the filmmaker who made Showa, is probably the most extreme proponent of this idea that showing anything is forbidden, He has this famous prohibition on filming anything, except he made an exception for one film, The Son of Saul. He made an exception for this film. But he...

But essentially there is a, so there is this, there was a very kind of, who knew, robust discussion about the Holocaust imagery as forms of pornography, depending on the perspective that you had. And so you had everybody from George Steiner, I talk about Lucy Davidovich, the famous Holocaust historian.

all responding to, in particular to the commercial, what they saw as the commercialization of the event or the exploitation of the event by mass market media, by mass market books, by mass media, they would typically use the word pornographic to talk about this. And I also wrote about Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book. It was very interesting to me.

Carolyn Dean (36:41.007)
because obviously the history is not very good. I don't think anybody would suggest that it is. And yet it had this disproportionate, it had an effect that was totally incommensurate with its actual quality as a work of history. And which doesn't mean that, you know, he didn't say some interesting things, but I don't think any historian at all could possibly embrace the notion that Germans

there was something kind of about Germans that made them more likely to perpetrate the Holocaust than other people. of course, famously, he also said it all ended in 19, right after when the Germans worked it all through. So that obviously isn't very persuasive, but you know, he had some interesting things to say, but the response of the historical profession to his

celebrity rather than asking why, why it was that in the late 1990s, he had the appeal, the book had the appeal, and he had the appeal. He did as a historian in spite of not being a very good one, even though he's not a historian, he's a political scientist, but still the question was, you know,

What was that appeal? That seemed to me the really interesting question. And instead of asking that questions, they just called the book pornographic and called the response to the book voyeurism in response to your question about voyeurism. And of course, Goldhagen had used images in his book. so I thought that was it. So I guess I was interested in the way that the words voyeurism, pornography, that whole vocabulary around pornography

was used to stop us from asking certain kinds of questions. It became a way of not actually asking hard questions and just kind of throwing an egg on the wall and hoping it would stick. It was just a,

Waitman Beorn (38:51.299)
I must stop here and say, as a proud advisee of Christopher Browning, I'm contractually obligated to note that Daniel Goithag is a terrible, but we'll come back to that in reason, because I agree with you as well. I think that there are some things that he does. mean, he does at the very minimum, which is the best we can sort of hope for him, he does tell us new...

Carolyn Dean (39:01.554)
Yep.

Yeah, right. Well.

Waitman Beorn (39:19.053)
give us examples of behaviors of perpetrators that are true. And they do tell us something about how those people behave. And we'll come back to that in a second. Because I think this idea of voyeurism is really important. And I think it's almost like it's being used not in a pornographic sense, but in a snuff film kind of sense, right? That people are, you know,

Carolyn Dean (39:30.258)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (39:48.64)
engaging in prurient sort of voyeurism. know, they're being titillated by the fact that they're seeing, you know, what is extraordinary cruelty, violence, etc. You know, I think in the film world, right, where with almost no exceptions, there are no filmic depictions of Jews being killed in a gas chamber. You know, because for whatever reason, you know, cinema has for the

almost its entire existence, that's kind of a red line that they don't cross. And the closest was sort of when Spielberg puts Jews in a shower and you don't know, it's a sort of surprise that it's a regular shower, but you don't actually, it's something that is considered, I guess, taboo. Like we're not gonna show that particular element. And I think that raises then this question, right, of how do we deal with

the desire to see. And I'll give you one example, and then I'll throw it back to you because you've written about this and thought about this. I noted that throughout my teaching of the Holocaust that students are particularly, for whatever reason, they are just massively interested in medical experiments.

Carolyn Dean (41:07.724)
Thank

Waitman Beorn (41:12.589)
They just, so many of students, want to write about medical experiments, you know, they want to write about, you know, all this kind of stuff. And, and eventually I got to the point where I just said, you know, we're not, I structured the assignments that had to use survivor testimony. And they had to use the show off fund is because both my institutions have worked at before we had the show off foundation. And I said, that's your source base. Here's your primary source base. You can write about anything you want, but you got to rely predominantly on, on these testimonies as a starting point, which is nice because it also takes out because.

the medical experiment people, because they can't tell you anything about why the Nazis were doing this. But of course, that doesn't mean that medical experiments and the role of doctors is not an important thing that we need to learn, right? So how do you, how would you draw the line in the sense, and obviously, you you're not, you're not here to sort of speak for everybody. But when does something become sort of an unhealthy voyeurism?

Carolyn Dean (41:46.907)
Right.

Carolyn Dean (41:56.71)
Mm-hmm.

Carolyn Dean (42:10.674)
Thank you.

Waitman Beorn (42:11.297)
or unhealthy desire to know more. And when is it just somebody who wants to know more about something?

Carolyn Dean (42:21.074)
I'm not sure you can ever answer that question in some neat way, right? I mean, you just, and you know, it's kind of like using Holocaust survivors as barometers of whether a film about the Holocaust is good. Right, some Holocaust survivors thought Schindler's List was fantastic. Others were horrified by it. They tended to track in certain ways, but.

Waitman Beorn (42:25.122)
Right, sure.

Waitman Beorn (42:37.325)
Mm.

Carolyn Dean (42:48.012)
according to certain sociological and demographic characteristics, but still, so I'm not sure that anyone, that anyone who tells you that they're, they can answer that question, you know, I'm not sure that they would be to give them much credibility at least cause it's so difficult. again, it gets back to this question of what is an appropriate kind of representation given that we have to represent.

Waitman Beorn (43:12.771)
Mm-hmm.

Carolyn Dean (43:16.71)
this event, because otherwise, mean, the Lanzmann obviously made an amazing film, Shoah, that did not represent the event, right? He did it through the testimony and it was an extraordinary achievement. It's also nine hours long. And if you didn't know anything about the Holocaust going into it, I'm not sure you would actually

Waitman Beorn (43:35.171)
Yeah.

Carolyn Dean (43:45.65)
take away.

Waitman Beorn (43:45.845)
It's not a documentary as much as people kind of imagine. It's an art, it's an artistic piece in a lot of ways, I think.

Carolyn Dean (43:51.91)
Yeah, and it's extraordinary. And I would add that there is this one film that I've seen called The Son of Saul, which is a Hungarian film that is filmed inside a gas chamber. It's from the perspective of one of the Sonderkommando, one of the men in the Sonderkommando. And it's extremely sanitized, given what it must have been like. And it's tasteful.

But these are all words, as you can see, you know, which are... Right. Right.

Waitman Beorn (44:21.323)
And still no one dies. It's not showing. It's not showing the moment. It's not showing the moment of gassing. Right. I mean, it's which is again, I think that's like that's like the sort of with the exception. I think there is a Russian film about a remake of Escape from Soybor something that did something similar. But generally speaking, it's kind of like we don't we don't show that moment, you know, which is in a certain sense kind of remarkable given Hollywood, you know, that there's been a kind of a tacit agreement that this is

Carolyn Dean (44:37.529)
Waitman Beorn (44:51.181)
This is a line we're not going to cross. But anyway, sorry I interrupted you. Go ahead.

Carolyn Dean (44:54.129)
Right. No, not at all. No, I'm thinking that I think that the question is just impossible to answer. And so I'm not going to give you a very good answer. But all I can do is suggest that we try to think about it in interesting ways. Right. We try to think about, you know, what what kinds of representations work and if we don't like them, why is that? And and when we make moral argument, what we think are moral arguments about representation.

Waitman Beorn (45:16.461)
Mm.

Carolyn Dean (45:23.643)
What is our investment in the positions that we take? What are we actually saying? As you said, nobody's gonna endorse a snuff film. And some of these images of the Holocaust were called snuff films by people, as you know. And that's a moral consensus we've arrived at as a society. At least until recently, who knows? Right now I'm waiting.

I think what would be really interesting because you mentioned obviously your relationship to Browning. If you think about Ordinary Men, this very famous book, he offers graphic descriptions of murder. And, you know, I think we could all ask, how does he do it such that it remains effective and does not elicit?

voyeurism. That strikes me as one of the remarkable achievements of that book, right? And that is partly because it's framed in such a sobering and austere manner that it becomes very effective. it becomes also, and I think he's perfectly aware of this, when students read it, I don't know if your students have responded this way, they feel

It's almost too much, right? Because they just, it's day after day and killing after killing. They don't become desensitized, but they can imagine being these men because they stop feeling the horror of it, right? So there's some way in which the first person, even though these are legal testimonies, obviously the way these accounts, the way Browning uses them and the way he lets them speak for themselves.

become very effective. The question is, can you do that with images? Now we live in a really different world than when Goldhagen published his book, right? And when the debates about images were happening, because now you can use AI and we don't know what's going to happen, right? But it is a really, you know, it's hard to argue that anybody should want to see images of people being murdered.

Waitman Beorn (47:22.179)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (47:33.208)
you

Carolyn Dean (47:47.995)
Aside from when they can be framed clearly contextualized and be carefully curated. As you were mentioning the Latvian, the image of the... If you frame that image, the short film you're talking about, it is about the Holocaust by bullets, right? So right away, you have to frame it as a certain phase of killing of Jews.

before the gas chambers. So it's really important that people realize that there was this entire, there was 2 million people murdered this way before gas chamber, before people began to be sent to gas chambers and or simultaneously with that. as you said, it gives you a sense of, which I think is very hard to convey, civilians and their role.

which is really hard, that's a very difficult thing to see, right? It gives you a sense of complicity and it's very disturbing, right? But I don't think I'm gonna say anything particularly interesting other than that you have to contextualize those images so that if they're simply there without any context as all images, they...

are going to be very problematic because they're going to elicit voyeurism and not even be, they wouldn't even be pretending to try to achieve some kind of didactic purpose. So, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (49:30.691)
I mean, I kind of feel this is slightly off topic, but I think it's related to this idea of perhaps this idea of the fragility of empathy that you're talking about in the modern context, is, you know, in the context of the war in Ukraine, you know, lots of people, you know, back when I was on Twitter, before it became a fascist hellscape, you know, they were, you know, there were lots of clips that were being shared all around the internet of

You know, Russian tanks getting blown up by the Ukrainians or the Ukrainian drone killing people. And everyone is sort of celebrating it in the sense of the Russians are clearly the bad guys. But I very quickly, you know, was just as like, I'm not I don't want to share these things because ultimately what we're looking at, at people being killed, you know, and whether they're being killed justly, which they are, it's still literally watching people die.

And I think there's really interesting and connected to what we're talking about. This idea of it's acceptable to show that image. mean, I'm going carry quotes here. It's appropriate to share that image because it's the bad guys. But it's also still someone being killed. Ultimately, it is a snuff film. You are watching real human beings being killed. And that's not

Carolyn Dean (50:37.606)
Thank

Carolyn Dean (50:47.738)
minutes.

Waitman Beorn (51:00.941)
That's not something that we really should be watching. as you point out, there's like a compelling reason that we need to see this. And I thought about that as I was reading your books, it is people that ordinarily I think are quite empathetic, sensitive people, sort of cheering over their popcorn. Two Russian soldiers walking down the street and then the drone

Carolyn Dean (51:25.68)
Bye.

Waitman Beorn (51:30.755)
flies in and kills them, you know, and again, no, no sort of no sympathy for the Russian cause here, you know, in that sense, but it's still, you know, I don't, I don't need that on my timeline. I guess it's kind of one of the ways of thinking about it. You know, it's, don't need to, we don't, we don't need to see that. And we, we should be just as shocked about the horror of, of war in general, you know, that it should not be quite of a kind of a video game, which is maybe there's a whole nother

Carolyn Dean (51:45.156)
Right, right.

Waitman Beorn (51:59.232)
route in terms of like the video gamification of the way that we view violence. But before I get off topic, let me come back to Goldhagen because I think that your discussion of him is actually really, really astute because I actually went when I was an undergraduate, my teacher, Mike Bowden, who is a great Holocaust learner himself, he took us up to see

Carolyn Dean (52:25.446)
and

Waitman Beorn (52:30.051)
Goldhagen speak. And so I actually got to see Goldhagen speak in person as an undergraduate. And it's interesting precisely because of what you note. And I didn't have that perspective because I was just an undergraduate at that point. know, Germans loved Goldhagen because he let them off the hook. Goldhagen said basically you couldn't help yourselves because you had this elimination and sempitism.

Carolyn Dean (52:34.604)
wow.

Waitman Beorn (52:58.307)
you know, the German evil gene that you had to go out and do this and you couldn't help yourself. they Germans loved him for that. You know, think a wide variety, a wide section of the survivor community and the Jewish community perhaps loved him as well because he paints the Germans essentially again as as monsters. And that's that's palatable as well. But I really hadn't thought about it the way that you did about about why historians were so mad.

And I think now that I am in a story and one of the reasons is, you know, obviously we all were kind of jealous. I wasn't a wee at that time, but think historians were jealous because they were like, because they were like, here's this guy writing crap and everybody loves him, you know, and he's on all the shows and everything else. I mean, I will say as an aside, and I want to get back to your thoughts on this, but I there was a, you can still find this video on the internet.

Carolyn Dean (53:31.812)
I

Waitman Beorn (53:54.212)
of a symposium which Goldhagen was a participant. was, Yehuda Bauer was there and Lawrence Langer, and he just got annihilated. I mean, it was the worst thing I've ever seen. I still cringe. Yehuda Bauer said something to the effect of, it's a good thing that this is your first book because you have room to like recover from what you've written. It was just devastating, right? And so I think there's kind of a professional irritation anyway about that. But I want to engage with

with your more substantive critique of it, which was this idea about emotion in the writing of history. Because I think that's something that I'd really like to explore with you. When you were describing sort of the critique, it seemed like a lot of historians were angry that he took a moral perspective and that they thought that the writing of history should be kind of without moral judgment. I wonder if you could talk about that.

Carolyn Dean (54:31.323)
Mm-hmm.

Carolyn Dean (54:35.654)
Thank

Waitman Beorn (54:54.229)
as it relates to the graphic things he describes in the book.

Carolyn Dean (54:59.232)
Yeah, that's a hard question. It seems to me that at some level, obviously, starting with 19th century British history, Whiggish history, morality was supposed to be an aim of history writing to instill virtue, right?

Obviously that has never really left the profession. I mean, there is a reason people tell stories the way they do. But of course, methodologically speaking, historians are not supposed to be for good reason in the business of judging, right? I do think that we don't think seriously enough about what

we bring to bear on material that requires judgment. And the way we usually resolve this problem if we study the Holocaust is by saying the facts will speak for themselves, right? We can't judge these people. That's not our role. What we're doing is telling you what they did, right? Or what deeds they perform. And you can judge, but

we're really in this so that we, because what our task is to understand. And when you are confronted with extreme violence and atrocities, the point is that it's very difficult to understand. And I wonder, for example, if you look at ordinary men, since we're ideally people have read it or know about it, you know, the,

Hoda to the book obviously tries to explain why these men did what they did. So he's kind of brave to do that. And he ends up where I think most historians do, which is to say, and he's bolder than most, but to say, well, I can't explain this. Only a person with a lot of arrogance could actually explain why these people did this.

Carolyn Dean (57:22.249)
But I need to tell this story so that we understand that it's possible, right, for ordinary men, ordinary people to do this, to behave in these ways, meaning murdering people over time, becoming immune to the effects of what they're doing, numb, and so that they drink a lot, But also saying, of course, I don't excuse this.

I can't excuse this because the danger, of course, of talking about perpetrators is that by talking about them, trying to understand them, you're explaining them. You're explaining their deeds. That somehow is a form of providing an excuse, by providing an explanation. think Browning very effectively, and most historians who do this very effectively, say that that's not what we're in the business of doing.

Waitman Beorn (58:13.763)
you

Carolyn Dean (58:20.646)
whether it's that simple, because in the end, Browning actually comes up with a way of explaining what they were doing that is suggesting that we could all do it. We're all complicit, right? Which is a very powerful message, almost feels self-evident in some way, now that we don't have illusions about ourselves, given the violence of the 20th and 21st centuries.

And so, so that has a self-evidence that is very powerful. On the other hand, I wonder how invocations of the ordinary and what we will do as ordinary people, at least if we're talking about perpetrators, aren't also ways that we

seem like we're answering a question while we're really concealing the fact that we have no idea. And what I mean by that is ordinary means everything and nothing, right? It's sort of the self-evident thing we all do. And the thing, we're all just ordinary people in the strong sense or the weak sense, depending on what we're talking about. But in this sense, the weak sense of we're all average people, right? Most of us, right?

who in in-circumstances can't say what they will do. And we could very well be killers too. Okay. None of us are going to be able to say that we definitely know we won't be right. But as a historical explanation, I'm not sure what we do with that because it on the one hand says ordinary people will do this. The invocation of ordinary being kind of self-evident.

in some way, right? At the same time as it's actually not explaining anything. It's just saying by virtue of being ordinary, we have the capacity to do this. know, Browning, I don't want to keep referring to him because there are plenty of people, he contextualizes this very precisely so that he's saying in these circumstances. But interestingly enough, it ends up being about psychology, right? Not about historical explanation. So,

Waitman Beorn (01:00:36.547)
Thank

Carolyn Dean (01:00:39.365)
I think the challenge for historians is how can you think the moral complicity of perpetrators is easier because they kill people, but the moral complicity of bystanders, which is what we're actually asking when we say could we imagine ourselves doing something like this, is a really hard thing to demonstrate or to show.

And we tend to then fall back on, well, ordinary people do these kinds of things. And I do think that in this case, the moniker, the word ordinary, does a lot of work that we might want to ask questions about. So I'm not saying that isn't the right approach or something. I'm not sure anybody's come up with anything better. And this is just a very long-winded way of saying that if you're talking about emotions in history writing, you could make the argument, and I won't do this, but you could.

to say, well, all of us who can imagine ourselves as complicit are by definition bystanders to something, right? To the events we're writing about. And to the extent that's true, we're also getting ourselves off the hook in some way. I'm just saying by not asking questions about moral complicity and how it works or by seeing it as somehow the outcome of natural reflexes that happen when people are under pressure.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:40.387)
you

Carolyn Dean (01:02:04.205)
right, in a wartime situation. Even seeing it as a latent anti-Semitism that emerges, you know, when, again, when people are under economic pressure, it doesn't get us to this moral question of, or the question, not so much a moral question, but a question of complicity and how we are complicit and why it happens. think we've, historians have a really, we have a hard time doing that because we're not philosophers, right, or psychologists. So.

But I guess what I'm saying in this, sorry, I don't mean to go on, but I guess what I'm saying is I think that it still might be interesting to push us a little bit to ask those questions methodologically, right?

Waitman Beorn (01:02:47.939)
Well, I think, I mean, I think if you've raised a couple of really important issues, I mean, I think the ordinary men piece, think, you know, I think ordinary worked on two levels. You know, is in contrast to this idea that the Nazis were all the killers were all these young, highly indoctrinated, young youth people. Right. So, so there's like a narrow, there's like a constrained sort of narrow historiographical ordinariness. But I think the question, the ordinariness that, you he actually, yeah, you're right. He, talks about that one.

Carolyn Dean (01:03:06.276)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:17.709)
And he refutes that one pretty clearly because these are middle-aged men from Hamburg. You know, they're not indoctrinated, blah, blah, blah. You know, and yes, but I think he also is doing the other piece, which you talk about, which is the ordinary every man kind of thing. And I think that I hadn't thought about it the way that you've just sort of suggested, you know, that the observation that this is something that normal people can do is not the same as explaining.

why normal people do it. These are two different things. And I think that you've raised something with this idea of self-evidence about perpetrators. When I talk about someone doing something horrible, hopefully, I don't have to say, and this is wrong. But I want to come back to what you're working on now, I suppose, because when it's bystanders, it's not self-evident.

what you should do, right? What the right answer is in terms of behavior. And so, I mean, as someone that is now working on this topic, maybe you can talk a little bit about what you're working on now in terms of bystanders and how you are trying to sort of answer this question of, on the one hand, not sort of...

Carolyn Dean (01:04:18.126)
Right.

Carolyn Dean (01:04:25.604)
Thank

Waitman Beorn (01:04:39.339)
not expecting the extraordinary of human beings. I mean, there's a reason why rescuers are heroes. It's because they're extraordinary. They do something that's courageous and different, and most people don't have the courage to do it. But I've always said expecting everybody to do that is also equally unfair because we're all ordinary people at a certain level, right? How are you engaging with this topic of

Carolyn Dean (01:04:48.575)
Absolutely.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:05.889)
of pointing out bystander behavior and then suggesting, you know, maybe people falling on one side or the other of right or wrong. I'm using star quotes here again in that.

Carolyn Dean (01:05:17.528)
Well, was, yeah, it's been tough. found there's a, I was trained in French history originally and my work, it just went back there. And it is about in the South of France, there were lots of, well, there were concentration camps all over France, but there were a couple in the South of France, which became very important sites.

or prisons, I should say, for Austrian and German refugees in France who were rounded up first in 1939 at the declaration of wars at enemy aliens. were expected to report. And then they were actually rounded up later as enemy aliens if they didn't report. all of, and the irony of course, being that the vast majority of these were German

and Austrian Jewish refugees and others as well. So I was working on a document that I found fascinating, which was international humanitarians working at one of these camps. And they all assisted until they went into resistance, they assisted in deportations. they weren't bystanders. Are they bystanders? Well, yes, they were.

I mean, if you take Hilberg's term, yes, they were. They weren't perpetrators or victims. And of course, no one knows what bystanders are. So that's a whole other thing. But that's what I was trying to get away, or what I'm trying to do is get away from thinking about bystanders as a category of identity or of conscious intention, because you're never going to be able to causally link somebody's, what somebody thinks they're doing and what they do.

right, their intent and their act. But also, as historians know very well, bystander means everything and nothing in the sense that it's a position relative to others on a spectrum. It's not, there's not a group we can reliably call bystanders, right? Because they shift all the time, right, who they are. So the word itself isn't very useful, but I started thinking about these

Carolyn Dean (01:07:42.24)
humanitarians and what they were doing because they're assisting in deportations. And there was a scene, I'll just talk about this as a way of making it very concrete, there's a scene at a deportation and they're not sure, they kind of know what's going on, the humanitarians, but they're not sure. And what they're trying to do is make all these Jews comfortable before they are

leave, right? So they equip the trains with toilets, which of course are being taken out at the end when they get to the demarcation line. They're trying to feed people. And there's this one scene in which a man congratulates the human- thanks the humanitarian because the humanitarians have been feeding them. Now they're getting on a deportation train, right? And the humanitarians are thrilled.

because they aren't seeing what's going on. mean, in that moment, they're so happy to be, it's very, very touching, actually. They're very moved by this. Now, one historian has looked at this scene and said, what? What is the use of this kind of, like, just threw up his hands and said, you know, others say, well, you know, how could they have known?

They didn't know they were just trying to help, all of which are true. These are true. Human responsiveness, right? In both senses of the word. And what I decided to do was look at all the archival material on all of these humanitarian groups in the camps to see how they talked about what they were doing. And what's really clear to me, at least I hope to make this case, is that they were, mostly Protestant Quakers and things like this.

is that they were very motivated to help and also completely blinkered by what was going on. so what I try to do is talk about their complicity, not in some judgmental terms, right? But to talk about how they ended up assisting deportations because they couldn't see what was right in front of them. And I think that

Carolyn Dean (01:09:58.446)
thing is that you have to be able to document this. And that's what's very difficult because these are not conscious intentions all the times, right? And historians don't work with people's like unconscious desire. So how do you get at them? Well, if you look at the, I think if you read documents that are available and you read them against the grain, you can see that there is this very systematic effort not to see what is in front of them.

which is both touching, infuriating. It's all kinds of things, very human. But I think it can be demonstrated empirically that to some extent that the way that complicity worked was because people could not bear to be seeing what they saw. It's very human on the one hand, it's also

It's also a, when they're not seeing, there's anti-Semitic representations, are all kinds of represent ideology that is never, can't be, their experience can't be constrained by ideology, but they're bringing to bear all of these cultural, political and other ideological presumptions when they don't see what they're seeing.

And so I don't know if that makes much sense because it's a bit abstract perhaps, it's, without actually seeing the material, obviously it's difficult, but that's, kind of trying to work with different groups of people who were engaged in these kinds of activities and how it is that without throwing up my hands, just saying, okay, like what did they think they were doing? And it's, sometimes you find they're exceptional people, right?

And once they figure out what's happening and they really know, they go into resistance, most of them. Anyway, that was,

Waitman Beorn (01:11:58.984)
I think it's fascinating because, first of all, I 100 % agree. I've always said that perpetrator-victim bystanders, it's a great shorthand, but it's explanatory value isn't that great. Because as you've pointed out, bystanding is a behavior, not a category. It's what you are doing.

Carolyn Dean (01:12:09.603)
it

Waitman Beorn (01:12:26.787)
In the same way, in a certain sense that so is rescue and so is as perpetrator. I mean, it's it's we would like to know the why, but as historians, I feel like the first our first stop is what did you do? And and that's probably the place we can make the clearest, you know, judgment about that was bystanding behavior or indifference, which is another thing that you talk about, you know, and rescue. I I think about

Carolyn Dean (01:12:28.344)
it

Waitman Beorn (01:12:56.771)
Is it truck May father pastor truck that he's a he's a Huguenot right and and and this is a whole town that basically unites and rescues people in it and of course the Hama texts You know work on this is really interesting more. She want to think one of the one of the the common you know sorts of one of the common characteristics rescuers that she points out is That rescue beak began for a lot of people that she studied

in a very coincidental, unplanned sort of way. You know, someone showed up at their house and said, I need help. And they were like, OK. It wasn't it wasn't them saying I disagree with this policy. Let me go out and figure out how I can best rescue someone. Which I that's really interesting, a really interesting sort of finding. And I suspect that perhaps bystanding is this is a similar way, because as you suggest, you know, it's not so much I'm going to be a bystander. You know, I'm going to maintain my.

Carolyn Dean (01:13:30.883)
Yeah. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:54.308)
my neutrality in this as a sort of ideological perspective. People are all doing what they think is right to include the perpetrators. Everybody's sort of, no one goes out and says, I'm going to do something wrong and be a bad person. And so I think that's really interesting. And again, it speaks also to this empathy piece, I think, as we get towards the end, where I...

I always talk about when I talk to students, you know that nobody imagined themselves as the perpetrator. Right, even the Holocaust Museum in museums, they want you to identify with the victim, right? Which I get. I mean, I get that. I mean, that's that's the moral humane sort of thing is to identify with people that are being persecuted. But statistically speaking. We're far more likely to be perpetrators or bystanders of some kind than we are to be victims, right? And and and at a certain level, ultimately it's

The victims that we want the perpetrators that we want to stop being perpetrators because then we don't have victims. We don't have. We don't have that. We don't have genocide, right? But. And this is something that we didn't get chance to talk about in detail here, but you bring up in your work and I want to highlight it. You know is is our sort of selfish desire to empathy to empathize with. With the victims, you know, and maybe talk about that towards the end here, because I think it's really important and it's a really astute point that you make.

Carolyn Dean (01:15:20.723)
I think, yeah, there was a concept when I was writing that somebody was referring to empathic unsettlement, meaning that ideally empathy would be, I think this is what you're referring to, ideally empathy would be that we're unsettled by what we see in some, or our ability to feel into someone else and it unsettles us. And he, the man who wrote about this was

using that ideal way of empathizing as a counter to what he thought was what you just said is a kind of over-identification with victims so that people stopped realizing there was a difference between themselves and the victim. Not that they didn't understand there was a difference, but in the sense that they...

And this is, can give you a more concrete example in the sense that the victim's experience was stop being about the victim and started being about the person who was imagining the victim's own stuff, right? And including the need to identify with the victim. And there was a lot of talk about this kind of thing around in the nineties with Holocaust survivors who over-identified with their parents and

the sense that there was an erasure of the line between, you know, they wanted to have survived because it was the only way to be special, right, was to have survived. There was, you know, a sense that everybody wanted to be a victim at some, in the 80s and 90s. This is a long time ago now. So there is the danger. mean, I guess, you know, here's a really concrete way of thinking about it.

somebody has written a book about this, the refrain, are all German Jews, are all Trayvon Martin, we are all, right, can lead to us forgetting that we are not, right? Like, because, right, I mean, we can erase the boundary because it comes from a great place, right? It comes from a place of wanting to...

Waitman Beorn (01:17:30.443)
Right.

Carolyn Dean (01:17:40.034)
uh, create solidarity through a rhetoric of identification, right? But in the end, there can't, mean, Michael Rothberg has written about this, that in the end, and so has Charles Mills, we are not Trayvon Martin. Like we are, you know, we're not a kid that is walking down the street in a hoodie and gets shot. Like that's not a lot of people, and we need to keep that in mind. Um, so that's something that, um,

Yeah, that's an important point, I think. that, yeah, there's a lot of criticism of that. I don't know if that was that clear? Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:18.261)
No, I mean, think that makes sense because it's an erasure in a certain sense. You know, if I'm like if I'm a middle class white guy and I say I am Trayvon Martin, it's in some way suggesting it's in some way suggesting that I I have the lived experience of being a young black man, you know, and all the things that that entails. Right. Which is which I would think it would be deeply insulting if I was a young black man to have me say that. Right. Because it's one thing to say like.

Carolyn Dean (01:18:23.703)
Okay.

Carolyn Dean (01:18:28.098)
Bye.

Carolyn Dean (01:18:38.08)
Right.

Carolyn Dean (01:18:41.888)
Right. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:46.019)
His death was a complete injustice. It's another thing to say. You know, I I sort of. Feel his pain in the same way, I suppose, or lived his life in the same way. I mean, it's it's as you as you point out it. That's just it's not. It's not the case. And I think I mean you can see it with the Holocaust examples with you know when COVID came around and everybody's all the crazy people were like, you know, I'm I have to my COVID passport is the same thing as my yellow star or whatever. You know, I mean, and that's. That's a bit extreme, but.

I think it's an example from this of the desire to be the victim, right? The cache of victimization. And the other place that I think you see it is in genocide, the use of the term genocide. Who has a genocide and who doesn't? There's an awful lot of sort of hierarchy there, whereas I would say if you're a victim of crimes against humanity, you're just as much a victim as...

Carolyn Dean (01:19:32.672)
That's a point.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:43.168)
anybody else. for me, there isn't the cache, but for some people there is. And so I think it's an important point that empathy can lead us astray sometimes if we're trying to lean into it too much. you might suggest, and I would probably agree, if, again, middle-aged white guy is saying, I'm Trayvon Martin, then I've kind of missed the point in a certain sense.

Right? Because it kind of lets me off the hook, perhaps for, you know, the position that I play in in the problems that lead to Trayvon Martin being killed in the first place. Right. You know that I'm not if I'm just saying, you know, yeah, yeah, it's kind of like I always use the example. It's like the support our troops thing, you know, like and I'm I was in the army for a while, you know, but, know, a great you tied a ribbon on your door. That's great. Like, but but ultimately that.

Carolyn Dean (01:20:22.423)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:39.331)
What have you done? Have you sent a package? You feel good about it because you have a magnet on your car of a rainbow or of some kind of ribbon. And then, of course, you saw the massive proliferation of ribbons in the early 2000s where everybody has a ribbon now. there's a ribbon for every single cause possible. And it doesn't really mean that you actually have done anything to help any of those causes except to slap a magnet on your car.

Carolyn Dean (01:20:55.414)
Right.

Carolyn Dean (01:21:00.158)
That's true.

Waitman Beorn (01:21:08.707)
I'm going to be quiet. Before we let you go, though, because this is really fascinating, and there were lots of other things that I wanted to talk about, but we didn't have time. Before we go, though, can you give us your one recommendation for now of a book on the Holocaust that you'd recommend for our listeners to read?

Carolyn Dean (01:21:10.953)
Hehehe.

Carolyn Dean (01:21:29.57)
Well, boy, that's hard. Of course there are many, I'm going to mention something that I don't think most of your listeners probably have heard of. And that's why, because it's not my favorite or anything like that, but it's worth reading. And it's a book by a woman named Francoise, Frankel, F-R-E-N-K-E-L.

And it's called, it was recently translated and it's called A Bookstore in Berlin. And it's about a, it's just a fantastic book. It's, it's a, it was found very recently in a, and, and traced to this woman. And they did all kinds of research to try to figure out who she was. She was a Polish Jew, ended up in France and goes through the whole French system, tries to cross at the Swiss border.

is arrested, goes through the farce of a trial, is acquitted. Anyway, and she ends up in Switzerland after the war and then comes back and lives the rest of her life in Nice. It's called a bookstore in Berlin because she originally opened a French bookstore in Berlin with her husband. And she had to leave obviously because of the Nazis. And so it's just a, it's an extraordinary book about

well, about being hunted. And it also takes place in France, in Southern France, very unusual. It gives you a sense also of very much about bystanders and how, as you said, some people helped without being asked and some people absolutely did not. And so it gives you, there's a whole cast of characters that are, you know, that we just, that are always in these stories, but

it's a different perspective than most perspectives. So it's worth a look. And there's a very famous French Mondiano, Patrick Mondiano, the Nobel Prize winner, who is the one who's responsible for getting this published. And he wrote the preface and gives you a very clear idea about who she is and why she's interesting. So I think it's just for people that have...

Carolyn Dean (01:23:51.486)
read everything. It's actually a pretty interesting read. So I would suggest that.

Waitman Beorn (01:23:57.913)
That sounds amazing. Thank you so much. And to our listeners again, thank you so much for sticking with it. Again, if you have time to give us a like, a subscribe, and a comment, that'd be fantastic. And again, Caroline, thank you so much for coming on and talking about your work.

Carolyn Dean (01:24:14.499)
Thanks for having me, I really appreciated it.