Reckoning With the Problem of Collective Evil

Who knew that Barry Manilow, the king of easy-listening music—smooth, soft, melodic, relaxed, emotive, catchy, vocally centered and lushly orchestrated, without the emphasis on rhythm and beat that appeals to younger audiences—had a higher ambition: To create a musical about the Holocaust?

Harmony tells the emotionally wrenching story of a German vocal group, the Comedian Harmonists, three of whose six members were Jewish, from the troupe’s founding in the 1920s until the outbreak of World War II and beyond. The sextet was, for a time, a big deal: performing at Carnegie Hall in 1933, making seven films and associating with the likes of Albert Einstein, Josephine Baker and Marlene Dietrich. Their memory deserves to be preserved.

The musical’s reviews, however, proved to be mixed at best. Whereas one attendee described the musical as “one of the most thrilling and moving pieces of theater to come along in years,” most professional reviewers dismissed it as flat, formulaic, muddled, overly earnest and forgettable. The Observer calls it “amiable if derivative.” Entertainment Weekly, which describes the first act as saccharine and tonally jarring—far too frivolous and giddy given what was to come—gave the musical a B-minus.

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The show is no Cabaret or The Sound of Music (or The Producers, for that matter), but I found its second act, when the characters confront the Nazi exercise of power, deeply moving, bringing tears to the audience’s eyes. I thought the show did a very effective job of examining the challenges that the play’s characters faced in recognizing and responding to the rising tide of German antisemitism. I also felt that the play’s structure, in which the group’s last surviving member reflects on the past, heartrending.

In popular culture, the Holocaust remains the epitome of evil. Disney+ recently screened A Small Light, which retells the story of Anne Frank through the eyes of Miep Gies, the secretary who hid the Frank family during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.

In 2022, the Israeli director Ari Folman (whose parents were held captive in Auschwitz), released Where Is Anne Frank, an animated feature that recounts the diarist’s tragic story through the efforts of Kitty, the imaginary red-haired friend to whom the diary is addressed, to discover what happened to Anne.

This past theater season, on and off Broadway, was filled with shows that dealt with the Holocaust explicitly or metaphorically. There was an English-language revival of the Algerian-born French composer Jean-Pierre Hadida’s Anne Frank: A Musical, which combines musical theater, opera and oratorio to reflect on “the human spirit’s ability to persevere even in the most trying circumstances” as well as “the strength of family bonds and the importance of remembering the past.”

There was also Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, which traces the lives of multiple generations of a fictional Jewish family in Vienna and the Holocaust’s devastating impact on the family’s survivors.

Then there was Parade, the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager who was falsely accused of murdering a young girl in Georgia and lynched in 1913. With its emphasis on the dangers of hatred, bigotry, antisemitism, a mob mentality and suspicion of outsiders, the show draws poignant parallels to the Holocaust.

Far more intellectually ambitious was Anne Being Frank, a one-woman show that moves between three distinct settings: the secret annex where Anne and her family went into hiding, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where the teenager spent her final days and an imagined postwar future in a which a still-young Anne tries to convince a New York editor to publish her revised diary, though the editor finds the details implausible. The question that this performance asks is whether Anne could still believe “that people are really good at heart” after experiencing her family’s betrayal and witnessing the horrors of the concentration camp (including rape and an abortion)—and whether the public could accept an unrelievedly shocking and traumatic account of her life.

The Holocaust gave rise to a framework and language for understanding evil in the modern world. Collective evil, we learned, resulted from the interplay of economic, historical, ideological, political, psychological and social factors: economic hardship, national humiliation, the quest for revenge, charismatic leadership, effective propaganda, political polarization, scapegoating and the systematic elimination of political opposition and dissent.

Unbridled state power, the complicity of the professional classes, extreme nationalism and even a distinctive form of child rearing within authoritarian families—these, too, we learned, contributed to the triumph of an ideology demanding racial purity and unflinching obedience as essential to national greatness and to the technocratic bureaucratization of mass killing.

The very word “genocide” was a product of the Holocaust, as were the concepts of day-to-day resistance and cultural resistance.

But memories of the Holocaust are fast fading. According to a 2018 survey,

• Eleven percent of all U.S. adults, and 22 percent of millennials, are “unaware” or “not sure” of the Holocaust.
• Forty-one percent of adults couldn’t identify Auschwitz as a concentration camp, a death camp or a forced-labor camp.

Historical ignorance is nothing new, but something bigger is going on. As New York Times opinion writer Ross Douthat has observed, the Holocaust is no longer “our only culturally available icon of absolute evil” (the words are those of the cleric and theologian Richard John Neuhaus). As Douthat notes, “the simple passage of time would inevitably have made the Holocaust somewhat less central to 21st-century debates, less elevated among historical atrocities.”

Even toward the end of the 20th century, challenges to the primacy of the Holocaust as the quintessence of absolute evil were in the air. Toni Morrison, for example, dedicated her 1987 novel, Beloved, to the “60 million and more”—those caught up in the slave trade—invoking a figure 10 times greater than the number of Jews killed during the Nazi reign of terror.

Meanwhile, a newer generation of scholars focuses on other exemplars of evil. In addition to slavery, heightened emphasis has been placed on colonialism, racism, population displacement and various manifestations of capitalism. (Here, I might note parenthetically that historians of Jewish background not only played an outsize role in recovering the centrality of slavery in the U.S. and world history, as August Meier and Elliott Rudwick demonstrated, but in the rise of critical histories of colonialism and global capitalism.)

In his essay, Douthat considers the Western left’s response to the Oct. 7 massacres and kidnappings—including the willingness of some to defend, excuse or rationalize Hamas’s attacks and to downplay the group’s religious fundamentalism and its misogyny and homophobic views and actions—as symbolic of the Holocaust’s decline as the archetype of collective evil. He worries, with some justification, that there’s a genuine danger that as memories of the Holocaust slip away, the public will be less aware of what it revealed: the dangers posed by all powerful states, including those motivated by supposedly utopian visions.

But like the devil himself, evil takes on many different guises. History, in Edward Gibbons’s famous phrase, is “indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” But the evils that historians focus on shift over time, and those that command the most attention today involve slavery and other systems of coerced labor; the displacement and extermination of Indigenous peoples (and, subsequently, the eradication of the peasantry); colonialism and imperialism; racism; and systemic and structural inequalities.

I have a deep interest in how we might radically rethink the way we teach history at the lower-division level to highly diverse students who consider the standard U.S. history survey redundant, narrow and irrelevant. Given that this is most students’ only exposure to academic history at the postsecondary level, history professors need to think very carefully about their courses’ content organization and learning objectives.

Many of my students want a history that is more global and comparative, a history that pays more attention to the experiences and values of “the people without history,” a history that does a more thorough job of situating U.S. history amid broader global processes and that more critically examines the U.S. role in the world. Many also seek a history that poses and addresses big questions—epistemological questions, such as “how do we know what we think we know about the past?”—questions of causation, interpretation and inevitability; and moral questions, including what debts, if any, today’s wealthy societies owe to those who were exploited, enslaved or displaced in the past.

You might respond, with some justification, that a comparative history or a moral history is beyond most historians’ capabilities and can’t possibly be taught in two semesters, much less one. I wholeheartedly disagree. Given that most undergraduates have had U.S. history in fifth, eighth and 11th grades and one or even two years of world history in middle and high school, there is no reason to repeat what students should have already learned.

There are readily available books, like Carl J. Guarneri’s America Compared: American History in International Perspective and Thomas Bender’s A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History and Rethinking American History in a Global Age, that can help us reimagine our history survey courses.

A quarter century ago, I heard the late Charles Tilly, among this country’s foremost historical sociologists, call for a history that is social science–informed and sociologically minded, that is attentive to long-term social processes and structures, such as state building, national consolidation and centralization; to institutions (including legal and judicial systems, party systems, and regulatory agencies); to various forms of collective action, including collective violence (like interstate and civil wars, revolutions, riots, and terrorism) and social protests (everything from marches and strikes to petition campaigns) and social movements (such as reform and protest movements).

The history he extolled focused on shifts in labor regimes, migration and urban organization as well as democratization (and its limits) and inequality and stratification and their institutionalization.

In little more than an hour, Tilly offered an overview of what such a history might look like. We would do well to follow his example.

The approach that I favor must be willing to grapple with the big issues—including issues of:

• Power: the various ways that power has been acquired, expressed and used at various points in time.
• Inequality: how and why disparities within and across societies arose, evolved and persist.
• Identities: both the positive identities that contribute to a sense of belonging and self-worth and the negative identities used to stigmatize, defame and justify or legitimate inequalities.

Among the big issues that we should tackle head on are these:

1. The factors that contributed to Europe’s rise to global power in the 15th and 16th centuries. Here, one must ask whether it is actually the case that Europe forged ahead of other parts of the world in terms of income productivity and technology before the industrial revolution. If so, why was it that Europe—and not China, India, the Ottoman empire or another society—surged during this era? To what extent were slavery and colonial plunder, as opposed to geography, natural resources, science, technology and various cultural attributes, central to European expansion?
2. The impact of European colonial expansion, from the mid-15th through the early 20th centuries, upon various peoples, societies and physical environments. Here, it is important to stress that colonialism took very different forms in various parts of the world, that Indigenous responses varied as well, that colonization occurred slowly and unevenly, and that resistance persisted and often resulted in negotiated outcomes and complex accommodations.
3. The divergent trajectories that various societies took into modernity and how those contrasting paths contributed to internal and international conflicts. What were the factors—cultural, geographic, economic, environmental, political, religious—that influenced patterns of development? And how did the changes associated with the twin revolutions—the democratic and industrial revolutions—alter various facets of life, from class structures to educational systems, gender relations, family arrangements, labor regimes, politics, and urban layouts?
4. The reasons why some previously colonized areas have achieved high levels of economic growth while others haven’t. Why is it that some societies, including countries that are resource-poor societies or that only recently escaped colonial status, have achieved high levels of economic success while others languish?

The greatest challenge facing historians is not to reconstruct the past, difficult as that is, but to find pattern, direction and meaning in history. Nor is history merely a matter of storytelling—though stories have immense power to engage the public in the past. Ours is—or should be—an interpretive enterprise that seeks to uncover the arcs of development and lay bare the dynamics of social change, disclosing the costs as well as the benefits of social change.

Anything less is merely antiquarianism.