Dan Stone's collection of thirteen compact essays, which were originally published between 1997 and 2004, are tied together by two overarching intellectual concerns. First, Stone advances and comments upon an important shift of perspectives in Holocaust studies. Whereas scholars have traditionally considered the “Final Solution” an exceptional event that defies comparison and perhaps even comprehension, a new generation of Holocaust experts studies the genocide of European Jewry from the conceptual vantage point of comparative genocide studies. Stone's enthusiasm for comparative research leads him to dismiss the notion of the Holocaust's uniqueness as an “identity-affirming comfort zone” that reflects “ideologically driven attempts to maintain the Holocaust as a kind of ‘sacred’ entity” (pp. 237–8). In his assessment, none of these attempts can survive empirical scrutiny because “they overlook the fact that other genocides have more in common with the Holocaust than they do differences” (p. 240).
The status of the Holocaust as a transgressive event is the second theme that ties together the essays in History, Memory, and Mass Atrocity. Stone hopes to offer a corrective to the work of historians and intellectuals who have highlighted the modern, rational, and utilitarian aspects of the Holocaust and thus failed to study, let alone fully comprehend, the irrational, ecstatic, and sacrificial elements that, according to Stone, played an important role in the day-to-day violence of the “Final Solution.” Especially this second theme, which takes center stage in History, Memory, and Mass Atrocity, gives Stone an opportunity to engage with some key concerns and thinkers in Holocaust studies. One might not agree with all of Stone's assessments but his arguments are always thought-provoking and well worth considering.
Stone approvingly cites George Orwell's aphorism that the “people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves” (p. 32). Hannah Arendt fits into the first category and her writings represent an important reference point for Stone. He applauds her insights into the interdependence between colonialism and fascism but maintains that she failed to understand important aspects of the Nazi phenomenon by insisting, for emotional as well as philosophical reasons, that there was no “connection between Nazism and Western traditions of thought” (p. 64). Postwar scholars such as Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben who were less emotionally attached to western thought and German idealism could more easily discern the self-destructive dynamics at the core of western culture that erupted in colonialism and fascism. Yet in an interesting twist in his argument, Stone insists that Foucault and Agamben might have successfully identified the tools of western self-destruction, for instance racism and biopolitics, but they failed to recognize what “primordial impulse” gave rise to the violence in the first place and why similar discursive formations had very different consequences in different social and national settings. After all, “biopolitics led not only to genocide, but also to advances in social welfare, public health, and family policy” (p. 224).
At this juncture, Stone turns to Georges Bataille who, because of the fascist streak in his personality, did not have to deal with the same philosophical and emotional hang-ups as, for instance, Arendt. Stone is particularly interested in Bataille's concept of sovereignty which he defines as “action divorced from all calculations” (p. 70). Bataille invokes Aztec human sacrifices and medieval cathedrals as examples of sovereign action caused by the necessary and welcome expenditure of excess human energy. These definitions explain why Bataille's theory of fascism has attracted so much criticism. After all, he casts a very sympathetic eye on Hitler and his henchmen who made a valiant effort to escape the unnecessary and unhealthy restrictions that bourgeois society imposes on all sorts of useless consumption. Yet in his perceptive reading of Bataille, Stone explains why it would be misleading to consider Bataille “a fascist, even a ‘left fascist’” (p. 82). In the end, Bataille dismissed Nazism as a perversion of sovereign action. While the Nazis managed to tap into affective, non-utilitarian energies on a vast scale, they also subjected these energies to their own calculations about warfare, empire building, and racial cleansing. The extreme violence of the Nazi phenomenon was thus caused by a vicious cycle consisting of the repression, liberation, and subsequent resubjugation of excess human energy.
Stone uses Bataille's theories to insist, correctly in my mind, that a significant portion of recent Holocaust historiography has overestimated the systematic, industrial, and bureaucratic factors that contributed to the unfolding of the “Final Solution” and failed to take note to what extent the events of the Holocaust were characterized by conventional, yet radically transgressive forms of brutality. To counteract this trend Stone reminds his readers that “violence is as much a part of modern societies as it is of other societies” (p. 4) and that we still have to research more carefully “the conjunction of rationalized society and violent passions” because the violence that erupted during the Holocaust “cannot simply be seen as a logical consequence of modernization” (p. 12). Stone therefore welcomes renewed efforts to study Nazi ideology and experiments with a wide range of concepts that might illuminate the interdependencies between violence and modernity, including notions such as “modern magic” (pace Malinowski, p. 47), “affective effervescence” (Bataille, p. 80), “Rausch” (Saul Friedlander, p. 199), and “crazed sacrificialism” (Dominick LaCapra, p. 203).
In the end, despite or perhaps because of the terminological diversity brought into play by Stone, it remains unclear how precisely he intends to replace or reconceptualize the dialectics of enlightenment. For example, Stone rightly criticizes empirical, “modernistic” Holocaust researchers such as Götz Aly, Susanne Heim, and Detlev Peukert for having overemphasized the causal relevance of the social theories that some academically trained perpetrators embraced in order to justify their crimes. He also points out that the effectiveness of their writings is occasionally hampered by a string of simplistic binary assumptions about rational vs. irrational social structures and civilization vs. barbarism. It is nevertheless surprising that Stone does not choose to engage more extensively with the empirical work about the everyday history of Nazi genocide, initiated by Aly, Heim, and Peukert and continued by Christopher Browning, Ulrich Herbert, and others. Their writings are one of the best available resources for an exploration of the interdependencies between violence and modernity precisely because these historians do not lose track of the extreme brutality of the day-to-day operations of the Nazi regime. Moreover, in his abstract reflections about the pervasiveness of violence and genocide, reflections that are only occasionally tied to concrete case studies, Stone runs the risk of reifying genocidal violence as an anthropological inevitability. Especially the model derived from Bataille seems to suggest that the repression of heterogeneous energies will unavoidably lead to massive, violent conflagrations. I am not sure how that model can explain the concrete social dynamics of the “Final Solution” and help us prevent the occurrence of future genocides.
In addition to essays about comparative genocide studies and the intellectual history of Holocaust interpretation, History, Memory, and Mass Atrocity contains a number of chapters on the aesthetics and politics of Holocaust remembrance. The chapters deal with such different media as photography, memorials, museums, and historiography and offer a trenchant indictment of British Holocaust memory which, according to Stone, primarily serves the purpose to detract attention from “Britain's own record of colonial atrocity” (p. 187). Stone is less discerning about other contexts and forms of Holocaust culture. He appreciates the political function of Yad Vashem, praises the design the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and reports on the controversies surrounding the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., without jumping into the fray. Following Hayden White, Stone also advocates new, experimental, and non-linear forms of historical scholarship while at the same time exhibiting a great deal of tolerance for the very conventional formats of historical writing that have informed Holocaust historiography since its inception. Reading these passages one might wish for a little more Bataille-inspired impatience with the dishonest and self-serving nature of a lot of contemporary Holocaust culture. After all, as Stone very appropriately points out, one should always try to resist the temptation of “draping [oneself] with the tortures that others underwent” (p. 101).
Yet perhaps most intriguing are Stone's statements about Holocaust photography. Taking the famous Sonderkommando photographs from Birkenau as his reference point, he talks about their “visceral impact” and “intrinsic power” to shock and chides John Tagg for arguing that the moral meaning of photographs depends on their discursive and cultural context. Yet Stone does not explain how the photos might retain such an intrinsic meaning in today's rapidly changing political and visual environments (pp. 24–25). It seems highly unlikely, for example, that middle-aged intellectuals steeped in the Holocaust culture of the 1970s and 1980s and videogame-savvy teenagers living in non-western contexts would attribute essentially similar meanings to the Birkenau photos. Is it possible that Holocaust exceptionalism which Stone has so unceremoniously dispatched through the front door is here sneaking back in through the back door?
By reflecting on the visual grammar of Holocaust photography Stone raises yet another important topic and highlights once more the importance of his interventions. The nicely integrated essays contained in History, Memory, and Mass Atrocity display impressive empirical breadth and conceptual dexterity and offer an effective guide to the intellectual complexities of Holocaust studies at the turn of the millennium.
