Marc Chagall, Calvary (Golgotha), 1912, credit Wikipedia
The Knot of Human Death and Fate
Dan Stone, Psychoanalysis, Historiography, and the Nazi Camps: Accounting for Survival, Palgrave Macmillan, electronic version, 2024, reviewed by Leslie Jones
In From Death-Camp to Existentialism: A Psychiatrist’s Path to a New Therapy (1946), (subsequently re-published as Man’s Search for Meaning), Viktor Frankl considered the factors supposedly conducive to survival in the Nazi concentration camps. Paradoxically, certain prisoners “of a less hardy make-up” survived better, in his estimation, than those of “a robust nature’, if the former were blessed with a life of “inner riches and spiritual freedom”. Bruno Bettelheim, in similar vein, conceded that although accident was the primary reason for survival, those endowed with “a rich inner life”, were ipso factor better fitted to survive. As Lawrence L Langer pithily remarked, Frankl and Bettelheim made “physical survival a matter of mental health”. Stone contends that “wishful thinking about the human spirit” vitiated the writings of Frankl and Bettelheim.
Dan Stone is Professor of History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway College. He discerns in the “canonical writings” of Frankl and Bettelheim a classical Freudian perspective in which psychological problems in later life stem primarily from traumatic events in childhood, i.e. from unresolved Oedipal conflicts. In his opinion, the field of psychoanalysis was thereby restricted to what Werner Bohleber calls “the inner world of the human being – [to] the unconscious and unconscious phantasies”. The psychoanalytic notion of “identification with the aggressor”, which Bettelheim borrowed from Anna Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, likewise, entailed regression to an infantile state. In the 1950’s, West German assessors of survivor’s restitution claims doubtless welcomed the conclusion that their psychological suffering was not ultimately attributable to Nazi persecution.
Eindstation Auschwitz, written in 1945, was republished in 2020 and entitled Last Stop Auschwitz: My Story of Survival from within the Camp. The author, Eddy de Wind, was an assistant to the admissions doctor in Block 9 of Auschwitz. After its liberation, he worked as a physician. In contrast to Bettelheim and Frankl, de Wind elaborated a theory of survival based on the concept of “stupor”, which anticipated the concept of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In ‘Confrontation with Death’ (1949), de Wind contended that to survive in the camp, the inmate must neither surrender nor resist. An “inner acceptance of death” was essential. There are uncanny echoes here of the “death drive”, posited by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
For Stone, the “more nuanced” theory of survival elaborated by de Wind (and by Elie Cohen, whose notions of “resignation” and “depersonalisation” complement de Wind’s analysis) unhappily gained “little purchase or resonance until recently”. Contra Bettelheim and Frankl, in his later articles, de Wind attributed survivors’ ongoing psychological problems to the massive psychic trauma engendered by Nazi oppression.
In How Did They Survive? Mechanisms of Defence in Nazi Concentration Camps (1948), psychoanalyst Hilde O. Bluhm reviewed twelve books pertaining to this subject for the American Journal of Psychotherapy. Have Bluhm’s ideas stood the test of time? Dr Stone regrets the fact that “the concepts of her profession at that time”, notably the questionable notion that “psychological illnesses relate solely to suppressed problems of childhood” and that “victims of the Holocaust reverted to childhood or identified with their aggressors”, informed her analysis. Nonetheless, Stone rates Bluhm’s concept of “estrangement”, a special mechanism of defence developed by the ego, whereby experiences were depersonalised and “turned into an object of …intellectual interests”, as it prefigures de Wind’s idea of “stupor”. Indicatively, Ernst Wiechert, in The Forest of the Dead (1947), one of the twelve books reviewed by Bluhm, referred to “an ever-growing coldness… that filled his entire being” during his imprisonment in Buchenwald. Dr Stone notes that by virtue of when they were written, none of the twelve books in question addressed the concentration camp qua factory of death.
In our review of Frederick Crew’s Freud, the Making of an illusion (2017), we concluded that “For all his failings, Freud surely deserved a more appreciative and generous biographer” (see ‘White Lines’, Leslie Jones, QR, June 7th 2017). Like Dominick LaCapra, Dan Stone is “one of the few historians who values psychoanalytic vocabulary and insights for understanding history” (quotation, Stone, Psychoanalysis etc p. 94). We unreservedly commend his eloquent and thought-provoking exegesis.
The Charnel House, Picasso, credit Wikipedia
Dr Leslie Jones is the Editor of Quarterly Review
“The Knot of Human Death and Fate” is a phrase taken from Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
So many published survivor stories, and camps, are so different from one another that these generalised psychiatric studies are a bit problematic. Compare the accounts by Elie Wiesel, Kitty Hart, Hugo Gryn, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Paul Rassinier, Filip Mueller and Martin Gray, for starters. Yad Vashem’s director once stated that some survivors recalled well-known atrocities when they personally had been nowhere near them (see Margaret MacMacmillan’s “Uses & Abuses of History”). It would be interesting to see attempts at comparative analysis of prisoners in the Soviet Gulag or the US Death-Row.
Dan Stone is an historian with a mission, as his writings taken together indicate. He is keen to spread guilt for “antisemitism” as widely as possible, while excepting Israel from the general indictment of national ethnocentrism.
The “longest hatred” needs objective explanations other than the exclusive and multiregional wickedness of non-Jews, as suggested by David Nirenberg’s “Anti-Judaism” [2015] and Robert Wistrich’s “Anti-Semitism” [1992], among countless other books, monographs, articles and films. The whole subject is immensely complicated, at once usually sensitive and potentially often incendiary, while the poisonous rubbish from Jew-crazed illiterates found, for instance, on blogs like The Occidental Observer does not help anyone reach a balanced, well-informed comprehension of the past, or discourage media-controllers from curbing, as “hate” speech, rational opinion on present or future policies, especially with a regional war looming less than 3000 miles away.
Yes indeed, Dan Stone has already written a baker’s dozen of Holocaust books, although they form the tiniest drop in the huge sea of literature and film about Nazism, within the greater ocean of material about Antisemitism. Hitler lost the war, but is apparently winning the reviews and the ratings. Does Never Again mean Never Stop?
Readers may be interested that Baron Pickles, UK Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues and self-declared “unashamed Zionist” and friend of Likud, is the chief Gentile advocate of a Holocaust Museum and Learning Centre, i.e. a “Shoah memorial [which] must be next to Parliament” (The Jewish Chronicle, 23 August 2024, page 32). It plans to record a centuries-old world-wide hatred, with special emphasis on the “long history of antisemitism in Britain”.
Originally it was supposed to select a few other “genocides” for comparison, but this plan appears to be shelved or dropped, presumably because it “detracts” from the “uniqueness” of The Holocaust. Of course, the recent description of the IDF operation in Gaza as “genocide” by various people, including a number of Jewish Holocaust scholars, has thrown an unexpected spanner in the works.
The erection of a de facto giant Zionist propaganda facility in the capital city of our guilty “racist” people, and costing them around £100 million in tax, may not actually reduce antisemitism, but then according to expert Professor Dan Cohn-Sherbok antipathy to Jews stimulates their unity and life. A win-win project, for some people?
@ Penny Spender & others
The Jewish people are a “holy nation” (Exodus 19:6) chosen by G’d as his special people “above all others” (Deuteronomy 7:6), entitled to the land from Egypt to the Euphrates (Genesis 15:18), and to whom every survivor among our enemies must pay tribute (Zechariah 14:16).
Antisemitism/Judeophobia, as history’s totally unjustifiable “longest hatred”, originates solely in Gentile psychopathy. Its Christian version (Paul, John, Chrysostom, Anselm, Luther, &c) led the way to the industrial extermination of over six million harmless Jews between 1933 and 1945, as part of a – fortunately futile – plan to eliminate us all from the earth, which thereby makes us and our descendants into survivors entitled to reparations from every nation of sympathisers, enablers, perpetrators, bystanders and deniers.
As Professor Antony Julius documents in his 890-page “Trials of the Diaspora” (OUP 2012), English antisemitism was one of its worst examples, including innumerable “famous” writers and politicians; and of course it is manifested recently in UK failure fully to join the Jewish homeland in its conflict with terrorism-nests, regional states and their supporters further-afield.
In these circumstances, a Holocaust Museum & Learning Centre, erected beside the Parliament disgraced by such as Simon de Montfort, Duke of Wellington, Archibald Ramsay, Ernest Bevin and Jeremy Corbyn, is hardly too much to ask, especially with antisemitism rising again. British taxpayers, who now include many anti-Israel immigrants, should see their modest contribution as reparation for past guilt.
The controversial Holocaust Centre proposed for Westminster has recently been defended in the Lords on the grounds of increasing “antisemitism” which is to some extent a synonym for international anger however unjustifiable over IDF actions in Gaza and elsewhere. The “Holocaust”-“Zionism” tandem is an important political phenomenon of our times that needs close and thorough scrutiny.
“Holocaust Memorial must be solely for the Shoah. This will sidestep the inevitable calls of those who classify the death toll in Gaza as ‘genocide’.” – Policy Exchange’s Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, The Jewish Chronicle, 6 September 2024, p.18. As it is written, so let it be done?