Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

by Timothy Snyder

If nothing matters but competition, then it is natural to eliminate people who resist it and institutions that prevent it. For Hitler, those people were Jews and those institutions were states.

One plurality is between politics and science. A recognition of their distinct purposes makes possible thinking about rights and states; their conflation is a step toward a total ideology such as National Socialism. Another plurality is between order and freedom: each depends upon the other, although each is different from the other. The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny. The claim that freedom is the lack of order must end in anarchy—which is nothing more than tyranny of a special kind. The point of politics is to keep multiple and irreducible goods in play, rather than yielding to some dream, Nazi or otherwise, of totality.

A final plurality thus has to do with time. When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action. The defense of states and rights is impossible to undertake if no one learns from the past or believes in the future. Awareness of history permits recognition of ideological traps and generates skepticism about demands for immediate action because everything has suddenly changed. Confidence in the future can make the world seem like something more than, in Hitler’s words, “the surface area of a precisely measured space.” Time, the fourth dimension, can make the three dimensions of space seem less claustrophobic. Confidence in duration is the antidote to panic and the tonic of demagogy. A sense of the future has to be created in the present from what we know of the past, the fourth dimension built out from the three of daily life.

We share Hitler’s planet and several of his preoccupations; we have changed less than we think. We like our living space, we fantasize about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe. If we think that we are victims of some planetary conspiracy, we edge towards Hitler. If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler’s world.