2000: Norman Finkelstein publishes his critique The Holocaust Industry.
2000: Ian Kershaw publishes the second volume of his biography – Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis.
2001: Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation is published.
2001: The historian Jan Gross publishes Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, igniting a renewed debate about antisemitism in Poland, and Polish involvement in the Holocaust.
2001: Peter Longerich’s The Unwritten Order is published, focussing on Hitler’s role in planning the Holocaust.
2001: Joachim Fest’s Speer: The Final Verdict is published in English.
2001: Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room is published.
2001: Sebald’s final masterpiece, Austerlitz, is published to international acclaim, only a month before he is killed in a car accident in Norfolk.
2002: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated is published.
2002: Ian Thomson publishes his definitive biography Primo Levi.
2002: Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist (based on the WarsawGhetto memoirs of Władysław Szpilman) comes out to great critical praise.
2003–2008: Richard Evans’ definitive trilogy on The Third Reich is published – The Coming of the Third Reich (2003), The Third Reich in Power 1933–1939 (2005), The Third Reich at War (2008).
2005: Laurence Ree’s Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ is published, with an accompanying BBC television series.
2006: Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy is published.
2006: Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) is published in France, and three years later in English.
2006: Robert Chandler’s new English translation of Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate is published to great acclaim. New editions of Everything Flows and The Road follow in 2010.
2010: David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen’s critical work on the first German genocide, in South-West Africa, is published – The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide.
2011: Jan Karski’s wartime memoir, Story of a Secret State, is republished by Penguin Classics.
2013: Otto Dov Kulka’s work Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination is published internationally to universal praise.
2015: László Nemes’ mesmerising film Son of Saul, about the Birkenau Sonderkommando, is released to enormous critical acclaim.
2015: Historian Timothy Snyder publishes Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.
2016: Lawyer Philippe Sands publishes East West Street, a profound meditation on his family and the Holocaust, and the two men who coined the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ – Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht.
5 Raul Hilberg’s list is at the beginning of the chapter ‘The Establishment’ in Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders.
Chapter Twenty: The Architect in Prison – a Different Man?
The majority of Speer quotations in this chapter are taken from three works: Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny, and Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries, both by Albert Speer. Casalis’ quotations are all from Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth.
1 Dorothée Casalis’ words are from her interview in the BBC documentary Albert Speer: The Nazi Who Said Sorry.
2 Regarding Casalis’ omission from the index of the Diaries, and downplaying of his role in Speer’s life, perhaps there was a less generous impulse involved here? Maybe the wound of Casalis leaving, and Speer’s profound sense of abandonment afterwards, never really left him? And so, retrospectively, Speer felt reluctant to give him the credit he deserved.
There is another possible explanation. Speer was always something of a chameleon, mirroring back what he felt his audience wanted to hear, subtly changing emphases where necessary. Maybe, knowing Gitta Sereny’s fascination in psychological analysis and morality, and knowing of her affection for Casalis, he told her what she wanted to hear? Slightly exaggerating the role Casalis had played. (The only problem with this hypothesis is that we know that Speer had written to his daughter Hilde several times regarding the centrality of Casalis in his life’s journey – unless here, too, he was attempting to tell her what he felt she wanted to hear.)
Chapter Twenty-one: Searching for Antigone in Ashford, and for Languages That Do Not Yet Exist …
The Simone Weil quotations in this chapter are from ‘La Personnalité humaine, le juste et l’injuste,’Gravity and Grace and Waiting for God.
1 ‘It was other people’s pain that moved her, not her own’ is from Simone Weil by Palle Yourgrau, Chapter One.
2 ‘How beautiful to think of you: / amid news of death and victory, / in prison …’ is from ‘9–10 pm’ by Nâzim Hickmet.
3 ‘On the ceiling, in a corner, around ten in the morning, a rectangleof sunlight appears …’ and the other quotations are from Men in Prison by Victor Serge.
4 ‘How do we condemn a holocaust if we have not condemned all past holocausts?’ Weil’s question was to her friend Maurice Schumann (quoted in Simone Weil, Chapter Eight, by Palle Yourgrau).
5 The George Herbert poem which Simone Weil loved more than any other was ‘Love’ (1633):
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
6 As we walk back to the car, Alice says that she still finds something very disturbing about the almost wilful act of her death … I agree strongly with Alice’s comment about Weil’s death, and there are other aspects of Weil’s life and work which I find problematic too – I think there was something missing in her activism, and all her writing about injustice: and that is rage. A real, determined fury to change the world, not just reflect on it, however exceptional many of her insights were. She certainly didn’t follow Marx’s advice – ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’. I also find that, at certain times, her identification with suffering, and affliction, can become so extreme that it can tip over into a kind of masochistic self-indulgence, a wallowing in shame and humiliation. I think you have to be in the right mood to read Weil – it’s like tuning into a radio frequency that’s very hard to find. She makes you work harder than many other writers and philosophers, but the rewards are great –her insights can be astonishing.