Lessons of the Holocaust

The recent impact of the American television drama in the Federal Republic of Germany provides the occasion to discuss a theme that has always if not explicitly been present in this journal. Although we have not dealt extensively with the Nazi genocide, or with the problem of historic relations between Germans and Jews, they have often provided a touchstone for many of our discussions, and certainly have informed the work of many of our contributors. For this reason we have chosen to devote this and the following issue to the Holocaust and its consequences. The present issue is largely concerned with the West German response to the tv film Holocaust, while the next will investigate the impact of the real event for Jewish selfconsciousness in the post-Holocaust epoch. This has resulted in two distinct approaches. While this issue emphasizes sociological analysis and criticism of the broad response to a single cultural phenomenon, the next issue is more subjective, relying on personal commentary, interviews and autobiography to analyze the way that Jewish intellectuals of different generations have come to terms with a collective tragedy. Of course, Jewish concerns have been evident in NGC in another regard. This is the unmistakably Jewish element in Critical Theory which is apparent, not only in the Frankfurt School's concern with anti-Semitism, discussed by Martin Jay in this issue, but in the essence of its concept of social theory. The idea that dialectics is secularized hope, the translation of the desire for transcendence into history, and the identification with the suffering of past generations that are characteristic motifs of Critical Theory owe a great deal to the Jewish Messianic idea. The Messianic impulse, with its emphasis on redemption, utopia, and the radical negation of the existing order was, as Gershom Scholem points out, the anarchic breeze in Jewish orthodoxy. It is no less true that Critical Theory, with its similar emphasis, was the anarchic breeze in Marxist orthodoxy as well. In his appreciation of Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse provided a cogent characterization of the