The irony of resistance: Simon Wiesenthal and the suffering of Holocaust denial

In “The Auschwitz Lie,” Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal addresses Holocaust denial as a problem of Nazi propaganda. In presenting his argument, Wiesenthal makes a series of surprising rhetorical gestures: he presents a neo-Nazi poem as his key, defining example, and he repeatedly uses irony to supplement his arguments as he critiques Nazism. This article examines both Wiesenthal's text and the words of the poem he cites, placing them in the context of mass identity as discussed in Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. By following Wiesenthal's implicit advice, considering both what his text says and what it does, the article argues that it not only provides a novel solution to the problem of Nazi argumentation, but that, through the poem, Wiesenthal signals a radical effacement of the self at the heart of fascism, aligning fascist euphoria with traumatic death and genocide. In this context, Wiesenthal offers the poem's self-effacement as a comprehensive, implicit theory of totalitarian identity, and furthermore reveals that irony and “sufferance” function together as twin, vital components of any project of resistance.