You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Holocaust, like all instances of genocide, constitutes a unique and total breach in human relatedness. Perpetrators do not relate to victims as human beings, viewing them instead as vermin, rats, lice, or even inanimate objects—”pieces,” or Stücke, as Germans would call the dead bodies of gassed Jews. Only in such a context, in which human communication had broken down completely, could the mass murder be carried out. The perpetrators did not imagine the feelings—terror, pain, and loss—of their victims, and therefore allowed for no empathy in themselves. Or perhaps they did experience a glimpse of such feelings, yet immediately cut it off. In the aftermath they felt no guilt and had no regrets; indeed, they often even obliterated their knowledge that the murders had taken place. Such an obliteration constitutes a further breakdown of communication—in this instance, an internal breakdown, between the perpetrators and themselves. The latter phenomenon was manifested in perpetrators' disavowal not only of wrongdoing, but even of any knowledge of wrongdoing. For decades after World War II, such disavowals were typical of the generation of perpetrators in Germany.
In order to assuage his woundedness, the survivor harbors an unconscious wish to repair the broken human relatedness. Realistically, this may be an impossible quest: the murders cannot be undone, the dead cannot be brought back to life. Symbolically, such repair might be attempted by getting the perpetrator to acknowledge his crimes, to repent, and to make whatever amends are possible. While on the political and societal level Germany has in recent decades repeatedly acknowledged the atrocities it committed and made far-reaching repairs, this never happened on a personal level. Perpetrators and bystanders steadfastly refused to accept responsibility. Most even insisted, as Thomas Kohut (2012) has demonstrated, on their own lack of knowledge of what had been taking place. To have been informed would have impl