Author Q&A: Timothy Snyder

1. What is new about BLACK EARTH? How is it different from other history books about the Holocaust?

It is a global history, in that it starts from how Hitler sees the planet, and concludes with how we see our world. It takes the familiar story of Hitler’s rise to power and asks: Why then did almost all of the Holocaust happen beyond the borders of prewar Germany? It takes seriously the lives and experiences

of Jews and others beyond Germany, and explains how the destruction of their political communities led to the destruction of their lives.

2. The subtitle of the book calls the Holocaust not only a history but also a 'warning.' What do you mean by this?

The Holocaust was unprecedented, but it is now a precedent. We know what people are capable of doing, but we might not understand why they would do it and under what conditions. My concern is that we have misunderstood the Holocaust, focusing on what is convenient for us and ignoring what I am convinced are some of the basic lessons: the risks of ecological panic, which was at the root of Hitler’s ideology and appeal, and the politics of state destruction, which is what made the Holocaust happen. Few of us link the Holocaust to fears of scarcity and removal of states, but we should.

3. How many languages did you read in to research the book?

German sources are important, but they also have their limits. No matter how critical we are with Nazi sources, we can’t see what Nazis didn’t see unless we use other sources as well. The political sections of the book draw on sources from throughout Europe, so that we have a sense of what the continent was like, for Jews and others, before its political order was destroyed. The sections about murder and rescue use the main languages of European Jews at the time, which means Yiddish, Polish, and Russian. We have a great deal of untapped material in these languages. The book is based mainly in German, Polish, Yiddish, and Russian sources, but there is a bit of Hebrew, French, and Ukrainian as well.

4. In what way, if any, is the story of the Holocaust personal to you?

It is of course in some ways personal. But my own personal worry is this: that too much of what is written and published about the Holocaust is about memory and feeling, and not enough is about history and understanding. I spent years of my life with the testimonies and I treasure them. But

here my purpose is to write a history of the Holocaust that not only does justice to experience but helps us to see how such an event can and did take place.

5. What are readers likely to find most surprising about the argument you present in BLACK EARTH?

I try not to think too much about this, and just to get the argument right. In America it might be this: we think the problem with Germany was that it was an all-controlling state that persecuted its citizens, whereas the Holocaust was in fact possible because Germany created special institutions that destroyed neighboring states and created zones of anarchy.

6. What are some of the common misconceptions about the Holocaust?

That Hitler was a madman—in certain ways he certainly was, but he was also a skilled tactician many of whose ideas were politically effective and some of whose ideas still resonate today. That the Holocaust happened chiefly in Germany—it happened entirely outside the borders of prewar Germany. That it concerned German Jews—97 percent of the victims were Jews from elsewhere. That it happened in concentration camps—Jews were in fact murdered over death pits (roughly half) and in special gassing facilities that were not in fact camps. That the perpetrators were all Nazis—many of the Germans who killed were not Nazis, and roughly half of the killers were not Germans. That it is somehow beyond politics—in fact it is incomprehensible without the special kind of politics that arose in zones of state destruction. That it cannot be understood—it can, and it must.

7. How does the concept of 'statelessness' figure into your understanding of the Holocaust, and why is that issue particularly relevant today?

We think of the Holocaust as racial killing, but this falls short. Hitler did not see the Jews as a race, but as parahuman beings who had to be removed somehow from the planet. In practice the easiest way to do so was to kill them, usually in places near where they lived, in eastern Europe. The bulk of the Holocaust happened in occupied Poland and in the occupied Soviet Union, states that the Nazi leadership declared to be subject to destruction and illegitimate. Polish and Soviet Jews were thus treated as non-citizens, and almost all such people who fell under German control were killed. Interestingly, the Holocaust could proceed elsewhere in Europe only insofar as states were weakened or chose to deprive their Jewish citizens of citizenship. The Nazi aspiration to kill Jews was complete, but in practice it stopped at the passport. Only Jews who were separated from states were killed.

9. In a previous interview with Shelf Awareness, you said: “I sometimes think that in America things have gone so far that when we say ‘Nazi’ we are closing a discussion rather than opening it. I have no problem with the concept of evil, which figures in the book; but I am sure that we cannot protect ourselves from evil with labels.” What do you mean by this?

Both the victims and the perpetrators of the Holocaust were human beings. To recognize the humanity of the victims is difficult in one way, since it requires from us that we see the mass murder of the Jews as an unbelievably vast accumulation of the murder of individual children, women, and men. To recognize the humanity of the perpetrators is difficult in another way, since it suggests that many of us could become killers in the right (or wrong) historical setting. In our own historical moment, we tend to focus on the victims and have a certain tendency to bracket off the perpetrators with the label “Nazi.” But at what point exactly does a human being become a Nazi? Or, more broadly, since most of the killers were not in fact Nazis, for what reasons do neighbors kill neighbors and strangers kill strangers? Answering those questions requires reconstructing the political world that Hitler imagined and that his regime in some measure created; it also requires seeing how not just thousands or tens of thousands but millions of people in some way or another co-created that world, either by becoming killers or by benefiting in some way from the killing.

10. Could something like the Holocaust really happen again? If so, which countries or leaders show the most disturbing warning signs?

The Holocaust was exceptional in that it began from the idea that an entire people, the Jews, had no place on planet Earth, and it was exceptional because it involved an attempt to kill every Jew under German control. That said, in the decades since the end of the Second World War we have seen a whole series of events that resemble the Holocaust in some way. Even though we should and must recognize the ways in which the Holocaust was unprecedented, we can also acknowledge its importance by allowing it to help us to understand related events. Nazi power was special because it deliberately destroyed states. But in general, mass killing and ethnic cleansing take place where states are weak or collapsing or during civil wars. Nazi ideology was special because it began from the premise that Jews were using false universal ideas, ethical and scientific, to create an ecological crisis for Germans. But ecological crisis can return, fears of scarcity can motivate other developed societies, and other ideologies that translate ecological panic to aggression against groups can emerge. In the world today there are disturbing elements: a changing climate that is creating scarcity and the fear of scarcity; a growing China that is anxious about food and water; a Russia that denies the legitimacy of statehood in its neighborhood; a United States where citizens sometimes deny climate change and sometimes believe that destroying states will bring good outcomes; an Africa where mass killing already takes place with depressing regularity. These are all possible elements of some coming crisis; much depends on whether we choose to see them as such.

11. What do you hope readers will take away from BLACK EARTH?

I would like for readers to understand the Holocaust not only in the depth of its horror but as a contemporary history, one not too distant from us, one that we not only can understand but should understand.

12. What can we—as ordinary citizens—do to prevent a future Holocaust?

The whole second half of the book is about rescue, ending with the righteous few individuals who rescued Jews without any external motivation or support from outside institutions. Their lesson of virtue is one that we must absolutely remember and try to live by. More Jews would have survived

had more non-Jews taken risks to save them. But we must also be realistic about ourselves and our limitations. In general, people during the Holocaust behaved better when political institutions endured and worse when political institutions were destroyed. If we are serious about preventing events like

the Holocaust, we must not only remember virtue, we must also work to preserve and improve structure. In our own historical moment, this requires, I think, that we relearn the lessons of the Holocaust itself, try to improve rather than simply critique the states that we have, and use the state to reduce the risks of the real ecological crises that can bring the politics of ecological panic. Prevention now is less emotionally resonant than rescue later. But I hope that readers of my book, even as they identify with the rescuers at the end, will understand that we should try very hard to avoid placing human beings in situations where almost all of us would fail the test.