Hitler's Posthumous victory

A work in progress

In my January 6 essay The Worst Crime is Silence, I committed myself to posting every day. I am now working on something that I will not be able to finish today, but I thought I would briefly share some of my thoughts about it.

To the 613 commandments compiled by Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim (1916-2003) added a 614th: "Thou shalt not hand Hitler posthumous victories. To despair of the God of Israel is to continue Hitler's work for him.” For Fackenheim, Jews gave Hitler posthumous victories by abandoning their faith or their attachment to the Jewish people. After 1967, he interpreted the latter to include support for the State of Israel.

The first person to imagine the posthumous victory of Hitler, however, was the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, in his story “Deutsches Requiem,” published in 1946 during the Nuremberg war crimes trials. In Borges’ vision, Hitler’s posthumous victory is not a matter solely for Jews.

Jorge Luis Borges and Emil Fackenheim

The narrator, Otto Dietrich zur Linde, former deputy director of a Nazi concentration camp, writes from his prison cell on the eve of his execution for war crimes:

An inexorable epoch is spreading over the world. We forged it, we who are already its victims. What matters if England is the hammer and we the anvil, so long as violence reigns and not servile Christian timidity? If victory and injustice and happiness are not for Germany, let them be for other nations. Let Heaven exist, even though our dwelling place is in Hell.¹

These lines occurred to me when I saw the video in the following post:

This reality is hardly unique to Israel. We see it in the United States. I may have more to say in the future on Hitler’s posthumous victory.

1. Jorge Luis Borges, “Deutsches Requiem,” translated by Julian Palley, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1962), p. 147.