Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) 2

 

A few months ago, while on a break between events held at the North Shore's Cap 5 Reserve, I stopped into Edgemont Village's 32 Books & Gallery to poke around, see what's new. Rachel Cusk's Second Place was newish, and I bought it, though not before flipping through the Globe & Mail Western Arts Correspondent Marsha Lederman's brand new Kiss the Red Stairs: the Holocaust, Once Removed, a memoir that tells of her parents' stories of the Holocaust and the intergenerational trauma that resulted from it.

When the name Fred Herzog (1930-2019) flashed by, I stopped and flipped back to where it might begin and read forward from there, to the turn of phrase that set off Lederman ten years before when, during her 2011 Globe & Mail interview with the photographer who chronicled Vancouver street life over the last half of the 20th century (in colour, no less), Herzog spoke the words "so-called Holocaust," a comment that "stayed with" Lederman ("I struggled with its meaning for many months"), the implication being that Herzog was an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier. (For the full story on Lederman's reflection on this interview, click here.) 

Is it fair to say that the use of "so-called" before any noun is to cast doubt on the truth of that noun? Maybe today it is, given that the truth is often more an impediment than an asset to those in pain (from the SJWs to DJT and his supporters). Hard to remember there was a time when "so-called" acknowledged a noun that was understood by those other than oneself. One of the greatest chroniclers of the Holocaust -- an event that took the lives of upwards of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis -- was the Jewish scholar Hannah Arendt, whose Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) is essential reading to anyone attempting to anything write on the subject. Had Lederman read Arendt's book she would have seen this, on Page 39 of the Penguin edition:

"Nothing's as hot when you eat it as when its being cooked" -- a proverb that was then on the lips of many Jews as well. They lived in a fool's paradise, in which, for a few years, even Streicher spoke of a "legal solution" of the Jewish Problem. It took the organized pogroms of November, 1938, the so-called Kristallnacht or Night of Broken Glass, when seventy-five hundred Jewish shop windows were broken, all synagogues went up in flames, and twenty thousand Jewish men were taken off to concentration camps, to expel them from it."