2—
Backshadowing and Apocalyptic History

The syndrome of the System is one of those super-
ideas, alongside which life itself becomes a detail
unworthy of attention. . . . Only for the sake of a
person's right to a private life is living worth while.
Anatoli Sobchak (mayor of St. Petersburg),
The Road to Power

At some point history becomes like topography:
there is no why to it, only a here and a there.
John Updike, Memoirs of the
Ford Administration

Our instinctive gratitude to what frees us from the too strictly plotted, the too seamlessly coherent story, undoubtedly accounts for much of our pleasure in experimental fiction. But this responsiveness to the improvisatory is changed decisively at those moments when contemporary history and literature intersect, when the issue becomes one of representing an event with whose occurrence we are still attempting to come to terms. Especially in the face of a catastrophe, there is an urge to surrender to the most extreme foreshadowing imaginable, thereby resisting sideshadowing altogether. We try to make sense of a historical disaster by interpreting it, according to the strictest teleological model, as the climax of a bitter trajectory whose inevitable outcome it must be. This sense of wrenching inevitability, like a tragic hero's vain efforts to avoid his fate, is the cornerstone not only of Aristotelian tragedy, but of its most powerful literary descendants across genres and epochs. Yet a historical cataclysm, no matter how

terrible, is not a tragedy, and to interpret it as one would denature the character of what I earlier called its "event-ness." If genres provide a certain way of understanding the world, as well as a constellation of distinct formal characteristics, and if, according to P. N. Medvedev and the Bakhtinians, "one does not first see a given aspect of reality and then shape it to a given set of conventions [but] instead, sees reality 'with the eyes of the genre,'"^[1] then classical tragedy is the genre least open to the claims of sideshadowing, just as the tragic hero's destiny is least amenable to the judgments of a prosaic ethics. When an event is so destructive for a whole people, so hideous in its motivation, enactment, and consequences as was the Shoah, there is an almost irresistible pressure to interpret it as one would a tragedy, to regard it as the simultaneously inconceivable and yet foreordained culmination of the entire brutal history of European anti-Semitism. (Because the word holocaust carries with it a penumbra of unwelcome theological implications of a divinely sanctioned sacrifice, I have preferred to use the Hebrew word Shoah throughout this book in referring to the Nazi genocide.)^[2]

Irving Howe has argued powerfully against interpreting the Shoah as a tragedy, but for entirely different reasons than the ones at issue here, and it is useful to test the logic of his position in order to clarify my own:

the death camps and mass exterminations . . . give little space for the tragic. . . . In classical tragedy, man is defeated; in the Holocaust, man is destroyed. In tragedy, man struggles against forces that overwhelm him, struggles against the gods and against his own nature; and the downfall that follows may have an aspect of grandeur. This struggle allows for the possibility of an enlargement of character through the purgation of suffering, which in turn may bring a measure of understanding and a kind of peace. But . . . [most of] the Jews destroyed in the camps . . . died . . . not because they chose at all costs to remain Jews, but because the Nazis chose to believe that being Jewish was an unchangeable, irredeemable condition. They were victims of a destruction that, for many of them, had little or only a fragmentary meaning. . . . All of this does not make their death less terrible; it makes their death more terrible.^[3]

Howe's description here seems all too accurate as an account of Jewish agony in the Shoah, but it suggests that a different measure of self-consciousness, a changed relationship to the fact of their murder, would have made the event a tragedy. In opposition to this view, sideshadowing and the prosaic worldview allied with it insist that no historical event, no paradigm of struggle, resistance, and acceptance, can transform the death of countless human beings into a tragedy in the literary sense Howe invokes. Tragedy is an arranged genre, and real events do not happen as part of an already narrated form. At most, one might say that in the retelling of individual deaths, in the movement from the complexities of their daily existence into the terrible simplification of their legends, the fate of a small group of individuals united by a common aim, like the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, may give birth, in Yeats's talismanic phrase, to a "terrible beauty."

Tragedy, that is, does not inhere in the actions themselves, not even if those actions are undertaken with the knowledge that they will end in a freely (and hence "heroically") chosen death. Rather, tragedy is created by the ways in which that choice is represented, refigured, and recounted to others. The tragic is a mode of comprehending and giving form to events as a narrative; it is not a mode of existence as such, as we instinctively make clear by labeling as melodramatic someone who attempts to interpret the quotidian details of his own life in a tragic register.

But at the extreme distance from any self-indulgence, even when death is chosen as the certain outcome of a desperate resistance against overwhelming forces, it is not just the courage of the deed, but also its posthumous significance in the communal memory that qualifies it as tragic. Thus, the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, or of the Sobibor and Birkenau revolts, have become crucial in the post-war Jewish, and, more particularly, in the Israeli imagination, as proof of a new Jewish readiness to strike back against their oppressors. By choosing, rather than helplessly undergoing their dying, the resisters can be figured as embodiments of the rebirth of armed Jewish daring and their story can be commemorated as a mixture of heroic and tragic drama.^[4] (The museum / study center in Jerusalem,

Yad va-Shem [Monument and Memorial], is explicitly dedicated as much to the Jewish resistance fighters as to the victims of the Shoah.) Like the plot of a classical tragedy, the uprisings against the Nazis took place in a restricted space and time, and the fighters seem tragically heroic to us because we know how they perished and thus we can grasp the beginning and end of each uprising as a single event, fixed in a clear progression of linked episodes. But while it was actually happening, it was experienced instant by instant and person by person, each with different motives and inspirations for fighting, and each with differently formulated explanations of his own involvement. The Shoah as a whole, moreover, can never be represented plausibly as a tragedy because the killings happened as part of an ongoing political and bureaucratic process. In the domain of history, unlike in the world "seen with the eyes of the [tragic] genre," there are always multiple paths and sideshadows, always moment-by-moment events, each of which is potentially significant in determining an individual's life, and each of which is a conjunction, unplottable and unpredictable in advance of its occurrence, of specific choices and accidents. Indeed, every survivor's narrative I have read emphasizes the multiple contingencies, the intersection of fortuitous events too wildly improbable for any fiction, that made survival possible. Primo Levi's account, Se questo è un uomo, is, of course, the classic instance of such a survivor's narrative, stressing, as it does, how many separate and unforeseeable incidents had to combine for Levi to live through his time in Auschwitz. These strictly "accidental" occurrences ranged from his encounter with Lorenzo, an Italian civilian worker, who for six months brought the starving captive enough extra food to keep him alive, to the scarlet fever that kept Levi in the infirmary when the Nazis abandoned the camp and took all the ablebodied prisoners with them on a forced march back to Germany, in the course of which virtually every one of them was murdered. Levi makes clear how much pure luck, as well as a gift for improvisation, and a certain inner resilience of character, spirit, and physical health, were necessary to have any chance of survival at all, but for millions of victims of the Shoah none of these qualities was sufficient to preserve them in the death factories: "If the drowned have no story, and

single and broad is the path to perdition, the paths to salvation are many, difficult and improbable."^[5]

But whether the interpretive model is tragic or historically determinist, the reward of fitting even catastrophic events into a coherent global schema is the pleasure of comprehension, the satisfaction of the human urge to make sense out of every occurrence, no matter how terrible. The simultaneously intellectual and emotional value of understanding the place of a particular event in the most inclusive possible framework is a crucial, and often underestimated, source of "contentment." (It may even be that this pleasure, rather than any direct Aristotelian "catharsis," makes the experience of a tragic worldview so paradoxically gratifying.) Yet every interpretation of the Shoah that is grounded in a sense of historical inevitability resonates with both implicit and often explicit ideological implications, not so much about the world of the perpetrators of the genocide, or about those bystanders who did so little to halt the mass murder, but about the lives of the victims themselves. The bitterness of inevitability, whether seen as tragic or pathetic, endows an event with a meaning, one that can be used both to make an ideationally "rich" sense of the horror and to begin a process of coming to terms with the pain by enfolding it within some larger pattern of signification. And for the Shoah, especially in its uncannily delayed representation in Zionist writing, that pattern has been primarily one of proving the untenability of the Diaspora, and the self-destructive absurdity of the attempts by European and, more specifically, by Austro-German Jewry to assimilate to a society that only waited for its chance to exterminate them.^[6] In a recent study, James Young perceptively analyzes "the central negative place of the Holocaust in Zionist ideology as the ultimate consequence of Jewish vulnerability in the Diaspora." In Israel, the Shoah can function as "proof of the untenability of life in exile," and thus can be represented as crystallizing a positive lesson in its very devastation, since what the Nazi killings marked was "not so much the end of Jewish life as . . . the end of viable life in exile."^[7] It is with the force of this interpretation, its almost irresistible conclusiveness as a historical and ideological analysis, that I contend throughout much of this book. To have chosen to confront the claims

of sideshadowing with the enormity of the Shoah is to test it against a seemingly intractable counter-instance, on the principle that if the validity of sideshadowing can be discerned here, where it seems so difficult to recognize, then its pertinence in cases that are not as morally and theoretically arduous will be more readily apparent. The logic involved is only a particularly sharp instantiation of the medieval guideline that a single, powerful lesson is more instructive than a host of minor ones (Exemplum docet, exempla obscurant ). If the Shoah is so critical a test case, it is precisely because it is also the one in which so much is at stake, humanly as well as epistemologically, in the simultaneously impossible and unavoidable debate about its meaning. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that I am not claiming that the enormity of the Shoah makes the consideration of more quotidian historical events superfluous. Rather, narratives about the Shoah can serve as exemplary test cases for my position both because of the importance of the Shoah for modern consciousness and because it has so often been represented through a plot governed by a logic of historical inevitability. Such emplotment either explicitly or implicitly rejects the relevance of sideshadowing, and hence provides the kind of totalizing master narrative against which the counterhistory proposed here can be heard most effectively.

But even to speak about a "debate" in this context is potentially misleading. It may suggest, quite wrongly, that the issue is one of the "textuality" (and hence the deconstructibility) of historical events. Although it is obviously the case that our knowledge of the Shoah, as of all events at which we were not actually present, depends on the record of others, written, spoken, filmed, or preserved in a myriad of man-made artifacts, a knowledge so mediated does not therefore cease to be knowledge. The Shoah can stand as a kind of limit case exposing the moral bankruptcy of a theoretical project in which the event-ness of the past is denied its unique specificity and force. Rather than casting doubt on the event-ness of history, sideshadowing helps us to reckon the human cost of an occurrence by reminding us of all that its coming-into-existence made impossible. The nonlives of the sideshadowed events that never happened are a part of the emotional/intellectual legacy and aura of each actually occurring event,^[8]

inflecting it in distinct ways, as, for example, the extinction of the culture that sustained Yiddish as a spoken and literary language has profoundly changed the way in which Jewish life has been represented since 1945. As Berel Lang rightly insists, "the immediate horror of the death camps has made it difficult to conjure the lives that might have been in lieu of the deaths that were—but this, too, obviously constitutes the actual and continuing loss."^[9] Lawrence L. Langer quotes a concentration camp survivor, Philp K., who, in addition to the terrible suffering he both witnessed and endured, is haunted by precisely this loss of all the potential futures that were exterminated in the Shoah: "We'll never recover what was lost. We can't even assess what was lost. Who knows what beauty and grandeur six million could have contributed to the world? Who can measure it up? What standard do you use? How do you count it? How do you estimate it?"^[10] I think that some conception of sideshadowing is already intuitively present whenever we talk about the extent of the horror inflicted by the Nazis; indeed, without such a concept, part of the devastation wrought by the Shoah would be permanently blocked from consciousness. Yet while there is nothing controversial about formally describing the workings of sideshadowing in this context, entailed in that account are a number of further implications that directly contest many of the most common narrative practices and theoretical premises flourishing today.

It is essential to recognize here that whenever our sense of what the Shoah destroyed includes, along with their actual deaths, the potential achievements and never realized futures of the children who were murdered, we are already engaged in sideshadowing. The logic of historical inevitability, on the other hand, explicitly suggests that the murdered children were already doomed to perish in the Shoah the instant they were born, hence it would be inconsistent to mourn the adult lives they never experienced or the accomplishments they never attained. Yet a genuine grief for this loss is voiced in books on the genocide that rely on premises of historical inevitability and exploit the narrative techniques of foreshadowing. This constitutes just one of what we will soon see is a whole network of major contradictions in writings about the Shoah, because only a re-

jection of inevitability creates the context in which mourning the obliterated futures of the murdered infants makes any coherent sense.

The realization that we ourselves are often still deeply implicated in historical conflicts and debates whose terms we have not so much shaped as inherited, leads to the most pervasive, but also the most pernicious, variant of foreshadowing, a variant that I have called "backshadowing." Backshadowing is a kind of retroactive foreshadowing in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events by narrator and listener is used to judge the participants in those events as though they too should have known what was to come . Thus, our knowledge of the Shoah is used to condemn the "blindness" and "self-deception" of Austro-German Jewry for their unwillingness to save themselves from a doom that supposedly was clear to see. Backshadowing of this kind, and the presumptions it nourishes, run unchecked, and too often uncriticized, throughout histories, biographies, and novels focusing on the life of Austro-German Jewry, until, in Michael Ignatieff's powerful description, "just as the cultural achievement of the empire is overshadowed by the empire's collapse, so the achievement of Jewish emancipation within the empire is overshadowed by its infamous finale. . . . In no field of historical study does one wish more fervently that historians could write history blind to the future."^[11]

But the dilemma cannot be solved by consciously "blinding" ourselves to the future in our histories, if only because it is not at all clear how we either can or should try to bracket all knowledge of the Shoah when we write about the community that perished in it. The discretion required, a discretion that sideshadowing is particularly concerned to teach us, is (1) not to see the future as pre-ordained; and, as a direct corollary, (2) not to use our knowledge of the future as a means of judging the decisions of those living before that (still only possible) future became actual event. Insofar as we are dealing primarily with written documents, the problematics of textuality here have nothing to do with an aporia of undecidability and everything to do with the demands of decorum in its full classical sense: the difficult attempt to work out which modes and techniques of repre-

sentation are appropriately responsive to the exigencies of different human experiences. The two linked forms of discretion I have specified seem, as is so often the case with questions of sideshadowing, uncontroversial enough as general principles, yet in practice they have scarcely ever been heeded in narratives about the Shoah. Thus, to return to Ignatieff's critique of histories of Austro-German Jewry, "because we know that the path for Vienna's Jews led to Mauthausen and Theresienstadt concentration camps, it is easy to be ironic at the expense of those Jews who believed in assimilation into a milieu that was to expel them so brutally. . . . [But to do so is to] evaluate the victims by the degree of prescience with which they anticipate their victimhood . . . and add to the heavy burden of Jewish messianic destiny, the absurd requirement that they be more prescient than other peoples."^[12] Such a requirement is precisely what marks numerous accounts about the victims of the Shoah, without their authors seeing that it drains all meaningful reality (that is, a reality made up of specific choices and decisions) from the lives of the people being described. In place of this reality, such accounts substitute an often intolerable, even if unintended, superiority shared by author and reader over the heads, as it were, of the book's subjects.

As a concentrated instance of what I have thus far defined in more general terms, consider the following sentences from a recent and much-praised biography of Franz Kafka. After mentioning the birth of Kafka's sister Elli, on September 15, 1889, the biographer, Ernst Pawel, writes: "Earlier that year, in the not too distant Austrian town of Braunau, one Clara née Plözl, wife of the customs inspector Aloïs Hitler, had given birth to another of the emperor's subjects, a sickly infant whose survival seemed doubtful. He survived."^[13] Mentioning the son born to a Braunau customs inspector called Hitler can only elicit the kind of tawdry frisson Pawel is trying to achieve if we let ourselves be susceptible to an egregiously blatant act of backshadowing. In 1889 no connection existed yet between the Kafka and Hitler families, and to gesture backward from the terrible years when such a connection, in the form of murderer and victim, did come to occur, is so shamelessly manipulative that it would be easy to laugh away, except that one finds it as a crucial topos in innumerable other texts

on the same theme. Pawel's biography is dense with similarly embarrassing moments, such as the description of Kafka's bar mitzvah: "under Jewish law, Amschel, alias Franz Kafka, became a man on the morning of June 13, 1896 at the Zigeunersynagoge—the Gypsy Synagogue, so called because of its location on a street formerly known as Zigeunerstrasse, though the strange name contains a chilling hint of things to come; a few decades later, the gypsies were to share the fate of the Jews."^[14] Toward the end of the biography, as Kafka is approaching his early death, Pawel writes, "the family doctor urgently advised another extended rest, and Kafka, faute de mieux, settled on a boardinghouse in the Bohemian mountain village of Schelesen, now Zelizy, not far from what was to become the infamous Terezin concentration camp, through which all three of his sisters passed on their way to the gas chambers."^[15]

These descents into what one may call a kind of Hitler-kitsch^[16] are especially alarming because reviewers of the book proved themselves so responsive to exactly this strain in Pawel's writing.^[17] More unsettling still, many of his tropes surface elsewhere in different hands and genres. Thus, in a study by the political scientist George S. Berkeley, Vienna and Its Jews: The Tragedy of Success, it is startling to come across the following sentence right after a mention of the famous suicide/murder of the Habsburg crown prince Rudolf and his lover Mary Vetsera at Mayerling in January 1889: "The other event of special significance to the Vienna Jews which occurred in 1889 passed unremarked by almost everyone, Jew and Gentile alike. Three months after Rudolph's death, in the border village of Braunau, a son was born to Aloïs and Klara Hitler."^[18] It is worth lingering for a moment on the astonishing phrase, "unremarked by almost everyone," with its surely unintended and risible hint that someone actually did notice the event—perhaps three wise men mysteriously alerted to the daemonic nativity in Braunau by a kind of negative illumination—but the coincidence of imagination and phrasing in the Pawel and Berkeley books requires more than merely being noticed and dismissed. Of course the similarity is not due to plagiarism of any sort; rather, it is due to the fascination with Hitler that so strongly mobilizes both writers' fantasies. Arthur Danto, in a wonderfully apposite

jest against predestination and foreshadowing, once quipped, "No one came to Mme. Diderot and said, 'Unto you an encyclopaedist is born.'"^[19] Danto's irony works so economically because the notion it reduces to absurdity is one to which almost no one would subscribe in the first place. But it is just as true that no one came to Frau Hitler in Braunau and said, "Unto you the Führer is born." Both the quotations by Pawel and Berkeley rely for their force on just such a premise.

If we laugh at the example of Mme. Diderot and yet are capable of responding with a shudder to the portentous news of Hitler's birth without seeing its absurdity, it can only be that in the face of evil on as great a scale as Hitler embodies, there is a general freezing up of normal intellectual discriminations. Yet exactly these moments of confrontation with the monstrous require more, not less, clarity, and demand a greater measure, rather than an abdication, of the ability to stay focused on fundamental distinctions. One of the disturbing "pleasures" apparent in numerous recent fictional representations of Hitler (works as different in their structure and rhetoric as, for example, a film like Hans Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland and a prose fantasy like George Steiner's The Portage to St. Cristobal of A.H. ) is the way their narratives derive their energy from—and hence transport their audience to—an emotional register whose intensity supposedly places it beyond moral discriminations. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky anatomized the feverish excitement that arises when abandoning oneself to the contemplation of horror is confused with authentic imaginative freedom, and a kind of lumpen Raskolnikovism is discernible in what has become a flourishing "Hitler industry." As Alan Mintz has warned, "the fascination with evil is a highly appetitive faculty,"^[20] and there is a demoralizing sense in which rhetorics like Pawel's and Berkeley's feed exactly this most dubious of urges. Such a fascination, as much as the logic and ethics of backshadowing, is one of the decisive problems facing anyone who decides to write about the Shoah, and in the next section I specify some of the strategies by which writers hope to short-circuit an "appetitive," and potentially sadomasochistic, immersion in the details of the Nazi barbarity.

The vulgarity of Pawel's and Berkeley's topos of the macabre antinativity of Braunau should not obscure how widespread backshadowing is in the great majority of texts about the period. Thus, when Pawel says of Kafka's story, "The Penal Colony," that "the figure of the head torturer himself is a prescient portrait of Adolf Eichmann, drawn from life,"^[21] it is no different (except for the spurious specificity of Eichmann, rather than any other Nazi bureaucrat-executioner) from George Steiner's declaration in Language and Silence that Kafka had predicted Buchenwald (an analogous example of the kind of false specificity such rhetoric seems to require) and that he had "prophesied the actual forms of that disaster of Western humanism [the Shoah]."^[22] Frederick Karl, in a more recent biography, unencouragingly titled Franz Kafka: Representative Man, continues the tradition of Kafka-as-prophet-of-Nazism by assimilating the transformation of Gregor Samsa to the image of the Jew in Nazi demonology.^[23] Although Karl is forced to admit that "the Samsas do not seem to be Jewish," he hopes that "their vague similarity to the Kafkas gives them some Jewish identity," and, in a still more implausible move to buttress his argument, points out that "Hitler used the term Ungeziefer to designate what he considered the vermin of Europe . . . the very word Kafka used in 'The Metamorphosis' to indicate Gregor's new shape."^[24] Then, as though a dubious thematic link were not enough, Karl soon enriches it with an even more unilluminating biographical link: "Kafka suffered the kind of privation, desperation, and discontent in Berlin that made possible Hitler's attempt in Munich, in November, to seize power through a Putsch . . . . As Kafka wrote 'The Burrow,' about hiding from enemies, the enemy was as close as Munich, planning to flush out moles like Kafka."^[25]

There is a host of ill-conceived assumptions in the whole range of apocalyptic/prophetic rhetoric that has become a staple of recent Kafka criticism, as though this kind of belated ennoblement were being offered to compensate for the initial underestimation of the importance of Jewish themes in his writing. It is probably unwise to inflict on even the greatest of writers the obligation of prophecy, and there is little evidence that doing so to Franz Kafka has done much to deepen the quality of responses to his books.^[26] Even Gershom

Scholem and Walter Benjamin, for whom Kafka was so vital an imaginative authority, did not attribute the gift of historical prophecy to him.^[27] Nor am I really convinced that the critics who do employ such terms mean them in quite the way their sentences declare. Instead, I think that it is actually the critics themselves who, encountering Kafka in the aftermath of the Shoah, have become prophets-after-the-fact and have found themselves unable to read stories like "The Penal Colony" without thinking of the concentration camps. But because of a lingering suspicion that something is seriously awry about interpreting a fictional text in this way, they have retroactively made Kafka into a prophet foreseeing the bestiality that they, not he, know occurred. (Interpreting a prophet is also a distinctly more glamorous activity than commenting on a fiction writer, and no doubt this hierarchic distinction is not without its own efficacy.)

Although the theoretical critique of backshadowing finds a kind of negative aesthetic confirmation from the embarrassing formulations that result when writers rely on it (e.g., the daemonic nativity at Braunau), there exists at least one powerful counter-claim that needs to be confronted because it directly questions the core of my argument. From the Zionist interpretation, Austro-German Jewry had no real future or choices except to leave Europe for Eretz Israel or face increasingly severe persecution. (The term Eretz Israel signifies "The Land of Israel" and was used through the centuries to designate the Biblical homeland even when there was no prospect of a new Jewish state or political program of returning there.) Of course, even the most pessimistic spokesmen of the Zionist movement never predicted anything as cataclysmic as the Shoah, but at least as early as Herzl, there was no shortage of grim predictions about the fate awaiting the Jews who continued to trust in the civil institutions and legal protection of their native countries. (Vladimir Jabotinski, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, formulated the most intransigent version of this position: "Liquidate the Galut [the Diaspora] or the Galut will liquidate you.") Hence, in Zionist writing the question of back-shadowing is more complicated simply because the dire predictions were made well before the event; thus, at least at the most basic level, Zionist narratives of pre-Nazi European Jewish existence, whether

written before or after 1945, cannot be charged with the same kind of blatant backshadowing prominent in a Pawel or Berkeley.

However, it is also the case that with the Shoah, if anywhere, the rule that a sufficient change in quantity amounts to a change in quality seems uncontestable. Zionist predictions never encompassed anything as dreadful as the Shoah, because before it took place, and even while it was happening, it was simply unimaginable for everyone except its perpetrators. And even they, it is worth remembering, initially never conceived of being able to enact their anti-Semitism on such a scale. In Mein Kampf, for example, Hitler writes about killing "twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people . . . [by] poison gas."^[28] That a demagogue who uttered such sentiments could have been invited to become Chancellor of Weimar Germany is rightly felt as appalling, but it is instructive to measure the difference in scale between what Hitler fantasized as possible when writing his book in 1924 and what the Nazis were able to accomplish once they had attained state power.

In fact, Zionist attitudes about the values and culture of European Jewry were always changing as part of the evolving self-definition of the movement and in response to new outside circumstances and pressures. For all the grimness of Zionist diagnoses about the dangers of assimilation, many modifications of even their own forecasts were required in order to fit the Shoah into the interpretive framework they had carefully elaborated.^[29] As the Israeli social historian Jacob Katz points out, "anyone who lived through the period of the Holocaust . . . will readily testify that information concerning the Nazi murder of the Jews, when it first came out, seemed absolutely unbelievable—impossible. In retrospect, however, we tend to conceive of it as the culmination of a predetermined and unavoidable march of destiny. . . . in the case of the Holocaust the contradiction is an especially flagrant one because the contradictory attitudes are so emphatic."^[30] But "still," as Katz goes on to write, "the antinomy persists between the feeling of having been taken by surprise by the events of the Holocaust when they occurred and the inclination, after the fact, to reconstruct those events in such a way as to make them inevitable."^[31]

To summarize and extend my argument thus far as succinctly as possible, in the corpus of works on the Shoah, I think there is a powerful but largely unrecognized connection that links together a set of contradictions which are so persistent that they have become constitutive of the whole discourse. On a historical level, there is the contradiction between conceiving of the Shoah as simultaneously unimaginable and inevitable. On an ethical level, the contradiction is between saying no one could have foreseen the triumph of genocidal anti-Semitism, while also claiming that those who stayed in Europe are in part responsible for their fate because they failed to anticipate the danger. On a narrative level, the contradiction is between insisting on the unprecedented and singular nature of the Shoah as an event and yet still using the most lurid formal tropes and commonplace literary conventions to narrate it.

It is because of its concern with just these kinds of contradictions that sideshadowing is so useful a concept. In their retrospective inability to imagine that any options existed for the Jews before the 1930s and, more damaging still, in their unwillingness to imagine the alternatives which the Jews of that era imagined for themselves except by pathologizing their hopes as willful delusions or symptoms of self-hatred, determinist histories impose a reductively monolithic framework upon an astonishingly rich and heterogenous subject matter. Such determinism inevitably pronounces its certainties in a tone that E. P. Thompson powerfully labeled "the enormous condescension of posterity,"^[32] and part of what I wish to do in this study is to help rescue from such condescension the culture and personal decisions of the communities that were obliterated.

What is required to begin resolving the antinomy Katz describes, which I have extended into the discourse of the Shoah as a whole, is to register honestly, without the acquired certainty of backshadowing or the tone of patronizing incredulity to which it gives rise, that there is nothing self-evidently deluded in the fact that it was the wrong prediction, the fatally incorrect interpretation of public events that won the intellectual and emotional allegiance of the vast majority of European Jews. Or to phrase the issue still more starkly: the wrong prediction did not have to be wrong, and its failure was, if anything, a

good deal less likely than the (retrospectively) more accurate Zionist prognosis. Thus, even someone with as complex and ambivalent a relationship to European Jewish history as Hannah Arendt is both more persuasive and more fair than many of her critics when she writes about pre-World War I Vienna that the anti-Semitism of Mayor Karl Lueger's Christian-Social Party "remained without consequence; the decades when Lueger ruled Vienna were actually a kind of golden age for the Jews."^[33] Of course Arendt, composing these sentences in the immediate aftermath of the war, does so with a full awareness of how hollow that "golden age" really was and how quickly Lueger's more brutal descendants would transform his rhetoric of Jew-baiting into daily practice. But what Arendt does not permit herself here, although she comes perilously close in her polemically backshadowing Eichmann in Jerusalem, is to sneer at those who believed in their security under Habsburg law and who refused to be frightened into flight by the election of Europe's first populist anti-Semitic mayor. Surprisingly enough, Arendt's and Zweig's Judgments about a "golden age" for Austria's Jews are also echoed by S. Y. Agnon (1888–1970), who is widely regarded as the greatest Hebrew novelist of the century. A lifelong Zionist, Agnon was deeply sensitive to the dangers of assimilationism, but in a novella like "Betrothed," set in pre-World War I Palestine, for example, the narrator describes his protagonist's state of mind in these terms: "Jacob Rechnitz was a native of Austria, where one is less conscious of the Exile and where one's thoughts are drawn to happier things."^[34] Since the story was first published in 1943, well after the German annexation of Austria (Anschluss ),^[35] Agnon certainly knew the fragility of such happiness, but for all the irony of his description, he refuses to judge his characters in terms of later events they could never have anticipated. The difference between, on the one hand, a perspective dominated by backshadowing and, on the other, one that respects the variety in how people understood their own positions and the contradictory expectations with which communities debated important decisions, turns on what Frederic Maitland defined as the first rule for comprehending history: an awareness that events now far in the past were once in the future.

One reason why Maitland's formulation is so important to a theory of sideshadowing is that it helps bring into focus the decisive differences between my position in this study and that of works like Danto's Analytical Philosophy of History . Although I have gratefully seized upon Danto's jest about Mme. Diderot, it is important to acknowledge that unlike Ignatieff, Danto is not arguing that historians should "write history blind to the future," even if such a thing were possible. On the contrary, he stresses that while an account of Diderot's subsequent career would make no sense if uttered by Mme. Diderot or by a hypothetical angel attending Denis's birth, some such judgment is unavoidable for later historians. Only after, and precisely because, subsequent events have occurred (in this case, Diderot's career as a writer and encyclopaedist) can we give a description of his early life that is grounded, if only implicitly, in a recognition that the subject of the study grew into a major thinker and author. Danto further implies that without a knowledge of later events, any historical account may be seriously inadequate and incomplete. But he is equally at pains to warn against histories that include "descriptions of events . . . which make an essential reference to later events—events future to the time at which the description is given. In effect [such works] are trying to write the history of what happens before it has happened, and to give accounts of the past based upon accounts of the future."^[36] Phrased in this way, it becomes clear that the issue is determined precisely by the intended chronological scope and ideological/moral assumption of a specific historical account. In terms of my argument here, I believe that only when narratives about pre-Shoah European Jewry are able to incorporate the different ways individuals evaluated their circumstances at the time, and do so without flaunting a fore-knowledge of the impending catastrophe, can a genuine sense of grief, unadulterated by anger or condescension at the "inevitable" truth that went unnoticed, be heard clearly.

A history of European Jewry that continues into the Nazi period obviously must include a detailed discussion of the Shoah, but (1) if the story stops earlier, for example at the end of World War I, it need not allow, and indeed, may only be deflected by allowing the knowledge of the coming genocide to structure its account of the prior

epoch; and (2) even when the narrative makes the Shoah central to its description, it should not use the author's and reader's knowledge of that catastrophe to impose the terms within which earlier events are analyzed. To return to Danto's example, our awareness of Diderot's career is undoubtedly the reason we are interested in his early years (unlike histories of a whole community, with individual biographies only the acknowledged importance, or at least representative character, of the whole life makes someone's first years a likely subject for a written reconstruction), but that awareness cannot be projected backward to anyone in Langres in 1715, nor can it be used legitimately to judge anyone's actions vis-à-vis Diderot during his years at home. Directly indebted to Danto, but still more committed to a theoretical horizon that appears to legitimize backshadowing, Jürgen Habermas insists that

Historical accounts make use of narrative statements. They are called narrative because they present events as elements of stories [Geschichten ]. Stories have a beginning and an end; they are held together by an action. Historical events are reconstructed within the reference system of a story. They cannot be presented without relation to other, later events. . . . Narrative statements describe an event with the aid of categories under which it could not have been observed. The sentence, "the Thirty Years War began in 1618," presupposes that at least those events have elapsed which are relevant for the history of the war up to the Peace of Westphalia, events that could not have been narrated by any observer at the outbreak of the war. . . . The predicates with which an event is narratively presented require the appearance of later events in the light of which the event in question appears as an historical event.^[37]

One way to highlight the issue at stake here is to confront Habermas's account with a contrary formulation in which we imagine a German burgher running through town shouting, "The Thirty Years War has just begun!" The distinction, in other words, is not necessarily one of foreshadowing and backshadowing, but rather the horizon of consciousness and knowledge that one is seeking to describe. There is nothing wrong with a historian narrating events from the perspective

of a time future to the subject matter and knowing more about that subject than its contemporaries could have—for example, the length of a given war—but such knowledge should not delude the historian into thinking that the future was inevitable simply because it happened, nor should it be used to judge the way contemporaries, existing without such information, viewed their own circumstances and decided upon particular courses of action. Moreover, and crucial to the theme of this book, both Habermas and Danto assume a curiously restrictive notion of what constitutes a "story." As we have already seen, both archaic and postmodern narratives show that stories need not have a single beginning and a single end; indeed, they need not even have a single, chronologically ordered series of actions. History can be understood as readily by these two earlier and later categories of narrative organization as by the linear, determined trajectory of a story that Habermas and Danto posit as the sole available model. We could rephrase Habermas by saying "stories need have no beginning or end; they are held together by actions and their sideshadows." But Habermas pushes his case still further by insisting both that historians necessarily use their greater knowledge to transcend the horizon of people actually involved in the story that is being told, and that the future be seen as somehow intended by the actions undertaken in the present:

The historian does not observe from the perspective of the actor but describes events and actions out of the experiential horizon of a history that goes beyond the actor's horizons of expectations. But the meaning that retrospectively accrues to events in this way emerges only in the schema of possible action, that is, only if the events are viewed as if this meaning had—with the knowledge of those who were born later—been intended. . . . A series of events acquires the unity of a story only from a point of view that cannot be taken from those events themselves. The actors are caught in their histories; even for them—if they tell their own stories—the point of view from which the events can take on the coherence of a story arises only subsequently.^[38]

But we should notice here again the assumption that a story has "coherence," by which Habermas means specifically the coherence of a

classically shaped and closed narrative. The crux of the matter is that a certain view of history is being determined not so much by principles of historiography but by a prior and naive grasp of what constitutes a story tout court . If we reconceive our understanding of the possibilities of storytelling and entertain more flexibility in our possible models, if we do not insist on closure and the retrospective judgment that closure is allowed to dictate, then the point of view of any single moment in the trajectory of an ongoing story has a significance that is never annulled or transcended by the shape and meaning of the narrative as a (supposed) whole.^[39]

The problem is that the particular flourishing of historical consciousness that began in the nineteenth century ended up by making the historian, or at least the thinker as historical system builder, whether in the form of a pure philosopher like Hegel, a philosophically trained revolutionary thinker and polemicist like Marx, or a conservative vulgarizer like Spengler, seem the one best equipped to interpret the world. But these kinds of historical analyses, especially when they are part of a larger philosophical vision, tend to legislate the future, as well as to explain the present and past, in terms of a single, coherent system whose laws the philosopher-historian has uncovered. The inevitability of these laws not only renders individual human creativity and freedom irrelevant, it also removes any significance from imagining alternative paths. Within such a logic, alternatives are "mere daydreams." The task for sideshadowing is to restore the legitimacy of reflecting upon what might have taken place instead.

What sideshadowing explicitly rejects is a certain view of how events assume meaning for us, a view perhaps most powerfully put by Wilhelm Dilthey:

We grasp the significance of a moment of the past. It is significant insofar as a linkage to the future was achieved in it. . . . The individual moment [has] significance through its connection with the whole, through the relation of past and future. . . . But what constitutes the peculiar nature of this relation of part to whole within life? It is a relation that is never entirely completed. One would have to await the end of one's life and could only in the hour of death survey the whole from which the relation

of the parts could be determined. One would have to await the end of history to possess all the material needed for determining its significance.^[40]

It is worth asking why it should be exclusively the end of the story that determines how one interprets everything that went before? How much of a specifically Christian theological perspective has been unwittingly imported into a historiographic context by this privileging of what sounds remarkably like a secular Last Judgment? To place such heavy weight upon "the end of one's life and . . . the hour of death" reveals this metamorphosis of a Christian topos with particular vividness. But one might just as well argue that everybody dies and that all nations and civilizations have at some point ended, so culmination, in the sense of termination, is both a commonplace and an uninformative universal truism. Why, then, should it be the sense-giving criterion for every stage that transpired before the inevitable end? The Roman Empire ultimately collapsed, but does its downfall make what happened during its lengthy existence meaningless or count only as a step toward the sacking of Rome by barbarians? Both on the personal biographical level and on the historical one, there is no reason to accept the retrospective authority of the last days. Dilthey's attitude here exactly parallels the point of view that the Shoah, as the death of the Austro-German Jewish community, must be understood as a judgment on that community, as the event by which everything earlier acquires its final sense. It is not the smallest irony of such arguments that, while arising from a perspective supposedly consonant with Jewish traditions and values, they actually rely on the deepest strands of a Christian metaphysics.^[41]

But intimately linked, as it clearly is, to a sense of the importance of sideshadowing, the rejection of the sense-making authority of the future to determine how we interpret past events still leaves unspecified a way to clarify the difference between prediction and foreshadowing. A constituent part of our sense of the present moment is an imaginative investment in some of the futures that might come out of it. Because presentness already includes anticipation, prediction does not in itself violate the integrity of presentness. Some form of

prediction is an inherent aspect of how we organize our world, affecting both greater and smaller plans, whether moment by moment or at decisive turning points. In prediction one makes the best guess possible about an unknown future, a guess limited by all the partiality of one's knowledge, temperament, and desire. But in both foreshadowing and backshadowing the writer continuously passes judgment on the characters' projects and predictions by drawing on the plenitude of his greater information about the end of the story. Since the writer knows which events "really mattered," which plans will bring disaster and which success, the existence of the book's subjects as human beings engaged in an ongoing effort to shape their own futures is denied any substantive meaning. In novels based on historical events known to both the author and reader, the narrative may seem concerned with registering the predictions of the characters. But the intrusion of foreshadowing, the network of portentous signs that signal the future of the characters and their world, is particularly deceptive because it is based upon the shared familiarity of a known outcome. In historical novels, unless the horizon is kept strictly within the consciousness of the characters themselves, any surplus of knowledge or interpretation is an instance of pure backshadowing from an already established future, even if, technically, it presents itself in the rhetorical modes of either prediction or foreshadowing.

To write about their forms of communal life, knowing that the Jews of Vienna's "golden age" were doomed, and then to blame them for not having realized it themselves in time to escape, is to attribute a far greater clarity and monologic shrillness to contemporary warning signs than they actually warranted. Danger signals obviously existed in significant quantities, but so did countless contradictory and, in the main, reassuring ones, and there is nothing inherently surprising that it should have been the latter that most people chose to believe. To illustrate this problem, one need only consider the sordid career of Georg Ritter von Schönerer (1842–1921), standard-bearer for the most extreme Austrian anti-Semitic party of his day and one of Hitler's acknowledged heroes. In 1888, Schönerer and a gang of thugs smashed up the office of the Jewish-owned, liberal newspaper Neues Wiener Tageblatt and beat up some of

the staff, including the editor, Moritz Szeps.^[42] About this incident, Ignatieff poses the telling question: "Is the historian to emphasize the anticipatory echo of the 1930s? Or should emphasis be placed on the fact that Schönerer was arrested, convicted, stripped of his title and his seat as a deputy, and sent to prison for four months?"^[43] Ignatieff's argument is so appealing for a theory of sideshadowing that there is a strong temptation to adopt it in its entirety. But there is a risk that by formulating the question in terms of a rigid either/or choice, Ignatieff may be overcorrecting against the dangers of backshadowing and introducing a different kind of simplification of his own. To deny any link between Schönerer and Hitler is as dubious a move as to see them in a deterministic continuum. A politically successful Nazi movement required numerous predecessors to prepare the ground for its ideology, as well as specific and distinct local conditions to make that success a reality. Hitler could not have been taken seriously as a political leader without a history of anti-Semitic völkisch demagogues like Schönerer to prepare the ground, but the path from one to the other was not foreseeable, let alone inevitable.^[44] Thus when Herzl in 1895 describes the Viennese joy at Lueger's mayoral victory with the memorable image of a man in the crowd standing next to him fervently declaring, "That is our Führer,"^[45] chilling though subsequent history has made the phrase, it is essential not to be so hypnotized by the negative aura of the Nazi Reich as to miss precisely what Herzl himself heard in the words: the voice of a triumphant and irredeemable Austrian anti-Semitism, not a figura of the later mob wildly cheering the arrival of Germany's Führer returning home to the Vienna he had just conquered.^[46] In Berel Lang's elegant formulation, "Affiliation does not amount to inevitability; what is latent does not have to become manifest."^[47]

Unlike Ignatieff's recommendation of deliberate blindness to the future, sideshadowing does not treat each moment of history as a monad, unconnected to what preceded or followed: a strictly atomistic view of history presupposes a relationship to time as distorted as the deterministic one that is its mirror image. Nor does sideshadowing argue against relationships and consequences evolving over time; it says only that few of these consequences are either necessary or

consistently predictable, and it urges that the multiple choices of action available at a given moment, and the realization that the present contains the seeds of diverse and mutually exclusive possible futures, be included in one's understanding of what any single moment entails. In the case of Schönerer, sideshadowing would argue that a crucial element in any history of his movement is how the Jewish community of Vienna and the rest of the Empire viewed both the threat he presented and the significance of his legal disgrace. The episode seems to have encouraged and solidified what was already a powerful tendency among many of the more prosperous Jews toward a certain nervous conservatism and faith in the Emperor as a bulwark against populist and rabble-rousing anti-Semitism. Schönerer's failure, far from making the Empire's Jews blindly complacent about their safety, as the most vulgar versions of backshadowing history fantasize, encouraged them to look for their security in those institutions that seemed, reasonably enough, to offer the greatest potential for protecting their welfare. It was only when all those institutions themselves crumbled that this decision proved disastrous, but the social and legal disintegrations that preceded the assumption of state power by virulently anti-Semitic forces was not a prediction that either the Schönerer affair or Lueger's successful career as mayor could be expected to have let anyone foresee.^[48]

In George Clare's memoirs of his secularized Austro-Jewish family there is a revealing indication of how past experiences were invoked by Viennese Jews to reassure themselves not only after Hitler's assumption of power in Germany but even after the Nazi Anschluss of Austria. Both the author's father and grandfather had suffered injustice under Lueger by being refused timely promotions and university posts. But in their circle not one Jew had been physically harmed, and even the career injuries had been slight and were ultimately rectified. Most of Vienna's Jews in the early 1930s thought Hitler would be like Lueger, rabble-rousing during election campaigns but relatively temperate once in office.^[49] Clare sees his grandmother's reaction to the Anschluss as typical of her generation: "Growing up and maturing in the heyday of European Liberalism [they] could envisage some aspects of evil, something of Lueger's

treatment of [Jews] . . . but [they] could neither envisage nor comprehend the brutal evil that was breaking out all over Vienna that very day."^[50] In Lawrence Langer's extraordinary analysis of taped interviews made with survivors of the Shoah, he quotes a historian who has tried to come to terms with this same question and concluded that "we build our expectations of the future . . . on our familiarity with the past. How could we foresee gas chambers . . . when we had never heard of them?"^[51]

Nor is this situation unique to Austro-German Jewry. A similar debate has arisen in France about the degree of self-consciousness of the French Jews as a separate—and endangered—community in the decade before the anti-Semitic legislation and deportations of the Vichy years. Emmanuel Berl (1892–1976), an assimilated Jewish intellectual and writer, related to the Proust and Bergson families with whom he associated as a young man, confronted this issue shortly before his death in an interview conducted by Patrick Modiano. To Modiano, born after the Shoah and centrally engaged with its implications for his own identity, Berl's refusal to see how grave the danger was in the 1930s seems almost incomprehensible. But Berl's answer is a gentle rebuke about how different history looks if one is predicting rather than backshadowing. In his own defense, Berl quietly points out that his generation of bourgeois Jews saw no reason to fear for their lives during the rising anti-Semitism of the late 1920s and 1930s. After all, Berl argues, they had already endured the most virulent episode of officially encouraged anti-Semitism they could imagine—the Dreyfus affair—and survived it with only verbal abuse and social discrimination, but no actual physical harm. Thus, when new waves of what initially seemed like the same madness broke out, they naturally turned to history and communal memory for guidance and found sufficient reason to think that this latest episode would also pass without jeopardizing their survival. Here too, the distinction is that for contemporary writers the legacy of anti-Semitism culminates "inevitably" in Auschwitz; for Berl's contemporaries it led, just as inevitably, to the public crises and confrontations of the Dreyfus period.^[52] Of all the contradictions we have been tracing, there is one so deeply and unreflectively embedded in most accounts of the Shoah

that it has become an almost indispensable cornerstone of narratives about the genocide. On the one hand, this contradictory perspective insists that the Shoah was an absolutely unprecedented event in human history, while on the other hand, it blames Europe's assimilated Jews for not having anticipated, and thus avoided, the plan for their total extermination. Without the acerbity of polemics, both Clare and Berl try to make us see how carelessly dismissive of the realities confronted by their generation such a judgment is, and how destructive of any genuine historical understanding are backshadowing's certainties.

Earlier in this section, I spoke with what might have seemed excessive disgust at the increasingly common literary topos of Hitler's birth as a sort of daemonic nativity. But by now it ought to be apparent that there is a sense in which historical backshadowing unwittingly places the pre-war European Jews in a position disturbingly similar to the one assigned them by the early Church. Just as the first Christians condemned the Jews for having seen the Savior, witnessed his miracles, and still choosing to reject him, so the contempt of writers projecting backward from their knowledge of the Shoah convicts all those who failed to heed the initial signs of Nazism's reign. It is as though the Jews, initially cursed for not recognizing the Messiah, are now to be scorned again, two millennia later, for having failed to recognize the anti-Christ. To have been blind to "the truth" at Bethlehem and at Braunau, to have misrecognized first the eternal promise incarnated in the carpenter's son and then the mortal peril in the custom inspector's, are the terms to which Jewish history is reduced once its content is held accountable to the certainties visible from the standpoint of backshadowing.

But the problem raised here is hardly amenable to global rules or absolute standards. What constitutes a reasonable warning sign is very much an open question, and no matter what answer one gives, it is hardly likely to be the same in 1913 as in 1933.

That many Jewish writers, and not only dedicated Zionists, realized the precariousness of their position is clear from a novel like Arthur Schnitzler's fascinating The Road to the Open, originally published in 1908 in six installments in the journal Neue Rundschau . The novel

incorporates a number of powerful debates between Viennese Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, and shows how all of them were keenly aware of the growing anti-Semitism in Austria, but differed both in their estimation of the danger it represented and in their plans for the best means to combat/escape it.^[53] In one of the most impressive of these scenes, the issue of a supposed Jewish "oversensitivity" and "persecution mania" arises, prompting an outburst that is all the more powerful for its insight, not just into a future threat faced by Austrian Jewry, but into the daily risks to their well-being and self-esteem that Jews incurred living in a city that had always, in varying degrees, despised them:

Do you think there's a single Christian in the world, even taking the noblest, straightest, and truest one you like, one single Christian who has not in some moment or other of spite, temper or rage, made at any rate mentally some contemptuous allusion to the Jewishness of even his best friend, his mistress or his wife, if they were Jews or of Jewish descent? . . . And as for talking about persecution-mania, why it would be much more logical to talk about a mania for being hidden, a mania for being left alone, a mania for being safe; which though perhaps a less sensational form of disease is certainly a much more dangerous one for its victims.^[54]

Although I have emphasized that we must read Schnitzler's warning in terms of the Habsburg Vienna his characters inhabit, it would be dishonest to pretend it is easy to come across these lines without the shadow of the Nazi era darkening them beyond anything the author dreamed of. But we need to make just such an effort in order not to judge Schnitzler's characters by future facts of which they could have had no inkling. The plight of the Jews in The Road to the Open is serious enough to engage us on its own terms without requiring any additional peril to rivet our attention. Schnitzler never imagined the Shoah when he wrote The Road to the Open, and his character is offering both a diagnosis of a present danger and a (significantly imprecise) prognosis of the serious risk for anyone exposed to that peril, but there is no backshadowing in the novel since neither the writer nor his intended reader possesses a knowledge denied to the figures in the book itself. We, the post-war readers of the novel, import—

illicitly, but I suspect unavoidably—our knowledge into the world of Schnitzler's Vienna. As long as we recognize that it is solely our awareness, not the text's, that makes us respond to the characters' debates as though they were taking place against a backdrop of what will become a pathologically genocidal anti-Semitism, our temptation to backshadow can be held in check by the novel's own openness toward the still-to-be-determined future.

To write history blind to the future is less difficult than to read it blind to the past that has intervened since the time of the narrative. But I think the importance of doing so increases in proportion to the difficulty it entails, a difficulty that is really one of forming a single perspective within which both the historical and the moral imagination are fused and which allows us to acknowledge the authenticity of values and decisions alien to our own. Only from within this perspective, one not determined by a knowledge of the future, can we listen to the conflicting voices of the past with equal attentiveness. Schnitzler is no more a prophet of the Shoah than was Kafka, and his very lack of prophetic certainty enabled him to register with precision and empathy the different and contradictory projections into the future of the multifarious Viennese Jewish bourgeois intelligentsia. What backshadowing can never attempt without condescension is the most richly instructive aspect of Schnitzler's book for readers today. It lets us hear the reasonableness of those who made the fatally wrong guesses, recording their position with the same degree of sympathetic clarity as it does the arguments of characters who turned out to be more accurate in their predictions:

"My own instinct . . . tells me infallibly that my home is here, just here, and not in some land which I don't know, the description of which doesn't appeal to me the least bit and which certain people now want to persuade me is my fatherland on the strength of the argument that that was the place from which my ancestors some thousand years ago were scattered into the world." . . . National feeling and religion, those had always been the words which had embittered him. . . . And so far as religions were concerned, he liked Christian and Jewish mythology quite as much as Greek and Indian; but as soon as they began to force their dogmas upon him he found them all equally intolerable and repulsive. . . .

And least of all would the consciousness of a persecution which they had all suffered, and of a hatred whose burden fell upon them all, make him feel linked to men from whom he felt himself so far distant in temperament. He did not mind recognizing Zionism as a moral principle and a social movement, . . . but the idea of the foundation of a Jewish state on a religious and national basis struck him as a nonsensical defiance of the whole spirit of historical evolution.^[55]

Schnitzler's Jewish characters fiercely and obsessively debate both what it means to be an Austrian Jew and what solution would be best for their embattled position. At various times, all of the novel's Jewish characters are targets of open anti-Semitism, but unlike contemporary clichés about a pandemic "Jewish self-hatred" among secularized Austro-German Jews, only a very few of them show any inclination to disguise, let alone to renounce, their Jewishness.^[56] Irrespective of any shared experiences of racial discrimination, their circumstances and temperaments are sufficiently various to militate against their agreeing on a single course of action. Instead, each character reacts quite differently in accordance with the dense network of personal ambitions, hopes, schemes, and ideals that are part of his nature.

This is exactly what sideshadowing is intended to illuminate, and it is integral to any notion of human freedom. It was Nazism that denied Jews any right to choose their identity or degree of communal affiliation, reducing all Jews to a single, undifferentiated category with one common destiny. For the Nazis and, with only a modification of the criteria of judgment, the Communists (for the race into which one was born, Communism merely substitutes the class), history was monologic as well as monolithic: the impulse toward individual choices, with its attendant debates and uncertainties, was regarded by both as the Jewish ("talmudic") vice par excellence . Sideshadowing is certainly not an especially Jewish principle, either historically or methodologically, but one can say that it is a fundamentally democratic and pluralistic one, and that, whether they label themselves "progressive" or "völkisch, " it is totalitarian ideologies that are in principle most deeply resistant to admitting the validity of sideshadowing.

John Dewey, voicing the pragmatist's view of historiography, argued that an "intelligent understanding of past history is to some extent a lever for moving the present into a certain kind of future. . . . In using what has come to them as an inheritance from the past [people] are compelled to modify it to meet their own needs, and this process creates a new present in which the process continues. History cannot escape its own process. It will, therefore, always be rewritten."^[57] In spite of the sharp critiques provoked by such a viewpoint, finding a "usable past" (i.e., locating in the community's history a fund of useful exempla with which to instigate present changes) is a powerful urge in many narrative histories, especially those composed during a time when the writer feels the physical, economic, or cultural welfare of his own people to be imperiled.^[58] Such a view need not imply that the information thus selected is not also objectively true (that is, as accurate as any purely contingent and humanistic study can hope to be), only that all historical knowledge is selected and then presented according to the criteria, consciously acknowledged or not, of the historian's own interests and passions. Only from the impossible vantage point of an ultimate clarity (whether it take the form of a Messianic Last Judgment or the attainment of a secular historical perfectionism) can history be comprehended as a totality, a grand summary in which everything is recognized in its true value and all the earlier events are harmonized within the plenitude of a final synthesis. In human terms there simply is no privileged horizon from which history can be seen clearly and recorded whole. History does not unfold through a homogeneous time that can be surveyed sub specie aeternitatis . Whether its form be a detailed monograph, an extended chronological survey, or a fictional narrative, what emerges from an intense concern for history is always something like a dynamic image or vortex, a series of intertwined crystallizations or illuminations, vitally bound to the particular concerns of the perceiver. But as Walter Benjamin reminds us, far from being an index of unreliability, the very "partiality" (in both senses) of each perception is a necessary aspect of its continuing human significance: "For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably."^[59]

But if, in their different ways, both Dewey's and Benjamin's arguments, based more on ethical than epistemological claims, have any validity, they raise a troubling question for sideshadowing that is quite different from the one posed by Danto and Habermas: is it right to demand that a writer ignore indications of future problems when composing an account of a historical life or movement, if those problems only manifested themselves with any force much later than the period treated in the narrative? It seems to me that some form of retrospective analysis is not only humanly irresistible, but theoretically legitimate as well. For example, there is no doubt that Palestinian grievances, especially since the intifada, have made historians go back and examine more closely the contemporary documents showing how the early Zionists envisaged the Jews and Arabs getting along in the new Jewish state. Thus, Ernst Pawel's ineradicable attraction to seeing the past in terms of the future that issued from it has a different, and more defensible, function in his biography of Theodor Herzl, The Labyrinth of Exile, than in the Kafka one. It is true that a reliance on vulgar psychological theorizing characterizes both books. For example, Pawel links Herzl's brief fascination with gambling during his university years to his later willingness to take daring risks for the Zionist cause, and attributes Herzl's attraction to secondrate authors to his mother's defective aesthetic judgments, describing her as "probably responsible for some genetic damage to her son's taste in literature and the arts."^[60] But the kind of psychological foreshadowing that is so dubious in the biography of an individual has an entirely distinct—and methodologically less questionable—status when the issue becomes one of assessing a political program or theory. Pawel emphasizes how Herzl regularly ignored Arab realities, thinking that there were few Arabs in Palestine to begin with and that those already there would gladly sell their land to the Jews. Herzl repeatedly refused to pay attention to reports by his own emissary to Palestine, the Ukrainian mathematician and Zionist leader Leo Motzkin (1867–1933), because Motzkin reluctantly concluded that the Arabs occupied the most fertile areas and were determined not to give them up, irrespective of the price offered.^[61] Pawel, judging from the perspective of post-1967 Israel, makes Herzl's blindness to the poten-

tial gravity of the problem a central strand in his biography. And yet, although troubling, such a method does not warrant the kind of theoretical criticism that was appropriate when he applied it to Kafka's life. When Pawel points out that Kafka's sisters would be killed in a concentration camp near where they once visited their sick brother, this link is entirely fortuitous and unrelated to any of the sisters' decisions or acts. But if Herzl deliberately disregarded reports on the Arab population's likely resistance to Jewish immigration, his error, even if its consequence only became apparent years later, was a direct outgrowth of his initial assumptions and of the policy based upon them.^[62] Pawel's highlighting of today's Arab-Jewish problem in his analysis of early Zionist debates is not a true case of backshadowing because the indications of future problems, if not their full implications, were clearly available to Herzl, and hence the perspective adopted by Pawel to judge Herzl's decisions is consonant with criticisms already apparent and articulated in Herzl's own time.

A preliminary account of why the effects of backshadowing differ according to the kind of history that is being told would stress that political programs always project themselves into the future and thus ask from their very inception to be judged by the criterion of future results. But whenever backshadowing vitiates the immediate context in which political projects were conceived, then those histories whose judgments are determined by the knowledge as well as the needs of the historian's present cannot be justified even by an appeal to Dewey's overly flexible model.

Although Ignatieff's criterion of willed blindness to future consequences may be impossibly demanding, it is an essential premise of sideshadowing that the immediate reality of an individual must be grasped on its own terms without the radical simplification of alternatives that characterizes a purely retrospective judgment. Backshadowing's selective interpretation of the past is designed to establish only the inevitability of subsequent developments, thus removing precisely the element of struggle for an ever-evolving significance in both past and present. In the case of Austro-German Jewry, backshadowing does not find new significance in the past but rather denies that it had any significance to begin with; instead of finding a "usable past,"

it is concerned almost exclusively with writing the moralizing tale of a "useless past" whose destruction in the Shoah was only the most brutal proof of its essential unfitness to survive.

The cruelty of backshadowing can be illustrated concisely by realizing that it regards as pointless the lives of countless numbers of people over hundreds of years like the Polish or Austro-German Jews who contributed to the building and maintenance of the synagogues that were eventually razed by the Nazis. Each present, and each separate life, has its own distinct value that later events cannot wholly take away, and we must, it seems to me, believe this in order to continue to have any conviction about our own actions and plans.

Ultimately, what is at issue here for communal memory has to do with nuances of proportion, stance, and tone. These, in turn, are part of how each writer works out the relationship between the individual fates of his characters and the collective trauma of European Jewry. All of these questions together constitute what we might call the difficult search for "decorum," but the last aspect is especially problematic because both the individual and the community as a whole are so deeply involved in trying to make sense of and interpret what is always called, by a kind of instinctive first reaction, the senselessness of the Shoah. And it is this dialectic, the tension between the senselessness of genocide and the sense-making urge of narrative, that centrally engages the theme of historical inevitability versus sideshadowing with which my discussion began.