To disorient, to induce disbelief. This is the stated intent of Saul Friedlander's book The Years of Extermination. It deviates barely a word from the declared intent of Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre, which sought, via the device of the Verfremdungseffekt, to make spectators conscious of being an audience as such and maintain their detached skepticism instead of being sent upon rapturous transports in the psyche of a Hamlet or an Othello.
It is superficially interesting, and somewhat jolting, to note that the same device employed by the extreme left in order to promote its ideology is the same one that is deployed in order to recapture the unimaginable consequences of the extreme right.
But upon revisitation, perhaps this observation has something more to it. For, despite the fact that both Friedlander and Brecht intended to establish a similar relationship between the work and its audience by employing comparable narrative techniques, there is still something of a distinction between the manner in which epic theatre and Friedlander's writing is each meant to be received. Brecht sought to create an emotional distance between the story and the viewer so that the spectators would not be given over to catharsis: to watch The Caucasian Chalk Circle is to engage with the ethical/political issues depicted therein, to be consciously critical, and to be able to walk away from the performance with specific opinions and judgments. The key to Brecht's theory was the notion that the audience would be empowered by such a "distanced" viewing, that they would become active moral and political agents. In other words, Brecht's art was meant to give rise to self-assured converts, confident citizens who maneuver themselves with precision and poise in order to concretize their world view. In comparison to this scheme, Friedlander's reader is allowed much less self-composure when confronted with the text. In what direction could one possible hope to be led in such a torturous labyrinth of bad intentions, what could one possibly be persuaded of when all coherent semantic units are rendered pale, irrelevant compared to the experience that gave rise to such harrowing testimonials? What could one hope to be converted into, after reading The Years of Extermination? The very thought seems vulgar, inappropriate. Indeed, Friedlander may have explicit designs to appeal to the reader's ethical processes rather than douse them in sentimentalized accounts of terror and grief, but by no means can one declare that his book give rise to uncomplicated, simple courses of action that follow from clear moral principles.
Why have we lost the ability to decide for ourselves the people we want to be, or become, in the gap of time between Brecht and Friedlander?
Could it be that Friedlander's subject matter treats a period of the time during which morality itself became farcical, as the concept that underpins ethics--universal right to selfhood and autonomous personal identity--became negligible? Extermination implies that personhood is no longer a consideration; it was no longer the case that a human was a human was a human. Some humans just had the semblance of being human: really they were not people, they were fodder. Even if we see ourselves as somebody--sentient, biped, with emotions and a unique personality--it did not guarantee that we were free to be seen as people. It is this assurance that we have lost in the time that Friedlander chooses to address, and it is this notion that propels the notion that, beginning with the Holocaust, ethics had to be rebuilt from scratch, and it would never resemble the glorious façade it had once been.