Thomas Laqueur

No one should take comfort from the title of Roy Porter’s shaggy masterpiece of a history of medicine. ‘The Greatest Benefit to Mankind’ – the phrase is Dr Johnson’s – begs for a question-mark, a rising inflection of incredulity, if not outright disbelief. Porter is too ebullient, too much of an optimist, too little of a polemicist to supply the Rousseauian rejoinder: ‘An art more pernicious to men than all the ills it pretends to cure’. But no one who follows Simon Schama’s advice helpfully prescribed in the blurb – ‘take a dose of the book at least once a day and retire early to bed’ – will sleep easy.’‘

Both these books are about recovering and redeeming a past: the past of Dan Jacobson’s grandfather, Heshel Melamed, the rabbi of a community of Jews in the obscure Lithuanian village of Varniai (Vorna it probably would have been to him); Eva Hoffman’s past and the past of Bransk, a Polish shtetl 180 kilometres east of Warsaw, whose history – alternately dismal and cheering – she interpolates into that of Poles and Jews generally, from the Statute of Kalisz to the present. (The statute was signed by Prince Boleslaw the Pious in 1254 and launched the ‘official experiment in Polish-Jewish co-existence’ with a set of laws ‘that could serve as an exemplary statement of minority rights today’.) It is a past lost, soiled, distorted, devastated seemingly beyond comprehension, most obviously by the Holocaust but in any case by modernity, befogged in the ‘Talmudic wilds’ – the phrase is Osip Mandelstam’s, used admiringly by Jacobson.’‘

In a happier age, Immanuel Kant identified one of the problems of understanding any of the genocides which come all too easily to mind. It is the problem of the mathematical sublime. The arithmetician has no more difficulty in principle comprehending one murder than 600,000 – the number murdered in the Armenian atrocities of 1916-17 or by Nazi Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front in 1941 before the death camps were fully geared up – or five to six million, the best estimates we have of the number of Jews murdered in the camps. At a purely cognitive level any number can be understood by adding, unit by unit, to the unit that comes before. But for Kant, the ability to take in great magnitudes – to feel their sublime terror – is ultimately an aesthetic act and one which depends on gaining the right distance from the subject. His example comes from a French general’s account of a visit to the Pyramids and his anxiety about how to feel the emotional effect of their sheer magnitude. Too close and we see only stone by stone without taking in the full sweep from base to peak; too far away and we lose the sublime wonder predicated on the sense that something so massive was made discrete block by discrete block.’

We understand explicitly, as Nietzsche remarked in the Genealogy of Morals, what earlier generations felt in their bones: ‘Only that which does not cease to hurt remains in memory.’ Remembering and mourning demand that the past is somehow kept present; they demand recollection as the pain of immediate loss diminishes. And yet we – that is, we moderns – are also acutely aware of just how utterly past the past is, how historical it is, how even the worst horrors lose their sting. As Walt Whitman wrote of the Civil War:’