October 23, 2008

“In the university,” writes Joseph E. Davis in the latest issue of Culture, the magazine of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, “the concepts of good and evil have largely disappeared.  This is not to say that scholars avoid normative issues; they don’t.  What they avoid is any reflection on what the good actually is.”

The danger of avoiding “any reflection on what the good actually is” is graphically illustrated in one of the magazine’s articles.   Jennifer L. Geddes in “Blueberries, Accordions, and Auschwitz:  The evil of thoughtlessness” reflects on a photo album that was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  It bears the handwritten title “Auschwitz 21.6.1944” and was apparently owned by Karl Hoecker, Auschwitz’s second-in-command who appears in many of the photos.

The museum already had one Auschwitz photo album.  The photos are of Jews from Hungary arriving at the concentration camp, waiting to be sorted, and then, having been sorted, walking to their assigned fate:  forced labor or the gas chambers.  Karl Hoecker’s album, in marked contrast, shows the life of the people in charge of Auschwitz during the summer and fall of 1944.

In the album are pictures of official visits and ceremonies, Nazi VIPs, and a Christmas tree lighting. But the most disturbing images are snapshots taken at Solahütte, a beautiful lodge in the mountains thirty kilometers from Auschwitz where officers, guards, and others went for rest and relaxation.