Progress Update

Once again, the blog has gone silent for months on end, but readers will hopefully understand that any research goes towards the book rather than used as the basis of a blog post. Admittedly, some writers use their blogs as a way of writing draught versions of ideas that get refined into books. I think I should do the same thing.

One discovery for me has been publication series Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933 – 1945. The good news is that this multi-author series now going to be translated into English, in collaboration with the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Centre (based in Jerusalem), as The Persecution and Murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933–1945. The publication of the first English translation starting at Volume 1 is imminent (I have it on pre-order). It looks like the series will have sixteen volumes, and although Volume 16 has been published in German, the German editions of volumes 6, 10, 11 and 15 are still in preparation. While such a comprehensive study is highly welcome, it makes the task of keeping up with the flood of publications on the Shoah a rather overwhelming task, even for historians specialising in the area.

As readers will know, the reason for my interest is whether any of these 16 volumes will state that the persecution of the Jews was directed by ideology and policy shaped by a nineteenth-century opera composer. While it will take some time to go through all of the published volumes (in German, as the complete English translation of all 16 volumes will take years to complete) looking to see if they corroborate this hypothesis, I can tell you in advance, this is most unlikely. The longest single author monographs to date have been those by Raul Hilberg (The Destruction of the European Jews in three volumes) and Saul Friedländer (Nazi Germany and the Jews in two volumes), and neither of these leading historians agrees with the claim the Hitler dedicated himself to a lifelong mission to "transform the world into a Wagnerian drama".  The question becomes then whether a more in-depth 16 volume study of the Shoah might shockingly reveal the spectacular truth about how Hitler and his regime based their persecution of the Jews, either entirely or in part, on the writings of Wagner. I very much doubt it—but watch this space.

The sad thing is that even if the complete 16 volume monograph on the Shoah fails to prove that the persecution was being directed by a dead opera composer, there will always be people who proclaim this to be part of a giant conspiracy to conceal the "dark secret" of the nineteenth century operatic origins of the Final Solution. If such a conspiracy exists, it looks like the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Centre in Jerusalem (the most sacred of all Holocaust memorial sites), will be in on the plot. There will always some crackpot who insists that there is a Jewish conspiracy, doubtless based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to hide the dark secret of the plot to "transform the world into a Wagnerian drama".