I wasn’t going to read Snyder’s Black Earth because I did not expect it to tell me anything new about the Holocaust. But then I read a pissy review of the book and realized that only something very good could provoke such a fit of poutiness in a reviewer. So I bought the book and can now tell you that this is probably the best thing I read this year. I hate wasting my time on books that tell me what I already know. Black Earth told me something new on every page and surprised me more than I could have expected.
This book on the Holocaust is in reality a passionate ode to the state. It is common to equate the destruction of the state with freedom, Snyder says. History teaches us, however, that the exact opposite is true. In order to be able to murder 6 million Jews, Hitler had to destroy the nation-states in half of Europe.
In the places where the state was preserved in 1939-45, few Jews were killed. Where the state was compromised, more Jews were killed. In the areas where the state was destroyed, most Jews were killed. And in the region where the state was destroyed twice, all Jews were killed.
There is no reason to believe, Snyder points out, that we are all that different from the 1941 Germans. We are as enamored of apocalyptic visions, as distrustful of science, as prone to blame the state, and as incapable of feeling content with our standard of living as they were. And the state today is weakened. As in Hitler’s times, the regions where the state is weakest (Africa or the Middle East) are the ones where human life is most at risk.
This is, of course, a briefest summary of a volume that brims with insights, analysis, ideas, and knowledge. Climate change, war in Iraq, Putin’s alternative to Hitler’s concept of “the Jewish lobby”, the analysis of what characteristic European Christians had to possess to be more likely to help Jews during the Holocaust – all these subjects and many more are brought together in an elegant, meaningful, and absorbing narrative.
In terms of the writing style, the book is structured around numerous repetitions that seem to strive to anchor the ideas Snyder introduces to prevent them from being swept away by the flow that is eroding and battering the very nation-state model that Hitler was so eager to destroy.