topics: |  history | catastrophe | anti-semitism

Seven apocalyptic endings of previous civilizations, cultures, and
peoples--from the sack of Rome to Auschwitz, each so profoundly disturbing
that the survivors cried, like Petrarch after the Black Death swept Europe in
1348, "When was such a disaster ever seen, even heard of?"
...  narrative skill and scholarship to play divertingly upon the nerves of a
generation of readers obsessed by the fire and ice of their own visions:
World War III; a cosmic flood from a melted polar icecap; incurable
plagues. But in the end, he has written something much more like a moral
inquiry. As he scrutinizes the crimes nature has committed against man, and
man has committed against himself, from the sack of Rome (A.D. 410) to the
Lisbon earthquake (1755), from the Inquisition (1209-44) to Auschwitz
(1940-45), Friedrich has added to Petrarch's rhetorical question Job's absurd
yet necessary demand: Why?
	Once upon a time the victims thought they knew the answer: sinners
were being crushed by the hand of an angry God. The Black Death, killing 25
million Europeans, or an estimated one out of three, provides Friedrich with
a syndrome. As they suffered what they believed to be God's scourge, the
Brotherhood of the Flagellants thought to echo his wrath by whipping
themselves. When this holy masochism failed, the Brotherhood and others
adopted a second response. They invented a scapegoat, turning their scourges
literally and figuratively upon Jews in Germany, France and Switzerland. (The
End of the World, among other things, is a subhistory of anti-Semitism.)
	Even more revolting than the corpses Friedrich keeps heaping up are
the bloody cries he records, calling for more massacres. Faced with the
peasants' rebellion, the rebel Luther exhorted: "Let everyone who can, smite,
slay and stab, secretly or openly." In the name of historical dialectic, a
terrorist much admired by Lenin, Sergei Nechayev, declared: "Our task is
terrible, total, universal and merciless destruction."
	The climax of all the jigs of death has to be, of course,
Auschwitz. At this hell-on-earth in the countryside of Poland, where 4
million people were killed, the world as slaughterhouse reached its peak of
efficiency. Men, women and children were murdered by gas, by flame thrower,
by artful orchestrations of hunger and typhus. In his quiet voice, Friedrich
lays it all out meticulously, as tidy as the camp commandant's garden. What
more can reasonably be said about history's perversions of Judgment Day?
- http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,923030-1,00.html