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Alexander, Jeffrey, C, with Martin Jay, Bernhard Giesen, Michael Rothberg, Robert Manne, Nathan Glazer, and Elihu and Ruth Katz. Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xvii + 205 pages. Cloth, $27.95.
While reading Jeffrey C. Alexander's excellent essay in this book, this reviewer was reminded of Wolfgang Borchert's 1947 play, The Man Outside, in which the main character is a German soldier who returns to a ruined home after the war. Confronting both his own plight and the suffering around him, the soldier declares at last, "We are murdered each day and each day we commit murder.'" This final scene at once exculpates and condemns the protagonist, placing him impossibly between the victims of Nazi crimes and complicity in a far broader nexus of guilt. In so doing, it anticipates the struggle that lies at the heart of Alexander's essay, "The Social Construction of Moral Universale," which concerns the historical development of Holocaust memory. For Alexander, a professor of sociology at Yale University, the meanings derived from the Holocaust are informed by socially-constructed representations "[which] are best studied by taking a sociological rather...