The Historiography of the Holocaust

Figure 18
The Topography of Genocide 239
world has known. 53 He has speculated that becoming absorbed in the great
cultural works can become so intense that the tragedy being played out in
those works shuts out the scream in the street outside. Perhaps the answer may
be a little more prosaic and also more pessimistic, even more terrifying: the
answer may lie in the solid bourgeois house with its boundary. Tragedy on the
doorstep could be ignored for across the threshold a job had to be done to protect
the bourgeois family from the world, from the Other, from the Jew.
Hoess had a clear understanding of his world. In his autobiography he wrote:
I have had two lights to guide me: my fatherland and, later, my family. My
second worship was my family. To them I was securely anchored. My
thoughts were always with their future, and our farm was to become their
permanent home.... To bring [our children] up so that they could play
their part in the world, and to give them a steady home, was our one task
in life. 54
As Eric Hobsbawm notes, the bourgeois home is often referred to by
nineteenth-century observers as an oasis of peace in a world of battle. 55
A competitive war waged where some died and many more were wounded – the
language of warfare and survival permeated descriptions of economic competition.