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Elie WieselHope, Despair and Memory
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Jewish Experience as Reflective of Human Rights
In this Nobel Lecture, Wiesel connects his experience as a Holocaust survivor with his belief in universal human rights. He does this first by depicting the horrors of the Holocaust, then by explaining the difficulties the survivors faced in communicating what they had experienced, and finally by observing that many other groups continue to be oppressed, facing their own horrors. Beyond any particular case, Wiesel also links the experience of the Holocaust to human rights in the abstract, including the importance of pacifism, which Wiesel sees as part of the Jewish tradition.
Wiesel asks his fellow Jewish people to remember their plight in order to understand the plight of others. The atrocities they have lived through should serve, Wiesel argues, as a vehicle for their defense of other groups in similar situations. As a Holocaust survivor, he calls it his “supreme duty” to remember his suffering in the hope of preventing future atrocities. Having lived through the terrors of racist, cultural, and religious oppression, Wiesel especially focuses on ethnic and wartime conflicts—apartheid, the continued persecution of Jewish people in the Soviet Union and Ethiopia, and various groups of refugees. However, he also exhorts his audience to accept “anyone whose orientation differs politically, philosophically, sexually” (20).
Wiesel ends his speech by recognizing the difficulty of the task of accepting all oppressed groups while underlining its utmost importance. He asks rhetorically, “A naive undertaking? Of course. But not without a certain logic” (20). This “naivete” mirrors what Wiesel describes as survivors’ initial assumption that the horrors of the Holocaust would inevitably safeguard against future tragedies. Wiesel recognizes that this was not the case, as hatred continued to exist throughout the world. Naming a series of then-contemporary examples, he wonders if it is even worth continuing the struggle but soon answers that humanity must continue to fight all forms of oppression: “[T]here must never be a time when we fail to protest” (29). Wiesel has here transitioned from the first-person plural as referring to the Jewish community to a “we” that encompasses all of humanity. Just as the Holocaust reflects the experience of other oppressed groups, the attitude of Holocaust survivors provides a blueprint for humanity to follow going forward, balancing hope against despair.
The Argument for Pacifism
As a Nobel Lecture responding to a Peace Prize, Wiesel’s essay seeks to explain his activism on behalf of peace. He does so by linking his experience as a Holocaust survivor to his pacifism, associating “prevent[ing] injustice” with opposing war.
Wiesel recognizes that the Holocaust occurred during a time of war and notes that nothing can justify the violence that war brings with it; humanity should never harm “innocent people and helpless children” (25). Wiesel also grounds his opposition to war in Jewish religious tradition, asserting, “Nothing provokes so much horror and opposition within the Jewish tradition as war” (13). With several examples, he demonstrates that warriors do not receive praise in the Talmud. Furthermore, he notes that the notion of a “holy war” does not exist in Judaism.
It is worth noting that this is not necessarily a broadly accepted position. Others have argued that the same Jewish warriors that Wiesel names—in particular David, who serves as an Israeli national symbol—were justified in engaging in war. At the time Wiesel gave his speech, Israel had been fighting in wars for decades. While Wiesel does not blame these wars on Israeli aggression, he does express hope that Israel can find peace with its Arab neighbors. He also condemns violence related to the Palestinian cause, naming recent terrorist attacks such as the 1985-1986 bombings in France and the Neve Shalom Synagogue Massacre.
God in Wiesel’s vision does not create peace; humanity does. In the speech’s final lines, Wiesel calls peace “our gift to each other” (29). This also adds urgency to a global pacifist effort. Peace rests on the shoulders of humankind. If humanity does not heed this call, it could result in “total destruction” due to nuclear war; at the time of Wiesel’s speech, the United States and the Soviet Union had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over. Placing pacificism at the end of the speech demonstrates how important the issue is to the speaker. Essentially, he asks the audience to save itself from the horrors the Jewish people faced in the Holocaust.
The Alliance of Hope and Memory to Avoid Despair
The key argument in this speech is how hope and memory are interdependent and necessary to avoid “despair.” Wiesel repeats all three terms throughout the speech—most frequently hope—and subtly connects them by framing them within time. Memory allows people to recall the past; in order to look toward the future, one needs to recall what has already happened to avoid making the same mistakes. Despair is, therefore, the lack of both hope and memory.
The Holocaust and its consequences embody this despair, reducing the lives of its victims to an eternal present. This “forgetting” was both a matter of survival—Wiesel describes how those in concentration camps were forced to focus on “the ration of bread or soup” (7), doing anything to stay alive—and the stripping of one’s human dignity; nothing about who the prisoners had been, either individually or as a people, mattered in the camps. Wiesel begins his speech with the story of the Besht, who forgets everything. Likewise, Wiesel suggests, the Jewish people lost their collective memory during the Holocaust, which in turn prevented them from hoping for a better future. Wiesel implies that this is one reason so many turned to chronicling their experiences after the war ended. Painful as that recollection was, it was also a way of exercising hope.
Wiesel argues that the same is true of humanity as a whole: Remembering what has happened carries with it the hope of a better future. This sheds light on Wiesel’s account of the story of Job. Wiesel suggests that Job’s “rebellion” against God was an act of faith; one only rebels because one hopes for something better, and in Job’s case, that hope was grounded in what he had lost. Job is, therefore, humanity’s “ancestor” as well as its “contemporary.” His story embodies the challenge facing humanity in the present, which is to remember where it came from and turn its past mistakes to good.
Given how much of Wiesel’s work is dedicated to testimony, this lecture uniting hope and memory acts as both a justification for his work and as grounds for his human rights activism. His work of testimony, he feels, contributes to a collective memory that informs his hope for a better future.
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