Historians know Clendinnen as a soul mate of Greg Dening, as a Geertzian proponent of the anthropological approach. A historian intent on ‘performance’ and ‘ritual’ and thick description. For the general and literary reader she is, more particularly, the historian most capable of giving due weight to the apprehension of human suffering in an allusive, even sparkling, prose which is everywhere alive to the weight, as well as the dance, of literature. To the world as language has shaped it most distinctively. A few years ago, she wrote a famous essay for ABR about George Robinson and the fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines. I suppose Clendinnen is some kind of historical ‘idealist’ – she is always conscious of the way belief and patterned behaviour interact with circumstance – but she is also a historian for whom the writing of history and theorising about its nature are inseparable. And she is a historian who agrees with Donne’s principle that he who truth would find about and about must go.

She begins with the fact that the very terms we employ for the Nazi extermination of the Jews – the Shoah and the Holocaust – have their resonance in a more than human lexicon, they lead back, balefully, to the mystery of evil (which is a road Clendinnen does not believe is worth going down).

Nor does the student of the Aztecs have much truck with the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Our sense of its uniqueness is due to the fact that it was inflicted upon and effected by people in western society very much like ourselves. And the danger with sacralising the Holocaust as unique is that it could risk falling out of human ken and of historical understanding.

Witness testimony is one guide but in the case of a witness like Filip Müller, one of the Sonderkommandos (the Jews who worked in the ovens) it is necessary to read without piety. When Müller details the horror and abjection he is credible but when he tells the uplifting story of the dancer who grabs an SS officer’s gun and shoots him – a story which recurs through different accounts and different camps – he needs to be read with scepticism (much as he may be dramatising a variety of other stories through this wishful bravura one).

With Primo Levi truth telling becomes almost continuous with art though it is the denial of any causality, any meaningful relationship between self and world, the sheer monotony of suffering in the camps which Levi brings so sharply alive. Clendinnen recalls the moment when Levi goes to relieve his thirst with an icicle and the guard prevents him. Why? Hier ist kein warum, there is no why here. Levi is full of ‘life’ as a chronicle of living death because he rediscovered himself by writing and the writing was itself the expression of the intense (presumably verbalising) awareness of a born observer and wordsmith. Yet even this arch-humanist dies haunted by the fear that ‘everyone is his brother’s Cain’, that he owed his own life not just to the merest luck but to unconscious betrayal. Clendinnen prays that his suicide, at the height of his fame, was an impulse and not a decision to abandon the world, a final despair.

Despair is not something he can capture as a writer. That is left to Charlotte Delbo with her images of a terrified woman ‘howling’ in the posture of a ‘flayed frog’. Delbo with her conviction that the tortured can never again be at ease with the world.

Clendinnen is appreciative of the humane and literary qualities of writers like Levi but she refuses to surrender to all their judgments. Reading the Holocaust includes a defence of the Sonderkommandos, ‘the crematorium ravens’ as Levi called them, who worked for the Germans, who kept the ovens going and lived high on the pickings. Clendinnen will not buy this. She says that the wonder is not that some complied but that any had the power to resist. And who would dare judge those who for their loved ones or in order to gain a few months’ life did the bidding of the Nazis in a world where they had no effective choice?

To Levi they represent ‘National Socialism’s most demonic crime’; they are beyond the circle of his compassion. In fact they were sometimes clubbed into compliance by their SS overlords even though (as Clendinnen details) there was a disconcerting amount of intimacy and interaction. There is the grisly story of the football match between the SS and SK and a range of anecdotes that suggest ‘fugitive softenings’ between the SS thugs in their fancy black and these dandyish Jewish men dressed to the nines in the castoffs of the murdered dead. Nevertheless, the SS had no compunctions about killing them too, generally within a few months of their service.

The Jews were deemed to simulate humanity. Inga Clendinnen tells the story of the Polish boy who delighted the SS at one of the camps with his folk songs. They taught him marching songs and petted him but towards the end, when they had to quit the camp, they shot him in the head and left him in a pile of corpses to die. He survived and the songs can be heard in Shoah.

Clendinnen will not allow us to try out our moral calculus on the victims. She says that she is inclined to admire the Sonderkommandos for their toughness of spirit. It’s true that their German overlords did not, generally speaking, subject them to normal antisemitism but that was not what was at issue in the camps. Of the thousands of Sonderkommandos who worked at Treblinka sixty survived.

The answer to how the monstrousness of the Holocaust could be perpetrated lies with the men and women who killed. Primo Levi had a luminous hatred for them and Clendinnen says it makes this Italian Perseus avert his gaze from the monster. The surprising thing is that scholars do the same thing.

A chilling speech by Himmler is exhumed. ‘When one hundred corpses are lying side by side, when five hundred lie there or more,’ the SS leader says, ‘[we] have not suffered any damage to our inner self.’ To Clendinnen these sentiments are grounded in a coherent racialist morality. He is telling the troops that they have done righteously. There is evidence of Himmler’s distress at the killing installations and of his mild schoolmasterly manner. But he believed that every Jewish baby was a danger to the German state. At this point Clendinnen complicates her picture of Himmler by telling the story (which derives from Martin Bormann’s son) that Himmler’s mistress treated the Bormann children to the sight of a private room where the furniture was made out of human bones, where the books were bound in human skin. Frau Bormann said in horror that her husband would not allow such monstrosities in the house.

But the monster Himmler rode on the coattails of Hitler. No Hitler, no Holocaust. The Nazis were revolutionaries vertiginously intent on power. It was the invasion of Russia that led Hitler to fix on extermination but the process was incremental. Hitler was a redemptive anti-Semite from his youth; he believed in the war between Aryan and Jew, but that did not logically demand extermination. Yet Clendinnen suggests that the 300,000 Germans who were sterilised for mental or hereditary illness, the 70,000 victims of enforced euthanasia – all this by 1939 – indicate that the Final Solution may not have been such a major step.

The magic of Hitler is visible to us (removed by propaganda and culture) only from the faces of those who watched him. The way, as Albert Speer said, he seemed to invest his love on all Germans by some power of mass hypnosis. Clendinnen does not put much weight on Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, ‘the banality of evil’. What strikes her about the equable, if self-important, figure of Eichmann is how this morally opaque worldling could have felt the exhilaration of revolutionary excitement. With Rudolph Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz (who was hanged there) the language is flexible, fluent, and frightening. There is too much straightforward self-disclosure for hypocrisy despite the nominal defence that he was led astray by the golden-tongued führer. Clendinnen is disconcerted by the combination of efficiency as a manager and complete moral imperviousness.

One of the touchstone moments in Reading the Holocaust which among other things is a guide to the perplexed through the bibliographical thickets of writing about the Holocaust is the description of the work of Gitta Serenyi. Many people will have looked at her highly readable book about Albert Speer. Here Clendinnen is less intent on the ‘subtle riddling’ Speer than on Serenyi’s encounter, over a series of long interviews, with Franz Strangl, from September 1942 the Commandant of Treblinka. He escaped after the war to Brazil, was extradited in 1967 to Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1970.

Gitta Serenyi reduced him to tears by saying she simply wanted to know what he was like as a man: his friends, his family, his loves. Clendinnen characterises her as having the quality of the great interviewer, to elicit the subject’s own account and to engage with her subjects deep within their own territory.

To understand them but not excuse. Almost unbelievably in this context Serenyi’s aim was her subject’s reformation. She felt that Strangl in their last interview had given his first signs of understanding his responsibility for what he had done. He died of heart failure within twenty-four hours. Serenyi thinks the ordeal of talking about his life may have contributed to his death. As Clendinnen says, we are a long way from monsters.

If Gitta Serenyi is some kind of wise psychopomp to those who created the Final Solution, Daniel Goldhagen has wanted to implicate all the German people in what Hitler did on account of their deep-rooted anti-Semitism. Inga Clendinnen wipes the floor with him and she does so via Christopher Browning, the first historian to look in detail at Reserve Police Battalion 101, who at the end of one long day in 1941 left 1,500 Jews dead in a Polish wood.

They were ‘ordinary men’ (the phrase that gave Browning the title of his book). Their commander Major Trapp wept at his orders. There is no indication that he found murdering Jews congenial. Many of the recruits baulked at the orders, actually couldn’t shoot, vomited, copped out. Eventually, however, with new experiences and close discipline their attitudes were transformed. Some would not take part (and were not formally disciplined) but, by and large, they turned themselves into a mighty slaughtering force. Browning does not fail to make the comparison with Vietnam and My Lai in particular.

For Clendinnen Browning’s book is ‘thick description history’, and she is full of admiration for it. He admits that he could have been a killer or an evader, depending on the circumstances and Clendinnen summarises his point with the eloquence of elegy: ‘could I, in the circumstances described, in a country where I owed no affection, in time of war and subject to persistent propaganda, have been moved by loyalty and solidarity with comrades to carry out similar actions?’ And she underlines the moral. If these men were ordinary it increases the horror.

In the penultimate chapters of Reading the Holocaust on the Auschwitz SS Clendinnen presents the figure of the torturer as the one who comes, notoriously, in disguise. She emphasises the Camp as a ritual performance, a world where ideology is incarnated through the stripes and numbers and the degradation of human flesh. She talks of how Treblinka was chocolate-box like, Tyrolean in its cuteness.

All of this sneaking up on the subject sideways, these Deningesque plays of mind, are impressive though they probably represent the one part of Reading the Holocaust which does not command automatic consent.

What complicates the picture even in this Dance of Death as text in performance chapter is the latter images which function in the text like a darker, because animated and enacted, version of Himmler’s necrophilia. The Nazi who uses his dogs like a physical extension of himself with the naked women at the rim of the pit of fire, dogs and man both mercilessly excited. Or the story of the clearing of the women’s hospital, near the end. The truncheons in faces. Clendinnen asks – dramatically enough – if there will always be psychopaths to cast in these roles. If so we must be wary of allowing them self-actualisation. She also says, at this point, that although she might have made the same choice of murder as the Order Police – so far in their ordinariness from the dressed-to-kill SS – she does not believe she could have carried it out.

The last chapter is a brilliant account of representing the Holocaust. Clendinnen takes issue with Richard Rorty’s assumption that novels and films are the best way for us to understand the moral reality of others. She finds it rankling that history is pointedly excluded, but this allows her to put her finger on why the Holocaust is out of place in Plath, or The White Hotel, why it leads to ‘the trivialisation not of the events but of the writing’. This was, as it happens, the initial caveat with Demidenko before Robert Manne and co. pointed out the propaganda. For Clendinnen, ‘The matter is so potent in itself that when art seeks to command it, it is art which is rendered vacuous and drained of authority.’ The argument gets complex here and does not work to the exclusion of Paul Celan’s Todes fuge (‘Black milk at daybreak’) nor does it stop her from admiring the sheer incomparable scope of Spielberg’s representation of the clearing of the Warsaw ghettos though she says he ‘sweetens the horror’.

She hammers out the truth about this subject more formidably though, I think, than anyone who entered the lists during the Demidenko affair. With Holocaust fiction any act of dignity or defiance appears as a falsification or sentimentalisation of the general condition. The freedom of fiction involves a circumscribed place of play; and the compassion fiction arouses is also a play of compassion, a fictional response to a fiction.

We are almost back to Plato and the banishment of the poets but not quite. Clendinnen would cheerfully ban (or at any rate seal up) the passage in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister which details the death by torture of a child but she sees in Lanzmann’s nine-hour monumental documentary Shoah precisely the kind of ‘middle voice’ which Hayden White called for and which he thought was notably lacking from literary modernism in the face of the Holocaust.

She also says that history is best done in writing, in the ‘secular’ form of history which does not arrogate to itself the privileges of art. In other words as non-fictional, evidential truth-telling which can admit of scrutiny and revision. She wants a form of history writing in which the writing is both the means of vision and of comprehension. I don’t think I would know what Inga Clendinnen meant if this was not such a naked attempt to generalise the ferocity and compassion of her own practice.

She believes that humankind saw the Gorgon and the Gorgon who had petrified the Jews into objects of degradation also petrified our apprehension of the Nazis because only monsters could do this, surely. For Clendinnen seeing the Gorgon steadily enough to kill it is to do away with the comforts of myth. Neither reverence for its victims or revulsion from its perpetrators will overcome its power to paralyse. All that can be done, with whatever power of analysis and moral discrimination, with every possible attempt to thicken the description and dispel mystification, is to dwell on the past so the Gorgon is conquered by History.

Inga Clendinnen does this more truly than I would have thought possible. This is an urgent, moody, profound book about the gravest subject we can ponder. It will also light up the dark for a lot of people who would never have imagined they would want to read it.

Is it possible with such a fine book to utter a caveat? Reading the Holocaust is such a dynamised example of the history at its most essayistic and literary, it is so close to a form of intellectual detective story as self-revelation that it is to some extent implicated in its own critique of fiction (if only because its rhetoric is so energised, its form so imagined). Clendinnen is so brilliant at highlighting her own subject position against the backdrop of six million dead, she is so intent on telling us that the barelegged little girl in the photo on her road to death is forever her grand-daughter; that she does not believe she could have murdered the Jews even if she had resolved to, that she does not entirely escape from her own implications about Plath and the rest of them. The Holocaust, my part in its understanding. Reading the Holocaust is such an intensely literary book, it is so performative and so analogous to literary criticism at its most resplendent, that it can sometimes seem, however unfairly, like a text for Meryl Streep.

But that is not a judgment which can be allowed to stand. This is a brave, towering book which deserves to become famous. Of course, it is overshadowed by the horror Clendinnen attempts to illuminate, of course the Gorgon continues to petrify – her own recourse to mythology works to symbolise both the historian’s ambition and the deeply personal nature of her quest – but it is the bravest possible attempt to conquer everything that inheres in the subject matter of the Holocaust which hardens the heart and paralyses the mind.