The Sociological Implications of Elie Wiesel’s Night

Racial and ethnic groups can relate to one another in a wide variety of ways, ranging from friendships and intermarriages to the killing of those from particular minority groups, from behaviours that require mutual approval to behaviours imposed by the dominant group. Nazi Germany’s extermination of six million European Jews and other “undesirable” people during World War II is a commonly known example of the systematic killing, genocide. Elie Wiesel’s novel “Night” was written based on his horrible experience in the death camp during the Holocaust. The boy named Eliezer was a devout Jewish in a Hasidic community where he lived with his observant religious family before the dreadful reality of World War II reached them. Wiesel’s book, then, must be read as an autobiography of a Jewish man’s appalling journey through that broken period. Consequently, it is up to the reader to make what he/she will of the work and to derive its sociological significance. It is the purpose of this paper, then, to attempt to arrive at an understanding of the incomprehensible, genocide. This paper will argue that Night, despite its brevity and surprising lack of theory, substantiates the sociological preconditions of genocide: a state bureaucracy with the technological means for genocide, the state’s ability to deliver a massive wave of dehumanizing propaganda, and the manipulation of extreme nationalist ideology.

It is tempting to search Night for theories and explanations, but one is likely to find this to be enormously difficult. Wiesel’s book, being a memoir, has a sense of urgency about it, and that sense of urgency stems form a seemingly desperate desire to tell, to narrate, and, of course, to remember. If Wiesel offers any larger “theory,” it is concerned with god, religion, and existentialism, which he touches upon repeatedly with Moshe the Beadle: “My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man (as cited in Wiesel, 2006).” This is a...