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5 The Holocaust – a Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory Community Aleida Assmann
Introduction The Holocaust is the name for a complex of events, actions and experiences that had a global impact historically and an emphatically transnational character. Due to its radical anti-human ideology, geographic scope and bureaucratic ‘perfection’, today it stands out as the paradigmatic genocide in world consciousness. From its very beginning, the social exclusion, contraction and extermination of European Jews was associated with spatial movements. Acts such as expulsion, flight and migration into exile, as well as deportation, the concentration of victims in transit camps and their transfer to sites of exploitation and extinction, implied crossings of many national borders. The Nazi administration was also eager to ‘outsource’ their crimes and to hide them in far-off places. The many languages in the concentration camps, as Primo Levi noted, rendered these places into a ‘perpetual Babel’ (Levi 1996, 38); people from many nations were drawn into the lethal orbit of the Holocaust, which was planned and organized by the Germans and enforced and supported by many other countries. Given the transnational nature of the crime, one that not only pulled together and concentrated millions of victims in the bureaucratic machinery of death, but also unleashed a centrifugal effect of scattering the families of victims across five continents, it is to be expected that this mega-event should find its resonance in transnational memory. After the end of the Second World War, however, the opposite took place: the memory of the Holocaust was fragmented and dispersed. The embodied memory was confined to various groups of survivors and privatized within the families of the victims. It took two decades before the event was identified by name and a discourse evolved on the unprecedented magnitude of the trauma and crime. The event that had been 97
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covered up by the history of the Second World War resurfaced and after two more decades was given a place in a widening moral consciousness. In this process, terms like ‘victim’, ‘survivor’ and ‘witness’ came to designate an acknowledged moral status. Starting from the 1990s, efforts were made to transform the transitory embodied or communicative memory into a long-term cultural memory based on monuments and museums. These activities, which started on a national level in Israel (Yad Vashem, 1953/2005), the US (Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, 1993) and Germany (Holocaust memorial in Berlin, 1999/2005), were interconnected in various ways. In its mnemohistory the Holocaust, comments Enzo Traverso, has had a unique career from almost total repression to global obsession: the twentieth century, at least in the West, has retrospectively been termed the century of Auschwitz. ‘Yesterday forgotten or almost ignored as a non-event, the genocide of the Jews today covers up almost all other memories in public space’ (Traverso 2009, 33–4). In this development, the year 2000 marks the starting point of a new era. In retrospect, we may say today that with the beginning of the new millennium the Holocaust went global. It is the purpose of this chapter to study this latest stage in the transformation of Holocaust memory in detail, investigating the pragmatics of actors and activists, the institutional arenas and infrastructure of the process. In doing so, it will focus on the changing format, quality and status of this memory and attempt to provide some conceptual clarifications within a more theoretical framework.
History and memory ‘Collective traumas have no geographical or cultural limitations’ (Alexander 2002, 27). This statement by Jeffrey Alexander has particular meaning when applied to the Holocaust. In general estimation, the Holocaust is a collective trauma of universal scope and global extension (Brumlick 2004). What today has become a consensus within Western culture had no support in the first three decades after 1945. In order to better understand this dramatic shift, we have to look more closely into the mnemohistory of the Holocaust. How did the Holocaust come to hold its unique rank not only in national and European but also global consciousness? Some of the questions to be asked here are: Through which actions and steps has the Holocaust been constructed and established as a universally recognized collective trauma? What is the difference between the Holocaust as an historical memory, a transnational memory, a universal symbol, a global icon? What are the limits to the extensions of this memory?
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My first question is a simple but important one: Can there be such a thing as a global or universal memory? It could be argued that the juxtaposition of the two words ‘universal’ and ‘memory’ is a contradictio in adjecto. For all we know, memories are tied to identities, they support the self-image of a group and are thus necessarily of a particular and distinctive nature. Collective memories necessarily have their limits and boundaries; to dissolve these boundaries is to dissolve the identity together with the memory. This point was made earlier by Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s when he investigated the dynamics of social memory. To highlight the specific qualities of collective memory, he introduced historiography as a negative foil (Halbwachs 1992). Halbwachs described histor(iograph)y as the inclusive memory of humanity, from which he set off collective memories that are embodied by specific groups and therefore always partial and particular. Sixty years after Halbwachs, the French historian Pierre Nora has reinforced the same dichotomy: Memory and history, far from being synonymous, are thus in many respects opposed. … Memory wells up from groups it welds together, which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs observed, that there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple yet specific; collective and plural yet individual. By contrast, history belongs to everyone and to no one and therefore has a universal vocation. (Nora 1996, 3) Given the premise that history is universal and memory particular, what can be the meaning of a ‘global’ or ‘universal memory’? Globalization is usually defined as the extension of human action and communication across geographical, economic, political or cultural borders. This process of extension is not only an intentional and directional one, but also one of emergence and spill-over via the channels of mass media and the Internet. In which way can the terms history and memory, universalization and globalization be reconciled?
The Holocaust as a European historical memory As an historic event, the Holocaust began in Nazi Germany with the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 and was carried into almost all regions of Europe by the SS and the German occupation army. Europe is today littered with the sites of the unprecedented genocide of European Jews that abruptly crushed and extinguished Jewish life and culture.
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For this reason, Dan Diner has rightly claimed that the murder of six million European Jews is the paradigmatic European memory, providing the different member states of the EU with the bond of a shared history and an ethical commitment for the future to remember and confront this dark episode in their history and to respect human dignity and protect human rights. Diner wrote: ‘Primarily, Auschwitz contaminates the memory of Jews and Germans. But also other European memories have been affected by the orbit of this event’ (Diner 2007, 39). For this reason, he argued, the Holocaust is the paradigmatic ‘lieu de mémoire’ of Europe and any cultural construction of European identity has to start from this point. When we think of the Holocaust as a ‘historical memory’, we presuppose some experiential link between the memory and the event. There are four groups that have a claim to such a historical memory: – Israel as the nation of the victims and diasporic Jewish communities in many parts of the world – Germany as the nation of the perpetrators – European nations linked to the historical sites of the genocide – The allies as the nations of the rescuers In Europe, the historical site of the German genocide of the Jews, Holocaust memory has a different quality and resonance than it has for instance in the US, where it is far removed from its local contexts. In Europe, this memory is anything but abstract and removed, but rather deeply entrenched in local and national history. While the Second World War had global extensions through the entering of countries like the US and Japan, the Holocaust had a clearly European extension. The memory of the Holocaust is embedded in the history of the Second World War, which all the nations of Europe experienced but which each nation experienced differently. In Europe, therefore, a unified transnational memory runs up against a variety of national memory constructions, constellations and collisions (Flacke 2004). Ignoring these historical levels of memory or painting them with too broad a brush means running the risk of ending up with a rather abstract memory construct. Volkhard Knigge, for instance, director of the Weimar and Buchenwald memorial sites, warned against the standardization of historical narratives and the ‘naïve importation of concepts, such as that of “Holocaust Education”’ (Knigge and Frei 2002, Afterword). Reinhart Koselleck feared that within the growing memory community of the Holocaust, the Germans would
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lose an essential part of their history together with their sense of national responsibility: ‘By no means may we hide behind victim groups, specifically the Jews, as if by doing so we were entitled to a Holocaust memorial as other nations on the globe’ (Koselleck 2002, 28). In a similar vein, Wolf Kaiser, director of the House of the Wannsee conference, has emphasized that an adequate confrontation and responsible dealing with the Holocaust must spring from the individual countries themselves: ‘To impose a unified model from the outside will be ineffective and can even be counter-productive. The aim must be to integrate the history of the holocaust into the respective national historical narrative’ (Kaiser 2007, 351). Historians and pedagogues therefore argue that instead of imposing in Europe a unified transnational memory of the Holocaust, what is needed is a constellation of different self-critical national memories reflecting the multi-perspectival quality of the Holocaust as an exemplary case of entangled history. In spite of such reflections that argue for historical diversity and a national framing of Holocaust memory, international measures have been taken to transcend the national level by reshaping and standardizing this memory in terms of a common historical reference. In the next section, we will retrace some of the steps along which a unified transnational memory of the Holocaust has been constructed.
The Holocaust as a transnational memory – the network of the ITF An important date in the creation of a long-term memory of the Holocaust is 7 May 1998. On this day, in Stockholm, Prime Minister Göran Persson invited the US president and the British prime minister to a ‘Meeting on the Holocaust’ attended by diplomats and historians of the Holocaust who were engaged in the restitution process. The following year, ‘The International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research’ (ITF) was founded in Washington, with the further participation of Germany and Israel. It was the aim of the Swedish prime minister to transform his national memorial activities into a transnational policy. Yehuda Bauer was involved in the project as an expert advisor. Together with prominent experts, he created a governmental network of action to develop a programme for Holocaust education in various countries and to root its lessons in the respective societies. In 1999, Stuart Eizenstat, another ITF expert, commented on the extraordinary character of the event: ‘For the first time, heads of
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government agreed to cooperate directly with other countries, through diplomatic and other channels, to strengthen Holocaust education efforts on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond’ (Kroh 2008, 107). To further coordinate these activities, Persson asked the countries to introduce a common Holocaust memorial day. On 27 January 2000, the ITF was reconfigured in Stockholm on a new and larger scale. On this occasion, Persson invited representatives of 16 nations (among them 13 present and future members of the European Union) to a Stockholm forum to discuss and define a common framework for commemorating and teaching the Holocaust. In the first year of the new millennium and 55 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, there was agreement that the murder of six million European Jews should become a common memory and, in turn, that this memory should inform the values of European civil society and protect the rights of minorities. The last article of the Stockholm Declaration states: It is appropriate that this, the first major international conference of the new millennium, declares its commitment to plant the seeds of a better future amidst the soil of a bitter past. We empathize with the victims’ suffering and draw inspiration from their struggle. Our commitment must be to remember the victims who perished, respect the survivors still with us, and reaffirm humanity’s common aspiration for mutual understanding and justice. (Taskforce) The enlarged ITF had a twofold aim: 1. To carry the memory of the Holocaust across the threshold of the new millennium and to transform it into a long-term cultural memory at the moment when the communicative memory of survivor-witnesses was fading away. 2. To carry the memory of the Holocaust across European borders by creating a supranational memory community with an extended infrastructure of social institutions, finances and cooperative networks. What had started in Stockholm and Washington was brought back to Europe. On 27 January 2005, the European Parliament in Brussels declared the day of the liberation of Auschwitz as a European day of commemoration, and passed a resolution against anti-Semitism in Europe (Eurlex). With this declaration, participation in the Holocaust community of
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memory became part of the entry ticket into the EU. Today, the ITF is an non-governmental organization (NGO) that comprises 27 states. Although most of its member states are located within the geographic area of Europe, it also transcends Europe, as it includes the states of Israel, the US and Argentina. It may become even more trans-European in the future. In January 2005, Kofi Annan celebrated for the first time a Holocaust remembrance day in the United Nations. According to the ITF’s statutes, membership in this transnational memory community is open to all countries of the United Nations.1 One of the effects of this growing transnational community is its de-territorialization. Due to its impact in the mass media and on education, some Americans now think of the Holocaust as ‘the worst event in American history’.2 The American Country Report presented to the ITF stated that the Holocaust is taught in the US ‘as part of US history’.3 In this perspective, European history is largely shaped by American perspective and standards. Such an ‘Americanization’ of the Holocaust tends to disregard the local sites and contexts, rendering the events more and more abstract. In Europe, the scene of the crime, this memory does not depend solely on documents and relics preserved in museums and archives and commemorated in monuments, but is anchored in cities, landscapes, villages, local institutions, firms and families. Within the ITF’s general project to create an inclusive memory community with shared social values, standardized educational tools and a common political agenda, much of the local specificity of the memory is elided. However desirable a shared memory may be, in Europe, the historical memory of variegated European experiences and perspectives is in danger of being covered over by a unified and locally disconnected memory. Public discourses and media representations of course do not automatically transform a personal and social memory into a long-term national and supranational memory. It also takes political decisions, bureaucratic institutions, organizational networks and appropriate funding (Leggewie and Meyer 2005). Towards the end of the twentieth century, in a growing number of countries the individually embodied memory of Holocaust survivors had been socially acknowledged and culturally supported by media representations, scientific research, monuments, museums, memorial sites and commemoration dates. Around 2000, a new chapter in the mnemohistory of the Holocaust started with the initiative of the ITF, which created an infrastructure for a supranational memory community with an extended network, standard education and coordinated political agenda.
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The structure of this supranational memory may be illustrated by some of the questions listed in the reports of the member states: Nr. 6: How many hours are allocated to teaching and learning about the Holocaust in schools? Nr. 9: Has your country instituted a national Holocaust Memorial Day? If so, in which ways is this day marked and commemorated? Nr. 10: Has your country established a national Holocaust memorial and/or museum? Nr. 12: What are the three major textbooks used in teaching the Holocaust in your country? How many pages do your school textbooks allocate to the Holocaust? While questions like numbers 6 or 12 focus on school textbooks and the aspect of learning within the system of education, questions like numbers 9 and 10 focus on more ritualistic aspects of commemoration pertaining to the state. In the wake of the EU Resolution on Remembrance of the Holocaust, Anti-Semitism and Racism, many European countries adopted 27 January as a European commemoration day. (It was first introduced in Germany in 1996, followed by Denmark in 2003 and Luxembourg in 2007.) The new unifying date, however, has not totally replaced different national commemorative practices: France, for instance, observes various dates, including 16 and 17 July to commemorate the ‘Vélodrome d’Hiver raffle’ and honouring of the ‘Brave among the Nation’. While European memory is more and more coordinated around 27 January, Israel and the large Jewish communities in the US continue to observe Yom ha Shoah in May on the 27th day of Nissan as Holocaust Remembrance Day. The last question in the list addresses possible problems encountered in the Holocaust pedagogy: Nr. 15: What are the three major obstacles to teaching and learning about the Holocaust in your country? Besides more contingent problems such as lack of time for teaching and lack of expertise of teachers, three issues are mentioned: The problem of complexity or the difficulty to combine an emotional with the cognitive approach: Holocaust education leaves the students morally outraged at Nazism, but they are unable to explain Hitler. Condemning Auschwitz is not enough to understand Auschwitz. (Holocaust Education Report, Switzerland). The multicultural problem: In the multicultural classroom, into which students bring more and more of their different family backgrounds and
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their religious and cultural socializations, European history is less and less accepted as a common heritage. ‘A growing part of Muslim students (especially in the suburbs) rejects classes specifically on the Jews and the Holocaust’ (Fechler et al. 2000). The gap between past and present: For students, new genocides, terrorism and other current events compete with the Holocaust, leading to ‘Holocaust fatigue’. In opening up the memory of the Holocaust to the present, students and teachers may be confronted with conflicts in assessing the present situation in the Middle East in the light of this past. In the late 1990s, the memory of the Holocaust returned with pressing urgency. It was a period of heated debates about the material history of the Holocaust revolving around stolen gold, stolen works of art, Swiss banks, forced labour and legal claims to restitution. More than half-acentury after the Holocaust, it was the last possibility for the survivors to file their claims for material restitution and compensation. While these practices were part of a last-minute crusade for justice, bringing back very specific historical memories concerning individual names and cases, important steps were taken at the same time to transform the transitory memory of the witnesses into a lasting memory. While Vergangenheitsbewältigung (confronting, coming to terms with the past) – based on historians’ commissions and media debates in countries such as France (Vichy), Switzerland (banks and borders) and Poland (Jedwabne) – ushered in a new wave of historical recollection in many European countries between 1995 and 2005, and in so doing corrected the all too smooth contours of national myths, institutional steps were taken simultaneously to overwrite these individual historical memories with a unified transnational effort towards Vergangenheitsbewahrung (a securing, sacralizing and perpetuating of the past). It has been speculated that this politics of memory involves a specific management of thematization and de-thematization in which these two developments countered and partly neutralized each other. To engage actively in the memory community of the Holocaust raises the moral profile of a nation in an international context, but it also allows the nation to evade awkward themes concerning its own past: genocide of the native population, slavery and nuclear warfare in the US, collaboration with the Nazis or the colonial history in various European countries (Kroh 2008, 106–7; Zuroff 2002 and Zürn 2002, 134–215).
The Holocaust as a universal norm Dan Diner, who introduced the influential concept of Zivilisationsbruch (rupture of civilization) into historical discourse and has reflected on
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the epistemological status of the Holocaust, has described it as both a universal and particular event: ‘This universal crime was perpetrated against humanity in the medium of the extinction of a particular group, namely the Jews’ (Diner 2007, 37). In their book on globalization and the Holocaust, which appeared in the year of the Stockholm conference, the sociologists Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider take a different perspective. They argue for the universality of the Holocaust not in terms of epistemology but in terms of media dissemination. For them, the Holocaust is unique in providing a universal, global and cosmopolitan memory (they use all three of these adjectives) (Levy and Sznaider 2001). Their study is based on iconic mediatized memories of the Holocaust that have spilled over national boundaries and found a worldwide resonance, such as the diary of Anne Frank, the Eichmann trial or the American TV series Holocaust. Their focus is on television, cinema and popular culture as powerful agents of globalization, carrying the message of the Holocaust into all corners of the world. As sociologists, the authors place Holocaust memory in the context of the era of ‘Second Modernity’. According to Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, second modernity is an evolution from first modernity. While the era of first modernity was defined by nations, second modernity is defined by a global society (Weltgesellschaft) which sets individuals free from the ‘container of the nation state’ to move and choose freely between countries and loyalties. According to Levy and Sznaider, the memory of the Holocaust can provide this global society with an appropriate world ethos: ‘In a world of perplexed and displaced humanity in search of moral clarity in the midst of insecurities, the holocaust offers a stable norm and a torch’ (Levy and Sznaider 2001, 34). After memory has left the national containers and become de-territorialized with the help of mass media, the cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust can guarantee human rights and offer a moral foundation for future humanity. They argue that the negative memory of Jewish suffering and brutal extinction of life and culture can serve as a moral norm that provides the necessary cohesion for the global society of the future. Despite their different theoretical assumptions, Levy and Sznaider follow Diner’s argument that the Holocaust is particular and universal. They describe it as the paradigmatic collective trauma that can be embraced by other victim groups who are able ‘to recognize their own suffering in the fate of Jewish victims’ (Levy and Sznaider 2001, 56). Their hope was that a cosmopolitan Holocaust memory could act as ‘the model of national self-criticism, spreading human rights as the legitimizing principle of global society and helping to affirm difference’
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(Levy and Sznaider 2001, 232). The authors’ study presents a rather optimistic view of media as the motor of both globalization and universalization, ushering in a new world ethos.4 Their book appeared at the threshold of the new millennium. Shortly afterwards, another millennial event cast a dark shadow over their cosmopolitan vision of a unified global future: 11 September 2001. Not long after, Jeffrey Alexander published an essay on the social construction of Holocaust memory in the light of moral universals (Alexander 2002/2004). In 2000, the Declaration of Stockholm had announced: ‘The unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning’ (Holocaustforum). What has frequently been affirmed and repeated in the form of official declarations, Alexander has made the special focus and object of his study. His methodology is that of a radical social constructivist. His concept of ‘cultural trauma’ distinguishes between historical and psychological trauma on the one hand and ‘cultural trauma’ on the other. He even discards the ontic level of the historical and psychological trauma as altogether irrelevant, privileging exclusively the cultural construction process of the trauma that gives it the shape of a social and political reality.5 Alexander analyses with admirable precision the cultural construction of universals on various levels. Nor does he overlook the fact that while the memory of the Holocaust is becoming more and more central in Western consciousness, we must not oversee and miscalculate the limits of this extension. He is aware that there are countries in which other historical experiences form a common reference and other traumas cast their long shadows on the memory of succeeding generations. The memory of the Holocaust, writes Alexander, is for instance ‘much more pronounced in Western Europe and North America than in Latin America’. And he continues: In Hindu, Buddhist, Confusion [sic], Islamic, African, and still Communist regions and regimes, reference to the ‘holocaust’, when made at all, is by literary and intellectual elites with markedly atypical levels of participation in the global discourse dominated by the United States and Western Europe. Of course, non-Western regions and nations have their own identity-defining trauma dramas. What is unclear is the degree to which the cultural work that constructs these traumas, and responds to them, reaches beyond issues of national identity and sovereignty to the universalizing, supra-national ethical imperatives increasingly associated with the ‘lessons of post-Holocaust morality’ in the West. (Alexander 2004, 261)
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Alexander identifies various national and cultural borders where the extension of Holocaust memory meets with obstacles. Among them are first and foremost ‘communist regions and regimes’. We may add that it is indeed striking that Russia is not a member of the memory community of the ITF, being one of the prime historical agents and the heroic liberator of Auschwitz. Paradoxically, the new European commemoration day which focuses on the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army has no place in Russian memory. The Russians continue to celebrate 9 May as the victorious ending of their ‘great patriotic war’. They commemorate the honour of Russian soldiers and the nation’s suffering, but they do not include in this memory the suffering and mass murder of European Jewry and thus remain outside the growing memory community. There are other countries that lie outside the historic constellation of the Holocaust. China and Japan are preoccupied with their own memories of defeat and victimhood; India and Pakistan commemorate the partition; the descendants of African tribes who were deported into colonial slavery commemorate the Middle Passage; and former colonial powers, such as Australia or Canada, commemorate the extinction of their Indigenous populations. These countries are the inheritors of their own historic traumas and burdens. This corroborates Halbwachs’ view that collective memory is by definition particular and limited, because it is based on experience and cannot be stretched beyond certain bounds to become all-inclusive. When comparing non-Western historic traumas, Alexander discovers a difference in quality. He argues that none of the other traumas has been sufficiently culturally elaborated to transcend its national context and to express a universal lesson for the rest of the world. For him, the Holocaust, which has been transformed into a universal lesson, is the only trauma with a capacity for globalization.6 And he goes on to ask the following question: ‘Can countries or civilizations that do not acknowledge the Holocaust develop universalistic political moralities? Obviously, non-Western nations cannot “remember” the Holocaust, but, in the context of cultural globalization, they certainly have become gradually aware of its symbolic meaning and social significance’ (Alexander 2004, 262). Alexander here affirms the uniqueness and sacredness of the Holocaust as a touchstone of universal moral maturity. Nations that do not embrace the Holocaust are proving that they cannot reach this higher level. This notion of universalist morality seems to apply Kohlberg’s schema of psychological moral progress to whole cultures. Alexander’s use of the Holocaust as a yardstick for moral ranking is also
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reminiscent of Karl Jaspers’ theory of the axial age (see Chapter 6 by Jan Assmann in this volume). Jaspers applied this term to a historical period around 500 BC in which he discovered within various cultures an independent and synchronous breakthrough to a higher moral and cognitive level, aspiring towards transcendence and individualism. Without referring to Jaspers’ terminology, Alexander constructs the Holocaust as a second ‘axial age’ in which it becomes manifest that some nations and cultures have leapt forward while others have remained stagnant on a lower level of morality.7 The universal norm of human rights itself has a particular cultural history; it dates back to Western enlightenment philosophers such as Locke and Kant. The new universal norm of ‘crime against humanity’ also has a particular history. It was created in 1945 as a direct consequence of the experience of the Holocaust. The question is whether non-Western nations have to enter the realm of universalist morals through the needle’s eye of the Holocaust or whether there are multiple trajectories that can lead to the same level of moral standards?
The Holocaust as a global icon ‘History breaks down into images, not stories’ (Benjamin 1999, 67). This phrase from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project is appropriate for introducing the last manifestation of Holocaust memory as a global icon. In this form, the global icon clearly differs from the ‘historical memory’ and the ‘moral norm’; it is an ultimate reduction and condensation of the memory that, in spite of its fragmentation, nevertheless retains something of its affective quality for which it is used and re-mediated in ever-new contexts. The icon expresses the truth about the Holocaust in its most abridged and condensed form. Reduction can imply a process of evacuation and trivialization of historical meaning but it can also stand for condensation and imply an intensification of the image, charging it with extraordinary gravitas. Such an icon is an image that presents the event in its ‘essence’. While global icons travel freely across national and cultural borders independent from the warrant of institutional infrastructure and formal membership, they are by no means self-evident images but symbolic constructs that are fraught with the weight of cultural elaboration. The cultural construction of a symbol involves various steps and phases. De-contextualization The Holocaust as a symbol emerged in the discourses of the 1980s in which the historic events were increasingly de-contextualized from its historical embeddedness and re-framed in new metaphysical and
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universal discourses. What had been treated as a footnote to the Second World War after 1945 now became a globally historical event, a rupture of civilization, the marker of a new epoch in the history of humanity, a ‘sacred-evil’ ‘of such enormity and horror that it had to be radically set apart from the world and all of its other traumatizing events’. The aim or effect of these discourses was to place this event out of reach, to render it inexplicable and mysterious (Alexander 2004, 222). Symbolic extension In its symbolic reconstruction, the Holocaust came to represent inhumanity in general and became a moral norm for human action. The ample use of ‘holocaust as metaphor’ confirms its status as a universal moral norm (Bayer 2008). The symbol of radical evil, as Alexander has emphasized, cannot be easily contained; it ‘overflows with badness’. Evil ‘becomes labile and liquid; it drips and seeps, ruining everything it touches. Under the sign of the tragic narrative, the Holocaust became engorged, and its seepage polluted everything with which it came into contact’ (Alexander 2004, 243). As a consequence of this narrative and its polluting effect, German guilt, for instance, could no longer be narrowly confined to individual perpetrators; it spilled over to taint and stigmatize the whole nation.8 Emotional identification Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, the nonJewish populations of European and Western countries that were confronted with the Holocaust have moved from distance and indifference to empathy and emotional identification. This was largely enhanced through media presentations and the staging of exhibitions in museums. Through the translation of the events into the format of a personal story of historical figures such as Anne Frank or fictional characters such as the Weiss family in the TV series Holocaust, attention could be focused, imagination animated and empathy kindled. Identification, the basic form of contact developed in the dramatization of stories in films, television shows and video testimonies, is today also applied in the choreography of museum exhibits. These no longer appeal solely to the cognitive function of the visitors but place more and more emphasis on the possibility to re-experience historical events from within. Analogy The Holocaust is used as a rhetorical trope in political debates to legitimize action and to argue for the intervention/non-intervention into
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other genocides and other cases of immoral action. In Germany, the master trope of ‘Auschwitz’ has been invoked as a moral standard (or moral club) to argue both for and against intervention into wars. Analogizing is often highly problematic as more often than not it is used indiscriminately to create equations between two highly unequal events, such as, for instance, the killing of Jews and abortion practices. Analogies are also used in a competitive (and even sometimes spiteful) spirit to diminish the importance of the Holocaust and to elevate the importance of one’s own trauma. German author and historian Jörg Friedrich, writing on the area bombings of Dresden, described the cellars of the houses as ‘gas chambers’ and the pilots of the air raids as ‘Einsatzgruppen’ (Friedrich 2002). Model In the global media age where attention has become the currency of a new economy, the prestigious symbol of the Holocaust is used as a universal lever to draw attention to other marginalized collective memories. Today, it is increasingly invoked as a model to articulate, analyse and legitimate other traumatic memories around the globe. The reference to the Holocaust need not necessarily be invoked in a spirit of competitive victimhood, but rather with the aim to establish a claim for moral authority, recognition and restitution for historical traumas that have as yet received no or little attention. The African-American writer Toni Morrison, for instance, dedicated her book Beloved to the ‘Sixty Million and more’. In this case, the reference is used not to diminish the importance of the Holocaust, but to alert the attention of Americans to their domestic history and pave the way for the recognition of the less acknowledged trauma of slavery (Morrison 1987). Speaking of cultural elaboration and media iconization, there is a huge difference between traumas, which, like the Holocaust, have met with maximum attention, while others have been passed over and are forgotten. They have neither constructed compelling, publicly available narratives of collective suffering nor found carrier groups ‘with the resources, authority, or interpretive competence to powerfully disseminate these trauma claims’ (Alexander 2002, 27). They have, in other words, not entered the ‘trauma process’ which Jeffrey Alexander describes in admirable detail as a process of social and cultural construction. Only a small part of historical traumas have become recognized as such and are publicly acknowledged. The Nanking massacre and rape perpetrated by the Japanese on their Chinese neighbours, for instance, has been termed ‘the forgotten Holocaust of World War II’ (Alexander 2002, 26). Other‚
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‘forgotten holocausts’ of World War II are the genocide of the gypsies and the victims of euthanasia.
Conclusion The quality and extension of the memory of the Holocaust will differ greatly, depending on whether it is framed as a historical trauma, as part of a political agenda, as a cosmopolitan reference, a universal norm or a global icon. In relation to the respective status of this memory, the commemorating community will be smaller or larger; limited or open. As an historical trauma, this memory is anchored in historic events that bind together perpetrators and victims, resistors and collaborators, bystanders and rescuers. Its memory community is made up of the historical agents, victims and bystanders that were involved in the event along with those who suffered from its aftermath and who carry specific responsibility for the crimes and their consequences. Europe is a memorial landscape documenting the interconnected geography of Nazi violence. The historical memory of the Holocaust is inseparably embedded within the history and memory of the Second World War. For many of its historic sites is true what was publicly claimed for the so-called ‘Topography of Terror’, an archaeological site relating to the bureaucracy and torture practices of Nazi perpetrators in Berlin, which was defined officially as ‘not only a place of Berlin, nor only of German, but rather of European history. Such a place should not be handled simply in the context of the tasks of local politics, but rather must have the rank of an international institution.’9 The historical memory anchored in these sites of perpetration, however, does not travel beyond these geographic and experiential borders; it primarily concerns and is limited to the countries and persons that in one way or another were affected by, linked to and involved in the event. The International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research network has given the memory of the Holocaust the format of a standardized transnational memory with a specific political agenda. In this form, it not only becomes accessible to nations that have no share in its history, but it also has the effect of homogenizing the memory of those countries that were actually involved. In spite of its self-description as an NGO, the full package of ITF membership conditions entails practical commitments at national level, including top-down regulations for Holocaust school education, museums and commemoration days. This memory is extended across borders via formalized admission criteria and obligations enforcing the institutionalization of the Holocaust
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within national cultures. At present, the ITF faces two problems: one is a growing rift between the official memorial agenda and unofficial (be they vernacular or counter-) versions of history that remain outside this focus. Critics have argued for an irreducible plurality of historical perspectives and warned that these differences must not be covered up by a unified ‘Americanization’ of the Holocaust.10 The other problem concerns the ‘hegemonic effect’ inscribed into the political agenda and ‘legitimation profile’ of this transnational memory community (Tobler 2002, 271). Olick emphasizes that ‘it is not just new constellations of interests that produce new images of the past, but new images of the past that allow new power positions’ (Olick 1998, 550). Although this memory has transcended the level of nations and even that of the EU, it is not necessarily on its way towards becoming an all-encompassing global memory.11 From the outside, the reference to the Holocaust is often perceived as a hegemonic instrument to export Western values and to expand the range of Western influence. The Western claim to a universal definition of history either meets with indifference or leads to a war of symbols in which political claims and cultural values clash in the global arena. One of these symbolic counteractions was Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s anti-Holocaust conference on 11/12 December 2006 in Tehran, to which he invited representatives of 30 countries. His aim was to build a counter-alliance of (mainly Arab) countries to defile Western values, defy political claims and aggressively mark the limits of the memory community of the Holocaust. Not only in the form of a transnational political alliance but even more radically in the shape of a universal norm, the memory of the Holocaust is able to spill over the range of those countries that are historically anchored in this event. In this form of cultural elaboration, the memory transcends the quality of an historic experience and acquires that of a secular norm. This norm is based on a moral lesson, which is distilled from the Holocaust; it implies heightened vigilance against renewed impulses of anti-Semitism together with the protection of human dignity and the enforcing of human rights for endangered minorities. Through its link to universal human rights, the memory community of the trauma of the Holocaust can be globally extended. The question remains, however, whether this universal norm can only be accessed via the exemplary history of the Holocaust or whether other historic traumas can also serve to back these moral commitments and values. If the universal symbol is disconnected from its historical content, it turns into a global icon that travels easily without impediments along the informal channels of global communication. In the format of canonical
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images, this de-contextualized historical reference is circulated, cited, indirectly invoked and understood all over the world. The carriers of global icons are not the teaching institutions but the mass media. Films, print media, television and the Internet are powerful channels for the multiplication, dissemination and communication of these images. In clear distinction from the historical memory and the universal norm of the Holocaust, this circulation has an informal quality and takes place largely outside organized institutions and state-controlled channels of communication.12 The reference to the Holocaust in the shape of a global icon and cultural symbol is easily disseminated around the world and used for all kinds of purposes. In this function, it has become a means to promote one’s own political aims and values. ‘As the process of universalization of the holocaust has emptied the symbol of its particular historical meaning, it can be used to legitimate anything including its opposite’ (Marchart et al. 2003, 332). As a universal reference and a global icon, it is understood in countries all over the world. Through representations such as images, films, books, events and discourses, the Holocaust has spread to become a universal symbol with a global resonance. Through the career of its worldwide acknowledgement and its status as a supertrauma of maximum prestige, the Holocaust has also become the paradigm against which other historic traumas are framed. Representations of the Holocaust in museums and monuments have become a model and source for the representation of other historical traumas. References to the Holocaust are increasingly being used to call attention to other traumas and atrocities. In this metaphoric extension, the Holocaust has become a free-floating signifier that is readily associated with all kinds of manifestations of moral evil, and which today can invariably be applied to any pain, destruction, trauma or disaster (such as in ‘bombing holocaust’, ‘nuclear holocaust’ and so on). On this level, the Holocaust has indeed gone global. This does not mean, however, that this de-contextualized and de-territorialized reference is invoked as a moral norm to enforce human rights. More often than not, it is used to legitimate one’s own actions and to support one’s own claims for moral authority, recognition and restitution.
Notes 1 The procedure for membership is described in the institution’s statutes. 2 Oral information by Anson Rabinbach. See also Flanzbaum (1999) and Novick (1999).
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3 ‘Given the belief in a standard-based education that now prevails in the United States, the Holocaust is taught as part of U.S. history. Again, education in the United States is a state-not federal-responsibility. Hence, in some schools the Holocaust may be covered in courses on world history or world cultures’ (Holocaust Education Report, United States). 4 The authors hoped that the link of solidarity created by a shared memory of the Holocaust can bring even Israelis and Palestinians closer together, because both can affirm their own suffering by recognizing that of the other (Levy and Sznaider 2001, 231). Uhl criticizes their depoliticized view of memory construction and their concept of universalization which leads to emptying out the event of its historical content. For her, universalization, semantic vacuity and relativization enter into a problematic constellation (Marchart et al. 2003, 332). 5 A caricature version of this constructivist methodology is condensed in the statement: ‘I can make a cultural trauma out of anything’ (Oral comment by Ron Eyerman). 6 Alexander discusses the universalist reconfiguration of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as human tragedies within a narrative of ‘what could happen after America lost control over the Holocaust story’ (Alexander 2004, 239). He thereby signals that the elaboration of ‘cultural trauma dramas’, as he calls them, takes place within a competitive field of struggle for moral prestige. 7 Alexander indeed once refers to Jaspers’ concept when he emphasizes that the construction of the category of absolute evil ‘has been an essential feature of all human societies, but especially important’ in axial age civilizations (Alexander 2004, 202). 8 This presents an interesting shift from the earlier concept of ‘collective guilt’ as embraced or rejected by the Germans on the one hand and, on the other, the deeply anchored stigmatization of the Germans as a nation of perpetrators in popular culture that intentionally blurs the difference between historical events and the contemporary situation. Alexander discusses this phenomenon under the heading ‘enlarging the circle of perpetrators’. 9 Official document of the state assembly in Berlin 2004, cited by Jordan (2006, 50). 10 ‘The history of the 20th century takes on a different colour, depending on whether it is seen from a Western, Eastern or postcolonial perspective. The historical memories differ accordingly. Considering this plurality of memories it would be illusory if not highly problematic to impose a universalist approach’ (Traverso 2009, 38). 11 Sociologists of a mediatized transnational public sphere speak of different media arenas and reciprocal – we may add, polemical – structures of resonance in a transnational space of mutual observation. 12 In polemicizing within the intellectual framework of ‘second modernity’ against the ‘container of the nation state’, Levy and Sznaider (2001) overlook the important function of mediation and infrastucture supplied by the state in the establishment of moral universals. The negative concept of the nation state is understandable from the point of view of 12 years of German history, but it is obviously too narrow a view to equate, as is often done, the concept of the nation with an aggressive and exclusionary ethnic state.
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