Holocaust Intersections in 21st-Century Europe
edited by Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
Issue n. 10, Dicember 2016
Editors
Guri Schwarz (Università di Pisa, editor in chief), Elissa Bemporad (Queens College of the City University of New York), Tullia
Catalan (Università di Trieste), Cristiana Facchini (Alma Mater, Università di Bologna), Gadi Luzzatto Voghera (Fondazione
CDEC), Michele Sarfatti (Fondazione CDEC), Marcella Simoni (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia), Ulrich Wyrwa (Zentrum für
Antisemitismusforschung, Berlin).
Editorial Assistants
Laura Brazzo (Fondazione CDEC)
Sara Airoldi (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Matteo Perissinotto (Università di Trieste)
Book Review Editor
Dario Miccoli (Università Cà Foscari, Venezia)
Editorial Advisory Board
Ruth Ben Ghiat (New York University), Paolo Luca Bernardini (Università dell’Insubria), Dominique Bourel (Université de la
Sorbonne, Paris), Michael Brenner (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München), Enzo Campelli (Università La Sapienza di Roma),
Francesco Cassata (Università di Genova), David Cesarani z.l. (Royal Holloway College, London), Marco Cuzzi (Università degli Studi
di Milano), Roberto Della Rocca (DEC, Roma), Lois Dubin (Smith College, Northampton), Jacques Ehrenfreund (Université de
Lausanne), Katherine E. Fleming (New York University), Anna Foa (Università La Sapienza di Roma), Ada Gigli Marchetti (Università
degli Studi di Milano), François Guesnet (University College London), Alessandro Guetta (INALCO, Paris), Stefano Jesurum (Corriere
della Sera, Milano), András Kovács (Central European University, Budapest), Fabio Levi (Università degli Studi di Torino), Simon
Levis Sullam (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia), Germano Maifreda (Università degli Studi di Milano), Renato Mannheimer (ISPO,
Milano), Giovanni Miccoli (Università degli Studi di Trieste), Dan Michman (Yad Vashem, Jerusalem), Michael Miller (Central
European University, Budapest), Alessandra Minerbi (Fondazione CDEC Milano), Liliana Picciotto (Fondazione CDEC, Milano),
Micaela Procaccia (MIBAC, Roma), Marcella Ravenna (Università di Ferrara), Milena Santerini (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore,
Milano), Perrine Simon-Nahum (EHESS, Paris), Francesca Sofia (Università Alma Mater di Bologna), David Sorkin (Yale), Emanuela
Trevisan Semi (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia), Christian Wiese (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main).
QUEST. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History
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Cover image credit: Cover (detail) of Zoran Penevski’s novel “Less Important Crimes” (2005). Courtesy of Zoran Penevski.
QUEST N. 10
Contents
FOCUS
Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
Holocaust Intersections in 21st-Century Europe:
An Introduction
p. V
Larissa Allwork
Interrogating Europe’s Voids of Memory:
Trauma Theory and Holocaust Remembrance
between the National and the Transnational
p. 1
Kara Critchell
Remembering and Forgetting:
The Holocaust in 21st Century Britain
p. 23
Derek Duncan
“Il clandestino è l'ebreo di oggi”:
Imprints of the Shoah on Migration to Italy
p. 60
Luca Peretti
“La nostra fratellanza nel dolore”:
The Jewish Community of Rome and
the ‘Other’ Genocides
p. 89
Stijn Vervaet
Between Local and Global Politics of Memory:
Transnational Dimensions of Holocaust Remembrance
in Contemporary Serbian Prose Fiction and Film
III
p. 113
QUEST N. 10
Damiano Garofalo
Temporal Cross-References and Multidirectional
Comparisons Holocaust Remembrance Day
on Italian State Television
p. 144
DISCUSSION
Maud S. Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France.
History of a conflict
by Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun
by Bryan S. Turner
p. 162
p. 169
REVIEWS
Anna Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging:
Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine
by Dario Miccoli
p. 175
Marco Clementi, Eirini Toliou, Gli ultimi ebrei di Rodi.
Leggi razziali e deportazioni nel
Dodecaneso italiano (1938-1948),
by Michele Sarfatti
p. 179
Inna Shtakser, The Making of Jewish Revolutionaries
in the Pale of Settlement: Community and Identity
during the Russian Revolution and
its Immediate Aftermath, 1905-07
By Polly Zavadivker
p. 181
David Malkiel, Stones Speak – Hebrew Tombstones
from Padua, 1529- 1862
by Andrea Morpurgo
p. 185
IV
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
Holocaust Intersections in 21st-Century Europe: An Introduction
by Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
Two vignettes of contemporary memory politics, from the beginning and the
end of the very recent period of cultural history that interests us, help to set out
in the first part of this Introduction some coordinates for the field of transversal
intersections which permeate 21st-century Holocaust legacies and which this
special issue of Quest sets out to explore. The first vignette focusses on a strange
conjunction at the turn of the millennium between two museum projects, one of
them at least obliquely Holocaust-related, both forced to negotiate across fraught
trans-communal cultural divides and to relate difficult parallel, convergent and
divergent histories. The second picks out an instant, a transient flashpoint from
the rolling news media of summer 2016, at which the sites, values and language of
Holocaust memory were used to confront, in awkward but powerful ways,
immediately contemporary anxieties and atrocities. Following these, the
Introduction will move on to address the larger field of intersection between the
terms, usages and scholarship of the Holocaust and genocide, including its often
problematic aspects. Its aim is to set the stage and provide a framework for the six
‘intersectional’ essays that follow.
Wellington–Berlin
The museum Te Papa Tongarewa or ‘Container of Treasures’ in Māori, better
known simply as Te Papa, was inaugurated in February 1998 in Wellington, New
Zealand.1 This remarkable turn-of-the-millennium, post-colonial centre for New
Zealand’s (or rather Aeteroa New Zealand’s) national history, culture and art was
conceived during the 1990s, following decades of reflection and debate, in order
to rehouse and revitalize a series of tired Victorian and post-Victorian museums
1
Information on Te Papa, on which this paragraph draws, is to be found at:
https://www.tepapa.govt.nz and in particular https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about/what-wedo/our-history (this and all websites consulted 1 September 2016). See also William J. Tramposch
“Te Papa: Reinventing the Museum,” Museum Management and Curatorship 17/4 (1998): 339350.
I
Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
in Wellington (variously known since 1865 as the Colonial Museum, the
Dominion Museum and the National Museum). Te Papa has been a remarkable
21st-century success story, both in museological terms and in its ambitious aim to
crystallize a new, ‘bicultural’ vision and diverse national identity for New
Zealand, equally attentive to, on the one hand, the Māori or indigenous
Polynesian peoples on the islands and, on the other, the Western people,
principally the British, who had established a right to settlement there with the
Treaty of Waitangi of 1840.2 Te Papa was careful not only to give equal space to
its bicultural constituents and their shared histories of conflict and
incomprehension, violence and oppression; it also shaped each part of the
parallel museum narrative in ways that were sensitive to the different
conceptions of memory, storytelling, the historical record and the past itself as
practised by each of its constituent communities and their cultures. This nearimpossible bicultural balancing act seems to have worked: by 2001, the museum
had already drawn 5 million visitors and by 2015, 25 million.
Meanwhile, in Berlin between 1997 and 2001, another near-impossible
‘bicultural’ museum project, also addressing a tense and conflictual multi-ethnic
national history and memory, one also conceived during the 1990s following
decades of debate, was running into serious civic, political and conceptual-artistic
trouble.3 Daniel Libeskind’s shattering design for an extension to the Berlin
Museum, intended originally to accommodate collections for a new Jewish
Museum department, had been selected from competition in June 1989.
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall months later and the imminent
reunification of Germany and of Berlin, however, caught up in a whirlwind of
fierce debate about the new Germany’s commemoration of the Holocaust
(focussed also on other Berlin sites such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe and the so-called ‘Topography of Terror’), Libeskind’s design and the
2
On this key notion of ‘biculturalism,’ see Tramposch, and also Kenneth Gorbey, “The
Challenge of Creating a Bicultural Museum,” Museum Anthropology 15/4 (1991): 7-8 (and for
more on Gorbey, see below).
3
On the history of the Jewish Museum Berlin project, there is useful summary information at:
http://www.jmberlin.de/main/EN/Pdfs-en/About-theMuseum/History_Museum/Museumsgeschichte_EN.pdf. There is also a large critical and
analytical literature on the museum: see, for example, Ezra Akcan, “Apology and Triumph:
Memory Transference, Erasure, and a Rereading of the Berlin Jewish Museum,” New German
Critique 37:/2 (2010) 153–179; Peter Chametzky, ‘Not What We Expected: the Jewish Museum
Berlin in Practice,” Museums and Society 6/3 (2008): 216–245; Amy Sodaro, “Memory, History,
and Nostalgia in Berlin’s Jewish Museum,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society
26/1 (2013): 77-91; James Young, ‘Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin: the Uncanny Arts
of Memorial Architecture,’ Jewish Social Studies 6/2 (2000): 1–23.
II
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
elegant original baroque building of the Berlin Museum alongside it could not
contain their own bicultural tensions, its so-called ‘integrative concept’ between
a city history museum on the one hand and a Holocaust museum and memorial
on the other, was on the brink of collapse, the sheer traumatic force of the latter
purpose increasingly coming to crush the former. 4 Following a series of
resignations and the appointment in 1997 of a dynamic German-American,
Michael Blumenthal, as the new director, radical steps were taken to resolve the
conflict, leading to a general reconceputalization of the project as a GermanJewish history museum. The redesigned museum was to take a purview of over
two millennia of German-Jewish relations, from Roman times to Enlightenment
flourishing to post-Holocaust community revival, the whole fractured both
architectonically and museologically by Libeskind’s shards and disorienting
spaces, marking the Holocaust as a traumatic and ever-present wound.5 And one
of Blumenthal’s most controversial and decisive moves, to signal a break with the
introverted anxieties and cultural politics surrounding local and national
Holocaust memory practices cemented over the postwar era, and aimed to
galvanize the museum’s practical move to completion, was his appointment in
October 1999, as exhibition project director, of Kenneth Gorbey, anthropologist
and museum designer, and one of the leading figures behind Te Papa.6 The
museum opened in 2001 and has since become a key stop on the itinerary of
Holocaust tourism and memory, and of modern architecture, in contemporary
Berlin.
4
Comparable tensions, debates and solutions have been aired in the more recent case of the
Warsaw museum, Polin, Museum of the History of Polish Jews, opened in 2013. See the account
by the director of the museum project there: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Inside the
Museum: Curating Between Hope and Despair: POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews,”
East European Jewish Affairs 45/2-3 (2015): 215-235.
5
On the interactions between the architecture and the exhibits, see Susannah Reid “The Jewish
Museum Berlin. A Review,” Virtual Library Museums (2001), http://www.historischescentrum.de/aus-rez/reid01-1.htm.
6
As he had done in Wellington, Gorbey worked together with Nigel Cox on the project.
III
Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
Fig. 1: Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington.
By Michal Klajban (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons (https://goo.gl/77qR6d)
Fig. 2: Jüdisches Museum, Berlin.
By Studio Daniel Libeskind (Architecture New Building); Guenter Schneider (photography), via
Wikimedia Commons (https://goo.gl/0jOOgK)
The strange conjunction between Te Papa and the Jüdisches Museum Berlin
[Figg. 1 and 2], by way of Kenneth Gorbey, is a minor but revealing one. It by no
means constitutes a complete nor even a dominant key for understanding and
interpreting the Berlin project, with all that building means for contemporary
Europe’s Holocaust legacy; it nevertheless serves as a powerful symptom of how
IV
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
complex, how transversal and how layered the conceptual and practical dynamics
of that legacy have become, set also against the wider context of contemporary
global (and globalized) museology. Blumenthal’s turn to Gorbey meant stepping
dramatically beyond the close community of first- and second-hand witnesses, of
first-, second- or indeed third-generation participant historians and
memorializers who inevitably (and rightly) dominated postwar Holocaust
discourse in Germany. Gorbey was not Jewish, spoke no German, was not
European; and his appointment was roundly criticized at the time as that of a
‘Disneyfier,’ a popularizer and simplifier of complex histories.7 But the success of
his project since its opening, as with Te Papa, and some of his own reflections on
his work on it, suggest that this unpredictable turn produced (or was produced
by) some powerful lines of convergence and connection within contemporary
Holocaust traces in our culture.
We can point briefly to four such lines of intersection: first and most evidently,
the Wellington-Berlin link suggests an overlap between post-colonial history and
memory, and Holocaust (and other post-genocide) memories. This is a thread
that has emerged powerfully in 21st-century critical debate on Holocaust culture,
in the work of Rothberg and Cheyette among others,8 with analyses
concentrating particularly on post-war French colonial politics or civil rights
politics and literature, but which, significantly, has become a key focus of debate
only recently, a symptom of 21st-century intersectionality as much as of mid-20thcentury identity politics. In a comparable fashion, we might note,
historiographical and memorial links have come to the fore in Italian memories
of and recent scholarship on Fascism’s African colonialism and racism as a
context for understanding its anti-Semitism. Loose but operative macrohistorical analogies link European empire and the Holocaust.9 And, we might
note in passing, the very looseness of the analogy marks the way in which the
Holocaust can be intersectional in contemporary culture, precisely because it has
become a pervading superficial presence, a metaphor for any and every form of
extreme violence and ideology, if not for evil per se.10
7
See discussion in Reid.
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
Decolonization, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Bryan Cheyette, Diasporas of the
Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2013).
9
For an interesting discussion, see Max Silverman, “Interconnected Histories: Holocaust and
Empire in the Cultural Imaginary,” French Studies 62/4 (2008): 417-428.
10
On these metaphors in the Italian case, see Robert S. C. Gordon, “Shared Knowledge” in The
Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 109-138.
8
V
Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
Secondly, and closely related to the first, Te Papa’s biculturalism and Gorbey’s
adapted form of an ‘integrative concept’ for the Jewish museum space – the
move from a planned Berlin museum with a Jewish extension, to an integrated
‘Berlin + Jewish’ museum, to a German-Jewish museum through which to view
and understand both German history and Jewish history (and Holocaust
history)11 – speaks to a wider politics of diversity and multiculturalism of the
contemporary first world (Europe, but also New Zealand), with all the
negotiations of similarity and difference that this brings. Researchers such as
Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz, and Annette Seidel–Arpaci have explored
comparable dynamics in the ways in which contemporary immigrant, such as
Muslim communities in Germany (before the new influxes of 2015), have been
educated into a German Holocaust memory culture.12
Thirdly, Gorbey was keenly attentive to the intersection of aesthetics, in this case
of Libeskind’s architecture, and the historiography and pedagogy of the
exhibition project, and also the works of art deployed within the historical
displays, a key and distinctive element also of Te Papa. He wrote in a 2007
lecture of the need to overcome the impulse to treat Libeskind’s work as an
obstacle to visitor experience, to pedagogy and also to the integration of (other)
works of art into the information space: “the architecture helps achieve the
public good by offering new and unique programmatic opportunities, perhaps
not available in other museums, by the alliance of programme and architectural
language and space;” and further on, “Libeskind’s architecture was a major
catalyst in leading the Museum toward exploring art as a vehicle to bring
complex emotion to play in the exhibitry.”13
Fourthly and finally, after the completion of the project, Gorbey reflected on
how forms of writing and literature had been a key intersectional influence on
his thinking about the visitor experience and the subjective interactions s/he
might have with the museum’s spaces and exhibits. In particular, he noted the
impact of reading Primo Levi’s Holocaust testimony, in a 2013 lecture entitled
11
These shifts in concept and design are discussed in detail in Reid, Sodaro and others.
Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz, “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust
Remembrance in Contemporary Germany,” Parallax 17/4 (2011): 32-48; Annette Seidel–Arpaci,
“Swept Under the Rug: Homegrown Antisemitism and Migrants as ‘Obstacles’ in German
Holocaust Remembrance” in Migration, Memory, and Diversity Germany from 1945 to the
Present, ed. Cornelia Wilhelm, (New York: Berghahn, 2016) [forthcoming].
13
Kenneth Gorbey, “Landmark Architecture Serves Museums. The Example of the Jewish
Museum Berlin,” (Auckland, March 2007), available at:
http://www.museumsaotearoa.org.nz/sites/default/files/conferences/MA06MA10/ken_gorbey_ma_2007_conference_paper.pdf.
12
VI
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
“How Primo Levi Helped Plan a Museum in Berlin.”14 Gorbey talked there of a
series of intuitions and insights he gleaned from his reading of Levi which then
informed his work on the museum: these included a sense of a moral humanism
in his/our eye onto history, but one that is fluid, uncertain, not set in stone, and
accompanied by a strong sense of voice and persona. This was in other words an
ethical approach to the encounter in the museum space and gave a fluid narrative
frame to Gorbey’s exhibition planning. A guiding aim, as he puts it, was to find a
‘persona of the place.’ In drawing on Levi and imaginatively, conceptually and
pragmatically translating his voice and insight into the informational and
experiential content of the Jewish Museum Berlin, Gorbey reflects not only as a
distant immigrant into the culture of Holocaust remembrance but also as a
vehicle of more subtle intersections between text, museum and memory.
The convergences between Te Papa and the Jewish Museum Berlin, then, are
multiple if not necessarily all concrete and substantial: they suggest a dynamic
field of multiply overlapping intersections in contemporary Holocaust culture,
between post-colonial and post-war histories, between bi- and multi-cultural
identity practices, between aesthetics and pedagogy as well as historiographical
museology, literature and testimony, as though this layered complexity were of
the very essence of ‘late’ Holocaust memorialization.
Auschwitz–St Étienne du Rouvray
The Jewish Museum Berlin was inaugurated on 9 September 2001, two days
before the Al-Qaeda assaults on New York and Washington, DC. Holocaust
memory, among myriad other settled cultural and geopolitical equilibria, were
deeply shaken by 9/11 and its spiraling and on-going global consequences, and
these continue to act as a primary point of intersection and framing for 21st
century Holocaust discourse, up to and including the present day.15
In late July 2016, Pope Francis undertook his first solemn visit to AuschwitzBirkenau, following his participation in Catholic ‘World Youth Day,’ a mass
gathering taking place in nearby Kraków. During his visit to the Lager complex,
Pope Francis met some ageing survivors and rescuers, meditated in the cell of the
Franciscan victim and Holocaust martyr Maximilian Kolbe, and wrote moving
14
We draw here on lecture notes kindly provided by the author.
One example of many is found in the opening and closing images of the documentary La strada
di Levi / Primo Levi’s Journey, (dir. Davide Ferrario, 2006). For an ‘intersectional’ reading of this
film, see Holocaust Intersections. Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium, eds.
Axel Bangert, Robert S. C. Gordon and Libby Saxton (Oxford: Legenda, 2013), 10-15.
15
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Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
reflections in the visitors’ book; but the most notable aspect for the Vatican press
corps and accompanying global media, was the Pope’s silence: in the face of this
symbolic site of the genocide, his act of witness was to remain wordless, not to be
drawn into the tangle of discourse surrounding the Holocaust and its now-long
legacy, a complex and contradictory legacy not least for the Catholic Church and
for Poland.
It was a characteristically contrarian and also sensitive response by this Pope, one
in contrast to visits by his predecessors Benedict XIV in 2006 and, most
importantly, John Paul II in 1979, shortly after his epoch-marking election to the
papacy in 1978. John Paul’s visit to his native Poland, including his visit to
Auschwitz, was surrounded by a swirl of passionate acclaim, fierce criticism and
vast media attention. The contrast with Francis at first glance might suggest that
the Holocaust and its commemoration might be in the process of undergoing an
attenuation or a fading in the 21st century from its peak of public presence and
discourse in Europe in the later years of the previous century, a withdrawal into a
zone of private moral meditation and respectful distance, somewhat sealed off
from the hard geo-political, historical and socio-cultural controversies that
surrounded it and intersected it in 1979, and continued to do so across Western
and Eastern Europe at least up until the turn of the millennium.
And yet, Francis’s silence by no means told the whole story. His literal silence in
many ways stood less for withdrawal and introspection than for a shift towards
new modes of encounter and intersection between the Holocaust, as history and
memory, and the many layers and pressure points of contemporary culture and
politics. Auschwitz, and the Shoah more broadly, still stands at the heart of
Europe’s contemporary reality and poses questions, even if answered in
meditative silence, to its deepest sense of present identity and values, and it
anxieties over both of these.
The director of the Auschwitz-Birkeanu site, Piotr Cywiński, was quoted in the
press commenting on this very convergence with present-day problems on the
day of the papal visit:
[The world] is increasingly internally divided, threatened with
terrorism and deterioration of human rights. It is a world where human
solidarity is slowly being worn down. If 15 years ago someone had told
us that we would so hysterically react to aiding refugees from war-torn
territories, I would never have believed it. This is a world which is
desperately in need of a wise message, of being reminded of the
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QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
fundamental human truths. Auschwitz and the tragedy of the
Holocaust sensitize us acutely to these issues.16
Cywiński was alluding to the series of parallel crises that cast deep shadows over
Europe in the summer of 2016: mass migration from the devastated regions of
Syria, the wider Middle East and North Africa, and the post-9/11 wars and
terrorisms that have both caused it and accompanied it; and the fracturing of
intra-European solidarity and identity following the 2008 crash, the Greek crisis,
Brexit and the widespread rise of reactionary politics across Europe. More
particularly, as Pope Francis had openly acknowledged on his visit to Kraków,
the most immediate context that made the message of Auschwitz still so resonant
and essential was the shocking sequence of terrorist attacks in France and
Germany in July 2016, most but not all inspired by DAESH/ IS: Nice, Würzberg,
Reultingen, Munich, Ansbach, culminating in the gruesome murder of a
Catholic priest by two French youths in St Etienne du Rouvray, Normandy, on
26 July. In France, the Catholic Church with all its complex and contradictory
relationship to the secular Republic, and the latter in turn in its deeply fractured
relation to its French-Muslim communities, was perhaps for the first time
directly drawn into the current terrorism crisis, and so too, as response across
Europe confirmed, was the Christian-democratic foundations of Europe itself.
Meanwhile, the large French Jewish community was still reeling from its position
as recurrent target and victim, alongside mainstream symbols of contemporary
French culture and democracy, of Islamist terrorist attacks in France in 2012 and
2015. The long-planned visit to Kraków and Auschwitz by Pope Francis
inevitably turned into a symbolic declaration of Christian defiance and
community in the face of such violence, as well as an act of solidarity and
mourning for another Christian martyr in St Etienne and for victims of other
belieds, Muslim, Jewish and secular. There was no ‘war of religion’ in Europe,
Pope Francis insisted to the travelling press corps on his plane to Poland within
hours of the St Etienne murder;17 but It hardly needed stating that Maximilian
Kolbe was murdered for his religion, like Father Jacques Hamel in St Etienne, as
were the 1.1 million Jewish victims who died at Auschwitz, this latter an aspect
that has long sat both awkwardly and powerfully alongside the canonization of
Kolbe as the saint of Auschwitz.
16
Quoted in: Harriet Sherwood, “No Words as Pope Francis visits Auschwitz Death Camp in
Silence,” The Guardian, July 29, 2016 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/29/nowords-as-pope-francis-visits-auschwitz-death-camp-in-silence).
17
Tim Hume, “Pope on Priest killing: World is at War, but It's Not a Religious One,” CNN, July
27, 2016, http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/27/europe/france-church-attack-aftermath/.
IX
Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
The point here is certainly not to revisit the troubled history of Christian-Jewish
relations in the light of the Holocaust, nor to chart the many intractable layers of
Europe’s contemporary crises. Rather, it is to note that the Holocaust remains,
deep into the 21st century, still a persistent presence and touchstone, an echo
chamber of contemporary anxiety, a ready symbol, often a symbol that circulates
out of any planned control or deployment, embedded in the sites, cycles of
events and language of our public discourse. Its power to shock and to signify has
perhaps been thinned out by the passage of time and of generations, but
nevertheless it remains structurally present, even foundational, cutting in
unpredictable ways into the discourse of the present. To revisit Auschwitz,
literally or symbolically, or indeed to design a Jewish history and Holocaust
museum in 21st-century Europe, is to walk on a ground that is shifting,
something more mobile and displaced than its once solemn status in the postwar
cultural field implied, something less conventionally stable as a historical
referent, something that has variously been labelled global and cosmopolitan,
palimpsestic, transnational, multidirectional, or, as here, intersectional, and
which therefore requires new tools or perspectives to decode.18 It is this dynamic
of intersection, operating across many different cultural fields and practices, as
well as across borders and media, across contrasting constituencies of history,
memory and identity, that this issue of Quest sets out to develop and probe.
Holocaust-genocide
If these two incidental case studies show surprising or contingent examples of
transversal intersection, perhaps the most sustained and substantial axis of
intersection in 21st-century Holocaust discourse and representation has been that
between the category and label of the Holocaust on the one hand and of
genocide on the other. This topic in many respects provides the founding
conceptual framework for this issue of Quest.
The point of departure is the rise of genocide scholarship since the 1980s-1990s,
and more decidedly in the 21st century, as a distinct and burgeoning
18
See, variously, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Holocaust Memory in the Global Age
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006 ); Rothberg, Multidirectional; Bangert et al,
Holocaust Intersections; Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory. The Holocaust and Colonialism
in French and Francophone Fiction, (New York: Berghahn, 2013); Larissa Allwork, Holocaust
Remembrance Between the National and the Transnational: A Case Study of the Stockholm
International Forum and the First Decade of the ITF, (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
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QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
interdisciplinary field of research with its distinct institutions, networks and
journals. The earliest periodical publication in the field was Internet on the
Holocaust and Genocide, a newsletter published since 1985 by the Institute on
the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, founded in 1981 under the leadership
of Israel W. Charny, Elie Wiesel, and Shamai Davidson.19 Independently from it,
one year later, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s journal
Holocaust and Genocide Studies started publication.
Both publications have the intersection between Holocaust and genocide
inscribed in their very name. At the same time they also contain the tension
between the two terms, seen by many as denoting a hierarchy and predominance
of the former (Holocaust) over the latter (genocide). This was the view of Henry
H. Huttenbach, who in 1994 launched his own semi-personal newsletter
Genocide Forum explicitly devoted to the comparative study of genocide.
Genocide Forum morphed into the Journal of Genocide Research (JGR) in 1999,
when it transferred to Routledge publisher. In 2005, JGR became the official
publication of the European Network of Genocide Scholars (ENoGS, now
renamed InoGS – International Network of Genocide Scholars – to mark its
extra-European reach) established earlier that same year.20
The other main scholarly organization devoted to the study of genocide was
established in 1994 in the USA with the name Association of Genocide Scholars
(AGS), and was led by pioneers in the field of genocide studies Helen Fein and
Roger Smith. In 2001, AGS assumed its current name International Association
of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). In 2006, the association launched its own journal
Genocide Studies and Prevention.21 As noted by Adam Jones, the early 21st
century saw ‘something of an explosion’ in the field of genocide studies.22
This rise in genocide consciousness is not exclusively an academic phenomenon,
but is corroborated by a rise in the proliferation of the term “genocide” in the
public sphere. Some of the contributions in this issue of Quest will address this
theme with reference to specific case studies. In this introduction, we reconstruct
in broad brushstrokes the history of the rising centrality of the term.
19
The Institute is still active, and between 2010-2012 published its own genocide studies journal
Genocide Prevention Now. For more information, see http://www.ihgjlm.com/.
20
See Anton Weiss-Wendt, “Problems in Comparative Genocide Scholarship,” in The
Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 61.
21
Samuel Totten and Paul R. Bartrop, Dictionary of Genocide. 2 vols, (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 2008), 217.
22
Adam Jones, The Scourge of Genocide: Essays and Reflections, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 1.
XI
Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
In order to start answering these questions, two graphs from Google Ngram
Viewer will be helpful. The first one [Fig.3] looks at the diffusion of the word
genocide in books written in English from 1940 to 2008.23
Fig.
3:
Google
ngram,
“genocide”
(English,
1940-2008).
https://books.google.com/ngramshttps://books.google.com/ngrams [accessed, November 5
2016]
As we can see, there is no clear and obvious big bang, no clear moment in which
the term “explodes.” However, there are two moments in which “genocide” rises
more decidedly. These are in the second half of the 1960s and in the 1990s. These
increases were due to a combination of factors. For the late 1960s, we can identify
three main ones. First, the term was used in works on the Armenian genocide
published on the wave of its fiftieth anniversary; secondly, and in larger numbers,
in relation to violence in post-independence Rwanda (and later in Burundi);
thirdly, and with developing domestic political implications for the USA, in
relation to the Vietnam War and the development of the civil rights movement.24
23
As is well known, the term was introduced by Raphael Lemkin in 1944. See Raphael Lemkin,
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for
Redress, (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).
24
See as examples James H. Tashjian, Turkey: Author of Genocide: The Centenary Record of
Turkey, 1822-1922, (Boston: Commemorative Committee on the 50th Anniversary of the Turkish
Massacres of the Armenians, 1965); Haigaz K. Kazarian, Minutes of Secret Meetings Organizing
the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians: What Turkish Sources Say on the Subject, (Boston:
Commemorative Committee on the 50th Anniversary of the Turkish Massacres of the
Armenians, 1965). On Rwanda and Burundi, see René Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, (New
York: Praeger, 1970); Michael Bowen, Gary Freeman, and Kay Miller, Passing By: The United
States and Genocide in Burundi, 1972, (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International
XII
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
For the 1990s, the dominant factors are the growth of publications in the
fledgling field of genocide studies, the incorporation of the term into works
about the Holocaust, and the events in Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the course of
the decade and their impact in the use of the term.25 Thus, we see that Armenia,
Yugoslavia and Rwanda (twice) played a major role in the rise of the term.
Now, if we add to the Google ngram search the noun “Holocaust” (with capital
h to optimize references to the destruction of European Jews), we notice two
main features [Fig. 4].
Fig. 4: Google ngram, “genocide,” “Holocaust” (English, 1940-2008).
https://books.google.com/ngramshttps://books.google.com/ngrams [accessed, November 5
2016]
Peace, 1973). For examples of the use of “genocide” with reference to the Vietnam War and the
Civil Rights movement, see U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam, (Hanoi: Juridical Sciences Institute,
Viet Nam State Commission of Social Sciences, 1968); Haig A. Bosmajian, and Hamida
Bosmajian, The Rhetoric of the Civil-Rights Movement, (New York: Random House, 1969).
25
For two landmark works in the field of genocide studies published in the early 1990s, see Frank
Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990) and Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective, (London: Sage,
1993). The use of the term “genocide” in important works of Holocaust scholarship can be found
in, for example, Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide. Essays on Launching the Final
Solution, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Henry Friedlander, The Origins of
Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995). Popular works published on the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia in the
1990s include Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed
with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998) and
Norman L. Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of "Ethnic Cleansing,” (College Station: Texas
A&M University Press, 1995).
XIII
Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
The first is that the Holocaust had two moments of sharper rise, in the late 1970s
and early 1990s. A great deal has been written about this, and we will not dwell
on it here.26 The other is that the rise of the terms “Holocaust” and “genocide”
follows a similar curve, albeit with clearly different quantities. In other words,
the rise of the Holocaust preceded, influenced, but also facilitated that of
genocide. The intersection between the two is palpable, and it needs
investigating. The argument presented here is, as mentioned above, that the
Holocaust has intersected and often acted as a paradigm for the
conceptualization of other genocides.27 Whilst the first part of this introduction
focused on more transient and at times fruitful areas of cross-fertilization, this
second part will engage with some problematic examples of this process, in
particular with reference to history-writing and visual culture.
In recent years, a small body of literature has emerged about the use of the
Holocaust as a paradigm for the discussion of other phenomena. In her
interesting book, Angi Buettner has argued that “the Holocaust has become a
benchmark against which other events are judged […] Using the Holocaust and
its images for representing and recording other historical events is a widespread
practice in the news media and other cultural fields.”28 Holocaust images are a
means to turn our attention towards violence, injustice and suffering. They work
by signification or figuration, i.e. as metaphor and symbol. The Holocaust is a set
of signifying practices used to gain access to other events.29 In this sense, it serves
as the already known through which we can approach the new. Buettner argues
that “the more [the image of the Holocaust] has become integrated into the
world’s consciousness and memory, the wider and larger it has become,
containing more and more different referents, ideas and victims. The story of the
destruction of European Jewry gradually has become the story of the destruction
of life in general.”30 As Hilene Flanzbaum famously asked, “if the Holocaust as
metaphor is part of our common language, who can control who speaks it?”31
26
See, e.g., Tom Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust, (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2010), 125-192.
27
The bulk of this Introduction was written before and independently from the publication of
the important work by Rebecca Jinks, Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm?
(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
28
Angi Buettner, Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe: The Cultural Politics of Seeing,
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 2. And cf. note 10 above.
29
Ibid., 4-12.
30
Ibid., 51.
31
Hilene Flanzbaum, “Introduction,” in The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene
Flanzbaum (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 8.
XIV
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
Buettner sees two decisive moments of this shift: from human to animal victims,
and from the Holocaust to other genocides. Here we concentrate on the latter.
Again, this phenomenon has been noted and discussed by others since the 1990s,
especially with reference to the theme of ‘uniqueness.’ It is a well-known – and in
itself historically significant – debate that need not be rehashed here.32 Suffice to
say that, whilst in the past the cause of disagreement was that comparing the
Holocaust to other events was seen by some as detrimental to the historical
specificity of the Holocaust itself, my argument here is that this process is now
harmful to a fuller understanding of the other genocides represented through the
lens of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the process continues unabated.
As noted by Leshu Torchin, one problem with the use of Holocaust metaphors
is that they tend to simplify and discard complexity in favour of the already
known, however atrocious the latter might be. Cueing atrocity through verbal
and visual metaphors (the Armenian Holocaust, the American Holocaust, the
Spanish Holocaust, as well as images like cattle-cars, shaved heads, camp-like
settings) leads to an unavoidable process of selection. We can see this slippage at
work in many of the more popular historical works on genocides or crimes
against humanity other than the Holocaust, such as the Herero and Nama
genocide, Belgian and British colonial crimes in Congo and India, the genocide of
Native Americans, and the crimes of Franco during and after the Spanish Civil
War.33 With reference to this latter case, Paul Preston writes in the preface to his
otherwise excellent The Spanish Holocaust that he “could find no word that
more accurately encapsulates the Spanish experience than ‘holocaust.’’”34 He also
adds that in choosing this term he hopes to suggest “parallels and resonances that
will lead to a better understanding of what happened in Spain.”35 Perhaps, but
one cannot help but asking why that is the case, and more importantly whether
using the term Holocaust really helps understanding what happened in Spain
during and after the Civil War.
32
For a good overview see Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, “The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the
Recent Polemical Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship,” Holocaust and Genocide
Studies 13/1 (1999): 28-61.
33
See David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten
Genocide, (London: Faber, 2011); Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed,
Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, (London: Macmillan, 1998); Mike Davis, Late Victorian
Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, (London: Verso, 2001); David
E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992); Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and
Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, (London: HarperPress, 2012).
34
Preston, Spanish Holocaust, xi.
35
Ibid., xii.
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Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
As stated above, this use of the Holocaust as shorthand for the conceptualization
of other instances of extreme suffering is far from limited to history-writing, but
is integral part of genocide “talk” and representation. This is partly
understandable: evoking Holocaust imagery represents valuable moral capital for
advocates of group victims of severe abuse. This process was often contentious in
the recent past; it is perhaps less so now, but it no less present.36 But the
Holocaust is not only called forth by representatives of victim groups. It is also
widely used in mass culture and media as a paradigm for the presentation and
representation of other past and present humanitarian crises. In fact, some of the
most well-known representations of genocides, which for large portions of
public opinion might be the first if not only entry point into the specific history
represented, make heavy use of Holocaust tropes. Several contributions to this
issue of Quest will develop specific case studies of this phenomenon. The
following section of this introduction will briefly discuss the use of Holocaust
imagery in some well-known representations of genocides about Australia,
Armenia and Rwanda.
Australia, Armenia, Rwanda
36
Two radically divergent examples from the relatively recent past are Steven T. Katz, The
Holocaust in Historical Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) and Is the Holocaust
Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum, 3rd edn (Boulder:
Westview Press, 2009). The first edition of Rosenbaum’s edited volume was published in 1996.
On these differing perspectives, see David B. MacDonald, Identity Politics in the Age of
Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical Representation (London: Routledge, 2008), 30-33.
XVI
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
Fig. 5. Rabbit-Proof Fence (dir. Philip Noyce, 2002)
Directed by Philip Noyce and released in 2002, Rabbit-Proof Fence is the
cinematic adaptation of Doris Piklington Garimara’s non-fiction book telling the
story of her mother’s escape from the Moore River Native Settlement in
Australia and her return to their native community at Jigalong after a 1500-mile
long journey in 1931. As such it is an example, one of the many, of what Elizabeth
Swanson Goldberg defines as “counter-historical dramatic film” – in other words
a film based on a true story but presenting a counter-narrative to an official
version of history or to a perceived silence surrounding a historical event.37 Tony
Hughes d’Aeth sees this as only one of the many similarities between RabbitProof Fence and Holocaust films, in particular Schindler’s List. In his view, a
series of signs like the barbed wire in the lettering and poster of the film [Fig. 5],
the shaving of Olive’s hair, the replacement of everyday clothes with white
uniforms and the ‘selection’ scene in which the children are separated at Moore
River Native Settlement, are clear Holocaust references. Moreover, in the film
the transfer of the two sisters is carried out by the codified means of the train,
instead of the ferry, as was actually the case.38 While Hughes d’Aeth himself
acknowledges that there are significant differences between the two films (first of
all in the fact that the perspective is not that of an ambiguous witness/rescuer but
37
Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights, (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 29.
38
Tony Hughes DuAeth, “Which Rabbit-Proof Fence? Empathy, Assimilation, Hollywood,”
Australian
Humanities
Review
(September
2002),
http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2002/hughesdaeth.html.
XVII
Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
that of the victims themselves), the relevant point here is the one made by Donna
Lee Frieze, that all these links with the Holocaust serve to reinforce the film’s
view that the chief protector’s policy was genocidal.39
The Holocaust template and its shortcomings are more obvious in the case of
Rwanda, and of its most widely known representation Hotel Rwanda. They are
evident in the film itself, and all the more so because they are explicitly stated in
one of the companion essays to the official script, journalist Nicola Graydon’s
“The Rwandan Schindler.”40 Moreover, they are also picked up by empirical
viewers, as noted in an interesting article that analyzed the reception of the film
among 41 empirical viewers, 21 of whom were Germans and 20 Americans. This
research showed that interviewees made frequent comparisons to the Holocaust
to address the ethnic differentiation between Hutu and Tutsi in Hotel Rwanda,
noting the use of dehumanizing words to address the victims, but also the silence
of bystanders, a phenomenon clearly underscored in the film. Respondents often
mentioned Schindler’s List, primarily to draw a parallel between Paul
Rusesabagina and Oskar Schindler’s courage in helping innocent victims. The
context of reception plays an important role in this process: twice as many
German interviewees mentioned Schindler’s List and the Holocaust compared to
the Americans.41
Hotel Rwanda is by far the most widely known film in a mini-canon of
cinematic representations of the Rwandan genocide that also include 100 Days
(dir. Nick Hughes 2001), Shooting Dogs (dir. Michael Caton-Jones, 2005),
Sometimes in April (dir. Raoul Peck, 2005), and Shake Hands with the Devil
(dir. Roger Spottiswoode, 2007), among others. Even a cursory analysis flags up
some of the main problems in the adoption of the Holocaust paradigm. The
combination of the fact that the topic is a non-Western genocide and a set of
assumptions about Rwanda as part of Africa, result in an overreliance on the
Holocaust template to make the stories told in these films understandable and
palatable to a Western audience. The Holocaust paradigm thus compounds
other deep-seated problems of Eurocentrism.
Just as scholars like Philip Gourevitch, Samantha Power, Stephen Haynes and
others felt compelled to compare discrimination practices, the death toll and
39
Donna Lee Frieze, “The Other in Genocide: Responsibility and Benevolence in Rabbit-Proof
Fence,” in Film & Genocide, eds. Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás F. Crowder-Taraborrelli,
(Madison: The University Of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 122-132.
40
Nicola Graydon, “The Rwandan Schindler,” in Hotel Rwanda: Bringing the True Story of an
African Hero to Film, ed. Terry George, (New York: New Parket Press, 2005), 33-45.
41
Christian Gudehus, Stewart Anderson, and David Keller, “Understanding Hotel Rwanda: A
Reception Study,” Memory Studies 3 (2010): 344-63.
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QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
other aspects of the Rwandan genocide to the Holocaust, so do films.42 The
Rwandan genocide “raises the problematics of representing yet another genocide,
in this case moreover, an other, non-Western genocide,” one which the public are
expected not to know much about.43 This leads to a series of narrative and
representational choices that are not without consequences. One of these is to
rely on Holocaust-like tropes. The parallels between Schindler’s List and Hotel
Rwanda have been debated widely and will be only mentioned briefly here. The
characters of Rusesabagina and Schindler follow the same development. They are
both male protagonists who, finding themselves in a position of power, decide to
save lives whereas many others would have killed.44 They do so by showing the
same cunning resourcefulness, resorting to charm and bribery when needed.45
Both start out as motivated by self-interest but in the course of the film morph
into selfless and almost saintly figures. Rusesabagina leaves his family to be
rescued while he stays behind with people he wishes to protect.
The similarities are also visual. The original poster for the theatrical release of
Schindler’s List depicts the entwined hands of the iconic ‘girl in the red coat’
with a man: an image of hope and salvation. In Hotel Rwanda, this iconic image
is replicated near the end of the film when Rusesabagina is being liberated by the
UN convoy and taken to a refugee camp. In this scene, the camera focuses on
Paul gripping his family’s hand. Moreover, Joya Uraizee identifies two defining
scenes including the male protagonists showing pivotal moments of horror and
confrontation with the effects of the genocides. In Schindler’s List it is the
climactic liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto scene; in Hotel Rwanda, it is when
Rusesabagina steps out of his car to discover the site of a massacre.46
Beyond these visual symmetries, there is at least one more important
consequence to the use of the Holocaust paradigm. One key feature of
42
Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You; Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”:
America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Stephen R. Haynes, “‘Death
Was Everywhere, Even in Front of the Church’: Christian Faith and the Rwandan Genocide,” in
Confronting Genocide: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, ed. Steven Leonard Jacobs, (Lanham:
Lexington, 2009), 183-94.
43
Madelaine Hron, “‘Genres of ‘Yet Another Genocide’: Cinematic Representations of
Rwanda,” in Film and Genocide, eds. Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás F. Crowder-Taraborrelli,
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 135.
44
Joya Uraizee, “Gazing at the Beast: Describing Mass Murder in Deepa Mehta’s Earth and Terry
George’s Hotel Rwanda,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 28 (2010): 10-27.
45
Joyce B. Ashuntantang, “Hollywood’s Representations of Human Rights: The Case of Terry
George’s Hotel Rwanda,” in Hollywood’s Africa after 1994, ed. Maryellen Higgins, (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 2012), 54-67.
46
Uraizee, “Gazing at the Beast,” 19.
XIX
Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
Holocaust films is the enclosed space of boxcars, ghettos and camps, and the gas
chamber. With the exception of Sometimes in April, films about Rwanda
present confined camp-like spaces, thus failing to account for the open air, broad
daylight and intimate nature of this genocide, in which there was no clearly
defined separation between the space of life and death.47
This aspect highlights a much larger problem in the intersection of Holocaust
and genocide: the lack of interest in putting on screen the sets of conditions that
led to the genocide. Most films about the genocide confine Rwandan history to
the few weeks of the genocide itself. The opening of Hotel Rwanda is exemplary
from this point of view, but the same applies to Shooting Dogs.48 The film opens
with a dark screen and the sound of an announcer from Radio Milles Collines —
a station also known as Hutu Power Radio and infamous for having facilitated
the organization of the genocide — while the screen stays dark. The anti-Tutsi
propaganda of the radio station situates the conflict as a clash of ethnic identities
rooted in the former colonizers’ privileged treatment of the Tutsis. This opening
is significant. Its rhetoric of darkness and the disembodied voice of ethnic hatred
construct Africa through the Conradian trope of the monstrous and spectacular,
the “dark continent” where evil lurks. The film’s opening focus on Hutu Power
Radio gestures toward a primordial understanding of African politics, while, in
contrast, the protagonist Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu manager of the Hotel des
Milles-Collines, and his wife, Tatiana, a Tutsi, designate Africa’s and Rwanda’s
political modernity and rationalism. The failure to historicise Hutu rage and
hatred plays into the hands of established stereotypes of Africa as a continent
without history and civilization.49 From this weakness follows another
important one: the Manichean division between Hutu and Tutis, perpetrator
and victims, evil and good, barbarity and civilization (with the exception of
Westernised Hutus like Rusesabagina). As Joyce Ashuntantang points out, the
“Dark Continent” is identified with the Hutus and their savagery.50 These
binaries, while well meaning, preserve the clear-cut “us” versus “them” dynamics
that make genocides possible in the first place. Moreover, they are still to some
47
On this, see Hron, “‘Genres of ‘Yet Another Genocide,’” 137.
Ann-Marie Cook, “‘Based on the True Story’: Cinema’s Mythologised Vision of the Rwandan
Genocide,” in Promoting and Producing Evil, ed. Nancy Billias, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010),
169-86.
49
Heike Härting, “Global Humanitarianism, Race, and the Spectacle of the African Corpse in
Current Western Representations of the Rwandan Genocide,” Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28/1 (2008): 61-77; Ashuntantang, “Hollywood’s
Representations of Human Rights.”
50
Ashuntantang, “Hollywood’s Representations of Human Rights,” 61.
48
XX
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
extent evidence of a lingering colonial gaze, for example the stereotype of Africa
as a racialized space of danger and exoticism fully deployed in the interracial love
story in Sunday in Kigali.
This is even more clearly the case in many documentaries made in post-genocide
Rwanda, such as for example Au Rwanda on dit...La famille qui ne parle pas
meurt (dir. Nathan Réra, 2004). Here, a certain ethnographic gaze merges with
the imposition of a Christian narrative of redemption and reconciliation that
does not take fully into account the trauma of survivors who have to live side by
side with their perpetrators. Cinematic representations of the Rwandan genocide
are often presented with heavy Christian overtones, for example in the
martyrdom of Father Christopher in the BBC-produced Shooting Dogs.51 More
in general, they present a strong emphasis on a universal humanist message. This
brings us back to the Holocaust paradigm. As director of 100 Days Nick Hughes
drily pointed out, “before you start looking for Schindler’s List you need to
establish what happened in Auschwitz. The problem with the Rwandan
genocide is that everybody started making human films about the humanity of
people and the possibility of hope surviving the genocide. You shouldn’t do that
before you establish that there is no hope and nothing good can come out of that
particular event.”52 By creating a narrative proximity between a certain type of
popular Holocaust representations and the Rwandan genocide these films digest
(badly) the Rwandan genocide for a Western audience.
Of course, it is worth asking if these claims that the implementation of a certain
type of Holocaust paradigm serves as a ready-made surrogate for understanding
of the specificities of genocides, while at the same time facilitating public
engagement with it are applicable beyond scholarly writings on these films. The
last example, about the Armenian genocide, engages with this point (and the
Armenian genocide will be discussed further in Peretti’s essay below).
The extermination of up to 1.3 million of Armenians and hundreds of thousands
of other Christian minorities in the Anatolian peninsula during the First World
War has been compared to the Holocaust countless times. This was particularly
the case in past decades, when comparing the Armenian genocide with the
Holocaust was a way for the former to gain recognition and find its place within
Western memory culture. The list of examples would be too long; suffice to
mention the British Channel 4 documentary “The Hidden Holocaust,” aired in
51
Linda Melvern, “History? This Film Is Fiction,” The Observer March 19, 2006.
Nick Hughes in Piotr A. Cieplak, “The Rwandan Genocide and the Bestiality of
Representation in 100 Days (2001) and Shooting Dogs (2005),” Journal of African Cinemas, 2/1
(2010): 49-64 (59).
52
XXI
Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
July 1992 as part of the Secret History series. Even in the title, the documentary
established a parallel between the two events; this theme was repeated frequently
during the course of the program, for example when Robert Fisk defined it the
“first Holocaust of the 20th Century.”
But the same is also true of much more recent products and debates. One specific
case is that of the novel and film La masseria delle allodole, translated as The
Skylark Farm (novel) and The Lark Farm (movie) and their impact in Italy, the
home country of the author of the novel Antonia Arslan and the directors of its
film adaptation, the Taviani Brothers, in the early 2000s.53 These are semifictionalized accounts of Arslan’s family experience during the genocide. The
novel and the film represented a first encounter with the Armenian genocide not
just for large sections of the public but also for a sizable section of opinion
formers. The reception of the film merged with domestic and international
political issues of the day, including the divide between left and right, debates
about Turkey’s inclusion in the EU, Europe’s supposed Christian roots, and the
alliance with the Bush administration (issues also touched upon in the
contribution by Garofalo in this issue).
The Holocaust paradigm was deployed on both sides of this fray. One way to
put forward the genocide narrative was to assimilate it to the Holocaust. Thus,
newspaper reviews of the film commented that the Young Turks “scientifically
planned the total solution [soluzione totale] to the Armenian question,”54 or
that the prejudices against the Armenians were the same ones harbored by the
Nazis against the Jews.55 At the same time, the Holocaust comparison was at
times used to undermine the “genocide” claim. This was the case of Sergio
Romano, who in a column adopted the dubious argument that since the
Holocaust was somewhat worse, then that of the Armenians was “just” a
tragedy.56 The main proponent of the Holocaust analogy was, perhaps
surprisingly, the author of the best-selling novel Antonia Arslan herself. In a
series of interviews, she drew explicit parallels between, among others, the Special
Organization (the Young Turk Central Committee’s paramilitary extension) and
the SS, as well as between the deportations of Armenians to the Syrian desert and
53
Antonia Arslan, La masseria delle allodole, (Milano: Rizzoli, 2004); Id., Skylark Farm trans.
Geoffrey Brock, (London: Atlantic, 2008); Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani, La masseria delle
allodole, (The Lark Farm, 2007).
54
Claudia Morgoglione, “Le immagini-shock del genocidio armeno nell’ultimo film dei fratelli
Taviani,” La repubblica, March 19, 2007.
55
Giuseppina Manin, “Gli armeni dei Taviani,” Corriere della Sera, February 14, 2007.
56
Sergio Romano, “La Turchia e gli armeni: i massacri e il diniego,” Corriere della Sera,
November 30, 2007.
XXII
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
the “Final Solution.”57 In order to stress the importance of the Armenian
genocide, Arslan herself as well as a host of commentators defined it, lie Fisk, as
the first genocide of the 20th century.58 In other words, the novel and especially
the film were then set up to be read through the lens of the Holocaust.
Despite being one of the few films produced to this day on the Armenian
genocide, The Lark Farm achieve only limited international success. The
Armenian genocide is still in search of its landmark work, its Schindler’s List or
Hotel Rwanda.59 One exception could have been Ararat (dir. Atom Egoyan,
2002), which however proved too complex to be appealing to large masses. It is
the story of a group of people whose lives revolve around the making of a
traditional historical epic film about the Armenian genocide. Egoyan’s film is,
among many other things, a sort of anti-epic historical drama (an anti-Schindler’s
List). Egoyan has explicitly stated in interviews that the film that is being made
within the film, the mimetic, emotionally charged realist period drama, is
precisely the film he did not want to make. There are also clues in Ararat that
confirm this view. Instead, Ararat is a film about the trappings of memory and
denial. In a sense, Egoyan has bypassed the epic drama phase in which the
Holocaust paradigm is strongest, and has produced instead a work that is as
thought-provoking as it is esoteric for a mass audience.60
This leaves us with a series of unanswered question: is the Holocaust paradigm,
despite its shortcomings, a pre-condition for situating a genocide close to the
center of society’s memory culture in this first part of the 21st century? Will the
more improvised, at times positive, at times strained forms of intersection
presented in the first part of this introduction prevail over the more sustained
57
Roberto Carnero, “Arslan: ‘Le armene? Pazienti tessitrici contro il genocidio,’” L’Unità,
September 5, 2004; Serena Zoli, “‘La mia dolce Armenia prima del diluvio,’” Corriere della Sera,
April 8, 2004.
58
Giuseppe Distefano, “Intervista ai Taviani: gli armeni? Un pezzo di memoria cancellata,” Il
Sole 24 Ore, March 20, 2007; Zoli, “‘La mia dolce Armenia.’”
59
Time will tell if The Promise (dir. Terry George, 2016) can fulfil that role.
60
On Ararat, see at least Georgiana Banita, “‘The Power to Imagine’: Genocide, Exile, and
Ethical Memory in Atom Egoyan’s Ararat,” in Film and Genocide, 87-105; Lawrence Baron,
“Holocaust and Genocide Cinema: Crossing Disciplinary, Genre, and Geographical Borders,”
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 28/4 (2010): 1-9; Helke Heckner,
“Screening the Armenian Genocide: Atom Egoyan’s Ararat between Erasure and Suture,”
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 28/4 (2010): 133-145; Jonathan Markovitz,
“Ararat and Collective Memories of the Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies
20/2 (2006): 235-255; Devin O. Pendas, “Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (2002) and the Critique of
Diplomatic Reason,” in Through a Lens Darkly: Films of Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and
Atrocities, eds. John J. Michalczyk and Raymond J. Helmick, (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 3847.
XXIII
Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
and problematic aspects of the adoption of what we called here the Holocaust
paradigm? What is the discursive relationship between the Holocaust and other
tragic past and present events, or indeed looser discourse of contemporary
politics, culture and memory? These are some of the themes developed by the
articles presented here.
Six Studies
The six articles in this issue of Quest are designed to offer a broad and inclusive
approach to the question of Holocaust intersections as laid out in this
Introduction. As we have here discussed cases ranging from New Zealand,
Poland and France to Australia, Rwanda and Armenia, the articles range over a
variety of different geographical and national arenas in Europe, from Britain to
Lithuania, from Serbia to Italy. Given the origins of Quest as a journal and the
range of expertise of the editors of this special issue, it was decided to dedicate
particular attention to the case of Italy, in a concerted attempt to adapt to the
complexities of the Italian case some of the most interesting recent research and
methods of an ‘intersectional’ kind, in ways that perhaps have not been fully
attempted before. We also deliberately encouraged an open understanding of the
kinds of intersections or what Duncan here, following Rey Chow, calls
‘entanglements,’ which might bring Holocaust ‘talk’ into contact with other
discourses and representations in early 21st-century Europe. The six articles look
variously at literature and its intersections with sites of memory (Vervaet); at
groups, associations and communities and their identitarian politics as they cross
borders from one memory constituency to another (Peretti); at how old and new
media grapple with forms of communication and representation of events,
memories and their politics (Duncan, Garofalo); at education and its impact on
public, civic discourse (Critchell); and at developments in scholarship, theory and
academic study as it interacts with and reflects inter-governmental dialogue
(Allwork). Taken together, these articles do not aim to offer comprehensive
coverage in regional or conceptual terms, but to give a strong sense of the
importance of this transversal approach for understanding the shifting ground of
the Holocaust’s present-day status and value.
Larissa Allwork’s article takes as its departure point the author’s work done in
preparation for her important monograph Holocaust Remembrance between
the National and the Transnational: The Stockholm International Forum and
the First Decade of the International Task Force (2015). In particular, the article
investigates some of the shortcomings of trauma theory as put forward by
XXIV
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scholars like Cathy Caruth, identifying trauma in the unspoken in narratives
such as Holocaust testimonies. In so doing Allwork advocates for the adoption
of a revised form of trauma theory. Drawing on the work of Richard McNally
and Joshua Pedersen, Allwork claims the signs of trauma can be found in the
texts themselves, rather than in their lacunae, and that trauma can therefore be
spoken by survivors and in part deciphered.
Kara Critchell explores the politics of Holocaust memorialization by examining
the intersection of education, commemoration and national identity in 21st
Century Britain since the inaugural Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001. In her
article, Critchell analyses the close relationship between Holocaust
commemoration and education specific of the British context. Moreover, she
illustrates how Holocaust commemoration in institutionalized spheres have
intersected with contemporary cultural discourse surrounding questions of civic
morality, immigration and the memory of other genocides. In her contribution,
Critchell argues that the way in which the Holocaust has been indelibly
associated with these issues has both implicitly and explicitly connected
Holocaust discourse to contemporary debates on what constitutes British
identity in the 21st century. In turn, these highly domesticated narratives of the
period are often used to promote a self-congratulatory notion of British identity
and supposed exceptionalism.
Derek Duncan offers a first case-study analysis of Italian intersectional memory,
showing how the current crisis of Mediterranean migration and wider waves of
migration from Africa and the Middle East, which has shaken European politics,
institutions and values of solidarity to the core, have become entangled in the
media with the tropes of representation of the Shoah. Whilst aware of the risks
inherent in this process, Duncan suggests, through a reading of migrant literature
and film, that it can create a viable space for interrogating also other hidden
histories and memories, such as the colonial past.
Luca Peretti’s article touches on a similar pattern of intersection, between Italian
memory and other traumatic collective memory discourse on genocide,
concerning in particular Armenia, Rwanda and the Romani, but he brings to
bear an important focus on community memory, its strengths and its inevitable
conflicts. Specifically, he works with the Jewish community of Rome and its
internal and external positions regarding museums and other memorial projects,
underlining the key importance of associations, groups and communities for the
practical processing of memory and for the creation of dialogue and intersection.
Stejn Vervaet’s contribution uses two recent Serbian novels and a film to
examine the deeply charged intersections between the legacy of the 1990s Balkan
wars in the former Yugoslavia and its plural intersections with memories and
XXV
Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra
legacies of Nazism and the Holocaust. This arena adds a crucial geo-cultural
dimension to the issue, since it is at least arguable, as noted above, that the
violence and trauma of those recent wars were at the origin of a profound shift in
memory frameworks and in the sense of the modern relevance of the Holocaust
in Europe. Vervaet suggests that the works he analyses create a prism (using a
metaphor akin to Luca Peretti’s idea of ‘kaleidoscopic’ memory), through which
both these looming and complex events can be seen anew.
Finally, Damiano Garofalo investigates the ways in which the Holocaust
intersects with other past and present tragedies in coverage of the
commemorations of the Day of Memory since its inception in 2001 across RAI,
the public television service in Italy.. By focusing in particular on the popular
political talk show Porta a porta, Garofalo’s article illustrates how the inclusion
(or lack thereof) of references to events other than the extermination of the
European Jews was often influenced by immediate political concerns, such as for
example the 2003 USA-led invasion of Iraq. At the same time, the article shows
how other historical genocides, including the Armenian genocide and the
Porajmos are establishing themselves as a feature of television programming for
the Day of Memory.
***
The guest editors would like to thank the editorial board of Quest for their
invitation to work on this issue, and in particular Guri Schwarz and Laura Brazzo
for their constant support. We would also like to thank the anonymous peer
reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments. Our gratitude also goes
to all the contributors and to several other colleagues and friends who aided in
the development of the issue at different stages, in particular Guido Vitiello and
Andy Pearce. Finally, warm thanks to Axel Bangert, Libby Saxton and all the
contributors to the volume Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual
Culture at the New Millennium (London: Legenda, 2013), for permission to
borrow, and we hope to build on, their ‘intersectional’ title and method.
_________________
Robert S. C. Gordon is Serena Professor of Italian at Cambridge University. He
has published widely on the Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi, as well as
on the field of Holocaust memory in Italy and the wider world. His books
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include Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues (2001), The Holocaust in Italian Culture
1944-2010 (2012), and (as co-editor) Holocaust Intersections. Genocide and
Visual Culture at the New Millennium (2013).
Emiliano Perra is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University
of Winchester. His research interests focus on Holocaust and genocide memory.
He is the author of Conflicts of Memory: The Reception of Holocaust Films and
Television Programmes in the Italian Press, 1945 to the Present (2010).
XXVII
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Interrogating Europe’s Voids of Memory:
Trauma Theory and Holocaust Remembrance between the National and the
Transnational
by Larissa Allwork
Abstract
Reflecting on the research process for Holocaust Remembrance between the
National and the Transnational (HRNT), which explores and analyzes the
significance of the European and global politics of the commemoration of the
Holocaust and Nazi-era crimes in the late 1990s and 2000s, this article will
consider the influence of the intellectual context of trauma theory for this book.
It will offer a response to the increasing critique of Eurocentric trauma theory
which developed during the period spent researching the Stockholm
International Forum (SIF 2000) and the first decade of the Task Force for
International Co-operation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and
Research (ITF, now the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance,
IHRA). This article will discuss how a revised trauma theory, along the lines
suggested by scholars such as Joshua Pederson, continues to offer important
possibilities for European studies of the histories and memories of the Holocaust
in singular and comparative terms.
Introduction
Part One: Encountering Trauma Theory
Part Two: Questioning Trauma Theory
Part Three: Rediscovering Trauma Theory
__________________
Introduction
This article will reflect on the impact of contemporary trauma theory as a key
intellectual horizon line for research on the histories and memories of the
Holocaust in twenty-first century Europe. It is based upon research completed
for my monograph Holocaust Remembrance between the National and the
Transnational: A Case Study of the Stockholm International Forum and the
1
Larissa Allwork
First Decade of the ITF (henceforth HRNT). The book analyzed the significance
of the politics and symbolism of the commemoration of the Holocaust and Naziera crimes in the late 1990s and 2000s at the European, international and
transnational levels.1 The work was a historical study that analyzed archival
documents, media representations and oral history interviews in an attempt to
reach balanced judgements about post-Cold War developments in Holocaust
memorialization. At the same time, the research process for HRNT was also alert
to history’s limitations, although these were not extensively commented on in
the book owing to space restrictions. These limitations included the dangers of
the narrative seductions of progressive rationalism, non self-reflexive ‘objectivity’
in which the disciplinary norm of empirical analysis became ‘theory in denial’ as
well as the dominance of the Rankeian orthodoxy that has focused on the
nation-state as the primary container of historical analysis. Other potential issues
included History’s tendency to subordinate the ‘unreliable’ quirks of the
individual’s perception to the greater perceived reliability of the archive as well as
the genre’s sometime failure to give due attention to what is absent, opaque,
intangible: traumatic.
These limitations do not necessarily apply to all history writing tout court as the
discipline is incredibly diverse and sophisticated. This is evidenced by the impact
of deconstructivist method, narrative analysis and trauma theory particularly on
scholars of gender history, the imperial past and the Holocaust.2 Nor is it simply
1
Larissa Allwork, Holocaust Remembrance between the National and the Transnational: A Case
Study of the Stockholm International Forum and the First Decade of the ITF, (London; New
York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Preliminary discussions of this material occurred as part of
Sonya Andermahr’s trauma research group at the University of Northampton and at the
University of Zaragoza’s ‘Acts of Remembrance’ conference (24-26 April 2013). I would like to
thank Maite Escudero and Constanza del Rio Álvaro, alongside the Quest editors and reviewers
for their advice in relation to this article. An alternative version of this article will also appear as a
book chapter in Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of
Literature, eds. Susana Onega, Constanza del Rio Álvaro and Maite Escudero, (Basingstoke; New
York: Palgrave, forthcoming). A note on terminology. The word ‘Holocaust’ refers to the Nazis
and their collaborators mass murder of approximately six million Jews during World War II.
‘Nazi-era crimes’ is used to describe both the Holocaust and the Third Reich’s broader atrocity
crimes. The use of the term ‘genocide’ refers to the standard definition offered by the United
Nations Genocide Convention. An analysis of the limitations of these terms is offered in HRNT,
x-xii. A discussion of what is meant by the ‘national’ and the ‘transnational’ is also available in
HRNT, ix-x.
2
Anna Green and Katherine Troup, The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in TwentiethCentury History and Theory, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Dan Stone,
Constructing the Holocaust, (London; Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003).
2
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the case that trauma theory has all the answers. Any theoretical paradigm too
rigidly and non-self-critically imposed risks becoming a distortive construct. It
may reveal a great deal about the intellectual predilections of its author but it
might risk hiding more than it illuminates in relation to intellectual
understandings of past and present human political, social and cultural relations.
Given this skepticism, this article is the story of how a historian of Europe
encountered trauma theory, questioned its paradigms and rediscovered its
analytical potentials.
Part one will delineate the ‘state of play’ in regards to trauma theory during my
research on the Stockholm International Forum on Holocaust Education,
Remembrance and Research (SIF 2000) and the first decade of the Task Force
for International Co-operation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and
Research (ITF, renamed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance or
IHRA in December 2012). Parts two and three will reflect on this pre-existing use
of trauma theory and specifically address how it impacted on the writing of
HRNT. These sections will address the limits of trauma theory for this particular
research project. However, they will also offer some initial thoughts on how a
revised trauma theory remains useful for understanding aspects of European
memory cultures. This continued use of trauma theory will particularly be
considered at the intersections of what Richard Ned Lebow has called
‘individual’ memory (personal testimony), ‘collective’ memory (communal
grassroots remembrance rituals) and ‘institutional’ memory (formal discourses
about the past by political, social and cultural elites).3
Part One: Encountering Trauma Theory
Trauma Studies scholar Cathy Caruth has written that in the German and
English languages the origins of the word ‘trauma’ derived from the Greek term
meaning a ‘wound’ inflicted on the body, but that since the incursion of
Sigmund Freud and subsequent psychoanalysts, the meaning of the term
‘trauma’ has shifted in its dominant although not uncontested signification.4
3
For definitions and an in-depth discussion of these terms see Richard Ned Lebow, ‘The
Memory of Politics in Post-War Europe,’ in The Politics of Memory in Post-War Europe, eds.
Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner and Richard Ned-Lebow, (Durham; London: Duke University
Press, 2006), 1-39.
4
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, (Baltimore and
London: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 3.
3
Larissa Allwork
Freud’s explorations in trauma began with his studies in hysteria in the 1890s
which introduced the key concept of Nachträglichkeit (‘belatedness’), but it was
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) that he began to explore the idea, now
central to interdisciplinary trauma studies, of the individual’s experience of
compulsive repetition following the incursion on consciousness of sudden,
violent overwhelming stimuli.5 Since Freud’s explorations, Caruth has argued
that the use of the term ‘trauma’ has often denoted the individual’s experience of
an unexpected shock: a wound inflicted on the mind, which causes the victim of
trauma to experience a radical breach in their sense of time, self as well as their
relations to others and the world. Moreover, the radical shock experienced
during a traumatic episode renders the traumatic event un-knowable to
individual consciousness in its immediate impact, and instead makes its presence
known after a latency period through the repetitive actions and nightmares of
the survivor of trauma.6
While as Caruth indicated this understanding of trauma was initially formulated
in relation to Freud’s foundational reflections, Roger Luckhurst has suggested
that since the resurgence of interest in trauma theory following the Vietnam War
and particularly since the 1980s, Freud’s ideas have become increasingly
questioned and disputed within certain discourses of trauma.7 For example, the
third edition of The Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders (1980) rejected
“Freudian psychoanalysis as a classificatory template in favor of a model that
considers psychic disorders on the model of neuro-biological, organic illnesses.”8
Equally, building on Freud’s legacy but moving far beyond his initial
formulation that collective trauma weakens community cohesion, scholars such
as David Lloyd and E. Ann Kaplan have stressed the importance of studying
group as opposed to individual experiences of trauma. They applied their
considerations to the traumatic aftermaths of colonialism, the Second World
War and 9/11 for collectives such as the family and the nation-state.9
Furthermore, various creative practitioners have attempted what has been
5
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writing, (London; New York:
Penguin Books, 2003).
6
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 3-4.
7
Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, (London: Routledge, 2008), 10-11.
8
Summary of third edition of the DSM from Irene Visser, “Trauma Theory and Postcolonial
Literary Studies,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47/3 (2011): 270-282, 273.
9
David Lloyd, “Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?,” Interventions 2/2 (2000): 212;
Kaplan, E. Ann, Trauma Culture, (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2005),
19.
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QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
interpreted by scholars such as Caruth and Felman as the paradoxical, aporetic
task of finding ways of representing in literary and visual forms the at once
‘knowable’ and ‘unknowable’ experience of individual and collective forms of
trauma.
Bearing in mind this context, and perhaps unsurprisingly given the excessive and
shocking brutality of the events of the Second World War, an understanding of
the significance of the experience of trauma became an important component of
psychological, intellectual and artistic responses to the atrocity crimes of Nazism
in the immediate decades after 1945. This can be seen in Niederland’s 1961 study
of the psychological difficulties encountered by Norwegian Holocaust
survivors,10 as well as from the opposite perspective of the perpetrator nation in
Alexander and Margaret Mitscherlisch’s psychological analysis of West
Germany’s collective failures to ‘come to terms’ with its Nazi past.11 The release
of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) was also particularly significant in the
context of trauma studies, with Shoshana Felman interpreting it as a radical
experiment in the aesthetics of absence, trauma and voice which correlates closely
with the questions asked by psychoanalytic theory.12
While Lanzmann’s film is now perceived to embody a not unproblematic
canonical ideal of representation of trauma that stresses aporia, repetition and
disruption,4 the 1980s also witnessed the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus I:
My Father Bleeds History (1986). Provocative in its comic strip format which on
first glance seems the opposite of Lanzmann’s vision,13 the themes tackled in the
narrative of Maus nonetheless raised profound questions in relation to forms of
transferential trauma between Holocaust survivors and their children.
Spiegelman’s text engages with his father Vladek’s experiences of incarceration in
Nazi occupied Poland, his mother Anja’s suicide after the war, his brother
Richieu’s death during the war, and the author’s own psychological breakdown
as a young man. For these reasons, Maus I and its 1991 sequel Maus II remain two
10
William G. Niederland, “The Problem of the Survivor: The Psychiatric Evaluation of
Emotional Disorders in the Survivors of Nazi Persecution,” Journal of the Hillside Hospital 10
(1961): 233-247.
11
Alexander and Margaret Mitscherlisch, The Inability to Mourn, (New York: Grove Press, 1975).
12
For example, see Felman’s introduction in Claude Lanzmann, “The Obscenity of
Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed.
Cathy Caruth, (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 200-220, 201-204.
13
For a collection of critical approaches to Maus, see Deborah R. Geis, Considering Maus:
Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survivors Tale” of the Holocaust, (Tuscaloosa, AL: University
of Alabama Press, 2007).
5
Larissa Allwork
of the most moving and accessible texts on the psychology of ‘survivor guilt’ and
the transmission of inter-generational trauma.14
However, it was not until the 1990s and 2000s that there was a particular
flowering of trauma studies critical theory, literature and visual culture in
relation to the processes of researching and writing about the histories and
memories of the Holocaust. This outpouring of literature on the relationship
between trauma studies and the Holocaust included works as diverse as Caruth’s
important 1995 edited anthology Trauma: Explorations in Memory, which
explored the theoretical paradigm of trauma and its application to the fractured
memory of a number of painful and difficult individual and/or collective
experiences which have scarred the twentieth century including the Holocaust,
Hiroshima and Aids.
However, the literature on trauma has reached far beyond the boundaries of
analyzing the psychological damage experienced by survivors of the Holocaust.
In this sense, trauma theory has also concurred in shaping questions of the
narrative construction of Holocaust historiography, approaches to collective
memory studies, the representational form embraced by memorials to the
Holocaust, Nazi-era crimes and human rights abuses more broadly. In terms of
Holocaust historiography, Dominick LaCapra wrote a number of essays in the
1990s and 2000s on how in spite of professional historians’ aspirations towards
objectivity and balanced archival research, the processes of ‘Acting Out’ and
‘Working Through’ still have the potential to affect their narratives of historical
trauma in secondary ways associated with processes of ‘identification:’
In acting out, one relives the past as if one were the other, including oneself as
another in the past – one is fully possessed by the other or the other’s ghost; and
in working through, one tries to acquire some critical distance that allows one
to engage in life in the present, to assume responsibility – but that doesn’t mean
that you utterly transcend the past. It means that you come to terms with it in a
different way related to what you judge to be desirable possibilities that may
now be created, including possibilities that lost out in the past but may still be
14
Art Spiegelman, Maus: My Father Bleeds History, Vol. 1 – A Survivor’s Tale, (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1986); Art Spiegelman, Maus: And Here My Troubles Began, Vol. 2 – A
Survivor’s Tale, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991).
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QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
recaptured and reactivated, with significant differences in the present and
15
future.
Demonstrating the application of this approach in his book, Representing the
Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994), LaCapra analyzed two German
neo-conservative histories of the Third Reich published in the 1980s by two
members of the ‘Hitler Youth’ generation, Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber.
LaCapra perceived ‘denial,’ ‘acting out’ and the failure to ‘work through’ the
trauma of the Holocaust in Hillgruber’s portrayal of Eastern Front Nazi soldiers
as ‘victims,’16 as well as in Nolte’s controversial argument that the Holocaust was
an extreme version of Soviet terror and that the Nazis defended western
civilization by opposing the Bolshevik threat.17 LaCapra’s critique demonstrates
that the most ethically sound uses of trauma theory in relation to analyzing the
legacies of the perpetrators do not abuse trauma theory in order to obfuscate
responsibility for atrocity crimes; rather they seek to demonstrate how
intergenerational acceptance of the realities of perpetration can be difficult,
complex and ongoing processes.
However, it was not only in critical approaches to historiography that
psychoanalytic frameworks were impacting on the methodological and narrative
approach in established disciplines. For example, in the field of collective
memory studies of the Holocaust and Nazi-era crimes, the work of Henry
Rousso on The Vichy Syndrome, which was first published in 1987 but also
appeared in a post-1991 revised edition, drew in Richard J. Golsan’s words on
“the classic Freudian model of trauma, repression and the return of the
repressed.”18 This was in order to suggest that the French collective memory of
Vichy had moved through four distinct chronological phases since 1945:
‘Unfinished Mourning’ (1944-1954), ‘Repressions’ (1954-1971), “Broken Mirror”
(1970-1974), and “Obsessions” (1974 to the 1990s).
15
Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins
University Press, 2001), 147-148.
16
Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, (New York:
Cornell University Press, 1996), 51.
17
Ibid. 49.
18
Richard J. Golsan, “The Legacy of World War II in France: Mapping the Discourses of
Memory,” in The Politics of Memory in Post-War Europe, eds. Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner
and Richard Ned-Lebow, (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2006), 74.
7
Larissa Allwork
Moreover, trauma theory impacted also on the architecture of museums and
monuments. One of the key figures in relation to these developments in the
1990s and 2000s was the architect Daniel Libeskind, who commented that:
I think about trauma not only as an architect but also as someone who
was born in the post-Holocaust world, with two parents who were
themselves survivors of the Holocaust. The theme of culture and trauma,
the void and the experience of architecture can be talked about in
conceptual terms as well as expressed in concrete reality.19
In this way, Libeskind’s architecture investigates how the experience of trauma
can be represented and mapped onto the geographies, material spaces and urban
landscapes that resonate with collective memories of the Holocaust and Nazi-era
crimes. For example, a number of Libeskind’s architectural projects have been
fundamentally “structured by a void and by trauma,”20 including his
competition entry for the re-design of Alexanderplatz, Berlin, his realization of
Osnabrück’s Felix Nussbaum Haus (1993) as well as his engagement throughout
the 1990s with the memories of persecution and slave labor at Germany’s former
Sachsenhausen concentration camp complex. However, he is best known for his
realization of the architecture for the Jewish Museum in Berlin (2001). Bringing
questions of trauma to the scarred landscape of Germany’s re-united post-Cold
War metropolis,21 the museum itself is architecturally divided into a number of
pathways which are symbolic of the roads travelled by many members of Berlin’s
Jewish community in the twentieth century. These lead to the ‘Garden of Exile
and Emigration,’ the ‘Stair of Continuity’ or the chill starkness of the ‘Holocaust
Void.’22 The museum is also sliced by a jagged 150 meters long, 27 meters high,
4.5 meter wide void which disrupts the building and stands for Libeskind’s postHolocaust assessment that “Berlin was organized around a void and a star that no
longer shone. That star was assimilation, the total integration of Jews in
Berlin.”23
19
Daniel Libeskind, “Trauma,” in Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust,
eds. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobwitz, (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press,
2003), 43.
20
Ibid., 45.
21
Ibid., 43-58.
22
Ibid., 54-56.
23
Ibid., 56-57.
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Although the Jewish Museum was clearly designed in relation to Berlin’s specific
history, literature and cultural studies scholar Andreas Huyssen has pointed to
how Libeskind’s design may have influenced the fractured structure of the
Monument to the Victims of State Terror in Buenos Aires.24 The traces of
Libeskind’s style in this memorial to the desaparecidos or the estimated 30,000
citizens who endured state terror under the Argentinean military dictatorship
(1976-1983), has been used by Huyssen in order to inflect the intersection of
trauma studies and the iconographical study of public monuments with an
overtly transnational and comparative dimension.25 This is because Huyssen has
suggested that ‘memory screens’ of the Holocaust may be at work, or the Freudinspired idea that direct confrontation with local and national traumas can be
either heightened or displaced, depending on how they are mediated by
international discourses associated with the commemoration of the Holocaust.26
Indeed, the use of tropes primarily associated with Holocaust representations in
other symbolic depictions of collective experiences of trauma has resulted in
scholars such as Robert Eaglestone asking the provocative question as to whether
trauma theory would not be better known as ‘Holocaust theory’?27
Within this context of the Holocaust acting as a ‘memory screen’ in some
Argentine public art-works, a practice that takes on additional symbolic
resonance given the fact that Jewish activists were one of the groups targeted by
the dictatorship, Huyssen has also pointed to the practice of Argentine
photographer and installation artist Marcelo Brodsky. Brodsky is a member of
the Buena Memoria Human Rights Organization and the Pro-Monument to the
Victims of Terrorism Commission that oversaw the construction of the Memory
Park and the Monument to the Victims of State Terror in Buenos Aires.
Huyssen has observed how Brodsky’s practice has sometimes used symbolism
associated with Holocaust memorials in order to provoke remembrance and
discussion about human rights in the Argentine context. For example, Brodsky’s
photographs of Tucuman University’s “Bosque de la Memoria” (“Memory
Forest”), in which a tree has been planted and dedicated to each ‘disappeared’
individual in the region is interpreted by Huyssen as resonating with the
24
Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpests and the Politics of Memory, (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 105-109.
25
Ibid., 97.
26
Ibid., 99.
27
Robert Eaglestone, “Holocaust Theory,” in Teaching the Holocaust in Literature and Film,
eds. Robert Eaglestone and Barry Langford, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 28-36.
9
Larissa Allwork
iconography of Yad Vashem’s “Avenue of the Righteous among the Nations.”28
More directly, Brodsky has re-appropriated the list form of Berlin’s
Wittenbergplatz memorial “Places of terror we must never forget” (1967),
locating and photographing a similar sign in front of ESMA (the Naval School of
the Mechanics), a former Buenos Aires clandestine detention centre and now
human rights and remembrance site. Whereas the Berlin memorial lists a number
of Nazi extermination and concentration camps, Brodsky’s 2001 temporary
installation names former Argentine detention and torture centers.
While Huyssen uses the case of Brodsky to illustrate how the use of symbolism
associated with the Holocaust can act as “an international prism” that encourages
discussion of atrocities in other historical and geographical contexts,29 not all
commentators have been as positive about the transnational potentials of
Holocaust symbolism. This critique has not just come from Holocaust
“uniqueness” advocates, but also from those who are concerned that the
Holocaust is becoming problematically de-historicized or alternatively may
symbolically struggle to publically resonate in some regions of the world. For
example, Stef Craps has questioned the linking of contemporary discourses of
Holocaust memory with human rights activism in the works of scholars such as
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider. For Craps, rhetorical invocations of Holocaust
memory have not always been utilized in the service of human rights, specifically
within contexts such as the Israel/Palestine conflict and the Iraq war.30
Moreover, despite Michael Rothberg’s call for a ‘multidirectional memory,’31 a
number of postcolonial critics have suggested that the centering of the Holocaust
in trauma theory can be problematic if it uncritically reinforces the Eurocentricity of a particular paradigm of Western trauma theory. This Euro-centric
cultural paradigm of trauma theory has been criticized by among others Craps
and Irene Visser as important yet inadequate in many indigenous postcolonial
contexts. This is because of the tendency of Western models of trauma theory to
reject the importance of non-Western ritual and belief systems in dealing with
28
Andreas Huyssen, “The Mnemonic Art of Marcelo Brodsky,” in Nexo: A Photographic Essay
by Marcelo Brodsky, (Buenos Aires: la marca editora, 2001), 7-11.
29
Ibid., 7-11.
30
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age,
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 201; Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma
Out of Bounds, (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 77-79.
31
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
Decolonization, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 21-22.
10
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
individual and societal experiences and representations of trauma. It also relates
to the tendency of some Western models of trauma theory to fetishize
experiences and representational tropes that, stress ongoing aporia and
melancholia as opposed to an emphasis on recovery and recuperation through
the survivor’s strategies of narrativization and collective forms of social
activism.32
Part Two: Questioning Trauma Theory
The intellectual background of trauma theory was one of the key critical contexts
in which the study of ‘institutional’ memory embodied by HRNT was realized.
However, HRNT’s assessment of the causes and public impact of Swedish Prime
Minister Göran Persson’s global millennial conference on promoting Holocaust
research, remembrance and education initially seemed to problematize rather
than embrace the lessons of trauma theory. For as Wulf Kansteiner has
commented, one of the primary weaknesses of trauma theory for understanding
twenty-first century social and political interactions with Holocaust
representations is that it provides few “insights into the experiences of most of
our contemporaries who encounter the history of the Holocaust primarily as a
tool of education, entertainment or identity politics.”33 Moreover, as the analysis
moved to cover the importance of subsequent Stockholm conferences on
‘Combating Intolerance’ (2001), ‘Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation’ (2002) and
‘Preventing Genocide’ (2004), given Craps and Visser’s critique, the potential
Euro-centrism associated with many of the dominant melancholic paradigms of
trauma theory may have been of questionable value in analyzing certain speeches
and interviews. Indeed, interviews with genocide survivors Esther MujawayoKeiner (Rwanda) and Youk Chhang (Cambodia) in the Stockholm anthology
Beyond the ‘Never Agains’ are characterized by their speaker’s activism, desire for
redress and resilience.34 However, a useful avenue for further research would be
32
Visser, “Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies”: 270-282, 270-280; Stef Craps,
“Beyond Eurocentrism: Trauma theory in the global age,” in The Future of Trauma Theory:
Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, eds. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert
Eaglestone, (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 45-46.
33
Wulf Kansteiner, “Testing the limits of trauma: the long-term psychological effects of the
Holocaust on individuals and collectives,” History of the Human Sciences 17/2-3 (2004): 97-123,
99.
34
See interviews with Mujawayo-Keiner and Chhang in Eva Fried, Beyond the ‘Never Agains,’
(Stockholm: Swedish Government, 2006), 11-16 and 19-24. For an illuminating analysis of
testimony and issues associated with universalizing the PTSD construct, particularly in the case
11
Larissa Allwork
to consider how international events such as the SIF 2002 on ‘Truth, Justice and
Reconciliation’ may have contributed to the further institutionalization and
universalization of Western therapeutic discourses such as PTSD at the global
level.
The second way in which HRNT implied a critique of trauma theory was
through its interest in exploring possible Cold War global precursors for the SIF
2000 and the ITF as part of its historical critique of the heavy emphasis placed on
the post-1989 period as the engine of transnational Holocaust memory in Levy
and Sznaider’s ‘New Cosmopolitan’ interpretation.35 Scholars such as Hasia R.
Diner, David Cesarani, Eric J. Sundquist, Laura Jockusch, Roni Stauber, Michael
Rothberg and Kirsten Fermaglich have suggested the neglected importance of the
1940s and 1950s in fostering transnational, international, national and local
cultures of the remembrance of the Jewish Catastrophe and Nazi-era crimes. For
example, Diner has demonstrated how American Jewish individuals and
organizations contributed financially to the founding of the Centre De
Documentation Juive Contemporaine and Tomb of the Unknown Jewish
Martyr which was opened to the public in Paris (1956).36 This new
historiography has not only thrown into question the underlying assumption
that the 1950s were a relative period of ‘silence’ in relation to the commemoration
of the Holocaust which was structurally reproduced in works as diverse as Levy
and Sznaider’s, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (2006); Peter
Novick’s, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience
(1999); and most controversially, Norman Finkelstein’s, The Holocaust Industry
(2000), but has also eroded the psychoanalytically inflected historical narratives
of collective memory associated with scholars such as Henry Rousso.37 These
Rousso-style interpretations theoretically allied the constructed historical pattern
of ‘silence’ with ‘latency’ and ‘return of the repressed’ style narratives. This
pattern of ‘latency’/’return of the repressed’ has been expressed by LaCapra in
the following terms:
of descendents of the Cambodian genocide residing in Cambodia and Canada, see Carol A.
Kidron, “The Global Semiotics of Trauma and Testimony: A Comparative Study of Jewish
Israeli, Cambodian Canadian, and Cambodian Genocide Descendant Legacies,” in Marking Evil:
Holocaust Memory in the Global Age, eds. Amos Goldberg and Haim Hazan, (New York;
Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015), 146-170.
35
See HRNT, 140-143; Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age.
36
Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and with Love, (New York; London: New
York University Press, 2009), 30.
37
Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome.
12
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
As many people have pointed out, right after the events there was a rush of
memoirs and diaries, and then it all sort of died down for a long period of time
– what is tempting to interpret as a period of latency after a traumatic series of
events. One of the reasons is that survivors found - in different countries, for
different reasons – that they didn’t have an audience that they didn’t have
38
people who wanted to listen to them.
This assessment of a possible ‘latency’ period after the Holocaust in various
nation states sits uneasily with the findings of scholars such as Alan Rosen and
Rachel Deblinger who have touched on the continued American funding in the
1950s of David Boder’s 1946 series of interviews with survivors in Europe’s DP
Camps,39 or Michael Rothberg’s assessment that from the late 1940s until today
there has been a sometimes culturally ‘underground’ but ever present tradition
of decolonized Holocaust memory in Western and non-Western societies.40
Moreover, it seems to especially conflict with David G. Roskies’ analysis of
Yiddish and Hebrew communal forms of memory, which highlights the
anthologies, diaries, memoirs, memorial books and novels created by amongst
others Ka-Tzetnik (Yehiel Diner), Zvi Kolitz, Leyb Rochman, Mordechai Strigler
and Abraham Sutzkever in the 1940s and 1950s.41 What emerges particularly
strongly from Roskies’ work is a picture of an often forgotten cultural history of
the immediate post-war era, or the fact that, as David Cesarani described it,
“Scholarship in Yiddish flourished. However, the precipitous decline of Yiddish
and the contraction of language competency closed off much of this source
material, finally creating the illusion that it had never even existed.”42
Thus, while Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has recently reasserted the ‘latency’ thesis
with reference to post-war Germany,43 significant immediate post-war discussion
38
LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 158.
Alan Rosen, ‘“We know very little in America’: David Boder and un-belated testimony,” in
After the Holocaust, ed. David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist, 102-114; Rachel Deblinger, “David
P. Boder: Holocaust memory in Displaced Persons camps,” After the Holocaust, ed. David
Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist, 115-126.
40
Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 22.
41
David G. Roskies, “Dividing the ruins: communal memory in Yiddish and Hebrew,” in After
the Holocaust, eds. David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist, 82-101.
42
Cesarani, “Introduction,” After the Holocaust, ed. David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist, 1-14,
11-12.
43
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, After 1945: Latency as the Origin of the Present, (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2013).
39
13
Larissa Allwork
of the Jewish Catastrophe and Nazi-era crimes was carried out by a considerable
number of Jewish survivors, liberal intellectuals and those engaged in the politics
of decolonization. The problem was that sometimes this multi-lingual discourse
fell on the ‘deaf ears’ of mainstream Western societies. Nonetheless, even when it
comes to Germany, it can be inferred from studies such as a Dagmar Herzog’s
analysis of sexual politics and the memory of Nazism after 1945 that this
perceived lack of mainstream public chatter about the charnel house of the
Second World War was nonetheless pregnant with deeper discursive meaning.
For Herzog, the German churches’ advocacy of sexual sobriety during the 1950s
was intimately intertwined with post-war religious discourses about Nazism
which suggested that the movement’s broader criminal immorality could not be
disconnected from those Third Reich policies that had permitted promiscuity
and illegitimacy.44 Rebelling against their upbringing and drawing on alternative
post-war intellectual movements such as the Frankfurt School, many members of
the German generation of 1968 would argue the opposite: that it was sexual
repression that enhanced the Nazi regime’s propensity for violence.45 Whilst
perpetrator motivations are not the central concern of this article, this example
from Herzog is relevant because it suggests that historians should listen hard to
the alleged ‘silence’ of the 1950s as the legacies of the Holocaust and Nazi-era
atrocities have the potential to reveal themselves in the most unlikely of places.
Part 3: Rediscovering Trauma Theory
Despite these limitations of some aspects of trauma theory for HRNT, specific
examples of research, interviewing and teaching demonstrated the ongoing
relevance of trauma theory for this project. The first example relates to
encounters with what Lebow might call the ‘individual’ memories of survivors.
Bearing in mind Friedländer’s ideas in relation to the construction of historical
narratives, survivor perspectives were integrated into my analysis of the historical
significance of the SIF 2000 and the ITF British/Lithuanian ‘Liaison Project.’
This included using pre-existing material by survivors on the significance of the
conference (eg. Hédi Fried, Irena Veisaite, Joseph Levinson), speaking to
Lithuanian Holocaust survivor Rachel Kostanian, as well as conducting new
semi-structured interviews with Holocaust survivors, education activists and
44
Dagmar Herzog, “‘Pleasure, Sex and Politics Belong Together’: Post-Holocaust Memory and
the Sexual Revolution in Germany,” Critical Inquiry 24/2 (1998): 393-444, 397.
45
Ibid., 397-398.
14
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
members of the British SIF 2000 delegation Ben Helfgott and Kitty HartMoxon.46
Although aware that survivor accounts are fundamentally shaped by their
context of recall and while semi-structured interviews were always prepared for
in the same way (research about the interviewee; preparation of questions;
production of an informed consent form), dialogues with survivors were
nonetheless always remarkable and took on a dynamic of their own. For as Laub
has noted in relation to the importance of listening and acknowledging camp
experiences to the recovery of Holocaust survivors, in the moment of the
dialogue “the interviewer has to be... both unobstrusive, nondirective, and yet
imminently present, active, in the lead.”47 While these interviews were quite
different to Laub’s in the sense that the interviewer was neither a Holocaust
survivor nor a trained psychoanalyst, a situation which allowed the narrator to
speak “as an expert about his or her own experience,”48 themes relating to trauma
and how survivors coped with it were either addressed by direct interview
questions or developed organically as the interview progressed. Drawing
potential parallels with Laub’s interview with a female survivor of the
Auschwitz-Birkenau ‘Kanada’ commando, which detailed the horrors
experienced as well as the extraordinary occurrence of the Auschwitz uprising in
the autumn of 1944,49 one of the most powerful moments was when HartMoxon was asked about how she had coped with the atrocities that she had
witnessed during her incarceration in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Like Laub’s
interviewee, Hart-Moxon had also worked in ‘Kanada,’ where the confiscated
possessions of those who were gassed were sorted for delivery to Germany. As a
result, Hart-Moxon had been within short distance of the gas chambers between
March 1944 and mid-October 1944. Of her experiences, she recalled:
We just saw people going in, all the time columns going in, more people
coming from the trains and going in, that’s all you saw, all day long and
all night. That went on 24 hours a day. But it just didn’t go into your
head that you had all of these people going into a building and they
46
HRNT, 65-66, 117, 124.
Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” Testimony: Crises of
Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub,
(Oxford; New York: Routledge, 1992), 71.
48
Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, (Basingstoke; New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 42.
49
Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” 59-63.
47
15
Larissa Allwork
never came out. And you heard them scream and you saw the fire, and
you saw the smoke, but you couldn’t believe...It just isn’t something
that your brain can accept. And that’s why it’s so difficult for people to
understand it. If I couldn’t take it in when I was watching it, how can
people today understand it? It’s difficult isn’t it? I knew it was
happening but you made yourself believe that it wasn’t happening. You
didn’t want to know. And when your friends said, “Look what’s going
on” and you said, “I don’t want to look. I don’t want to see it.” But it
was all around you of course. I mean the smoke came all down. At
times it was all black, all the smoke and debris coming down from the
chimneys. But you just couldn’t accept...yet you saw the ash come out,
and you saw the corpses being heaped up at the side of the gas chamber
and you saw all of the tins of gas and you could smell the gas very often,
because sometimes they opened up the gas chambers too soon. You
could actually smell it. But you simply couldn’t get it into your head
that all these people were dying. You just couldn’t. I think it is more
than your brain can accept. Most people would tell you, they couldn’t
take it in. That was presumably just to protect yourself, because if you
could take it in, you would commit suicide. And quite a lot of the
Sonderkommando people did commit suicide.50
Overwhelming and horrifying, Hart-Moxon’s testimony of Birkenau stresses not
the single, shocking wounding event nor the experiences of amnesia and
unspeakability central to Caruth-inspired readings of trauma narratives. Rather,
what is striking about her testimony is the atrocious daily repetition of violence
and its cumulative wounding assault on her senses of comprehension, hearing,
vision and smell. Here Joshua Pederson’s recent rethinking of trauma narratives,
building on the work of psychologist Richard McNally is illuminating. McNally
has argued that trauma is describable and may even lead to more heightened
memories characterized by “disassociative alterations in consciousness (time
slowing down, everything seeming unreal).”51 Consequently, and contesting the
Caruth-inspired trauma theory orthodoxy of the 1990s, Pederson argues that in
terms of analyzing trauma narratives, scholars should “turn their focus from gaps
in text to the text itself,”52 pay close attention to “narrative detail” and analyze
50
Kitty Hart-Moxon, “Kitty Hart-Moxon interviewed by Larissa Allwork,” Unpublished
Transcript, interview date: 19 August 2013.
51
Richard McNally, Remembering Trauma, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 182.
52
Joshua Pederson, “Speak Trauma: Towards a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma
Theory,” Narrative 22/3 (October 2014): 333-353, 338.
16
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
“depictions of experiences that are temporally, physically or ontologically
distorted.”53 Thus, the paradox can exist that while Hart-Moxon repeatedly
claims that her experience of Auschwitz was more than her mind could process,
she nonetheless can still, in Pederson’s terms, “speak trauma” in all its sensorial
detail, from the sounds of the death camp to the stench emitted by the chimneys
of Birkenau.
Hart-Moxon was also asked about the processes associated with the writing of
her memoirs Return to Auschwitz (1981), and in particular her first book, I am
Alive (1961).54 Hart-Moxon completed I am Alive in breaks and gaps of time that
she grasped from working in an X-Ray department in the UK after the war.
Unlikely as it may seem, it could be argued that this splintered process of writing
ended up being an important part of helping her find a mechanism of dealing
with the traumatic events of Birkenau that were so powerfully described during
the interview:
I just managed to switch. I just learned to switch. And I think that was
actually good for me. Because I learned to switch off. Which I can do
now. It actually trained me to do this switching off, this switching over.
So, immediately a phone rang and I had to go and x-ray this patient, I
just left everything and I went back to my work. Because I had to do it.
If I wouldn’t have had to do it, I probably couldn’t have done it, I
think. There was nobody else in this x-ray department, I was on duty,
my casualty was there and I had to cope with it. So, I think, it goes back
to what Auschwitz taught you, which is to cope...with extraordinary
situations and you just learn to cope. But that’s what it actually taught
you, you need to cope with whatever life’s going to throw at you. And I
think that’s what happens, or at least that’s what happened to me.55
Writing and learning to ‘switch’ from the pain of the past to reclaim agency in
the present, thus seems an important part of Hart-Moxon’s rebuilding of her life
after 1945, though her approach should not be perceived as a normative coping
strategy for all survivors of genocide. For as Anne Karpf, daughter of Holocaust
survivor Natalia Kapf has written in her February 2014 Guardian article on the
53
Ibid., 339.
Kitty Hart-Moxon, I am Alive, (London; New York: Abelard Schuman, 1961); Kitty HartMoxon, Return to Auschwitz, (London; Toronto; Sydney; New York: Granada Books, 1983).
55
Hart-Moxon, “Kitty Hart-Moxon interviewed by Larissa Allwork.”
54
17
Larissa Allwork
passing away of survivor of Theresienstadt, concert pianist and relentless
optimist Alice Herz-Somner:
Herz-Somner was remarkable, we’ll never know what enabled her to
manage her traumas with such optimism, or why she was able to feel
such profound gratitude towards life. But we should never hold her up
as an ideal towards which all traumatised people should aspire. Nor
should we apply the psychobabble concept of closure to genocide –
when reams of historical evidence – from the Armenian genocide to the
Holocaust – show unequivocally that many traumas cannot be
processed in the lifetime of the individuals who underwent them, and
indeed are passed on to successive generations.56
The second way in which trauma theory connects to work arising from HRNT is
based on the observations of Felman in relation to the transmission of memory
through the ‘institutional’ context of undergraduate teaching, although in
contrast to Felman, here the Holocaust related pedagogy focused on history,
memory and testimony rather than literature and testimony. In her essay on
‘Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,’ Felman described the
exceptional responses provoked by exhibiting two films of survivor testimony in
her Yale class for “Literature and Testimony.” According to Felman the showing
of the video testimonies instigated a kind of crisis in the classroom which was
marked by a silence within the seminar alongside a profusion of discussion
outside of the class.57 Following a consultation with Laub about this situation,
Felman decided that this contagiousness of trauma in turn required ‘working
through’ via the means of an address to the class by Felman and an assignment
that called for the students to express their understanding of encountering the
testimonies. For Felman, this process of “creating in the class the highest state of
crisis that it could withstand, without ‘driving the students crazy,’” reflected her
“job as a teacher.”58 Given the changing economics of British higher education
since 2010’s Browne report and current debates on US campuses about the need
for ‘trigger warnings’ in relation to potentially explicit or disturbing material on
56
Anne Karpf, “Alice Herz-Somner is not a one person truth, justice and reconciliation
commission,” The Guardian, February 25, 2014.
57
Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Testimony: Crises of
Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub,
(Oxford; New York: Routledge, 1992), 42-56.
58
Ibid., 53.
18
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
university syllabuses,59 the idea of taking Felman’s principles of ‘crisis’ into the
university seminar room seems increasingly institutionally problematic. This
poses important questions for Holocaust educators as they probe the limits of
pedagogy in the neo-liberal classroom.
No experiences encountered on this project have been as dramatic as Felman’s
and it is important to bear in mind LaCapra’s criticism that it is dangerous “to
obscure the difference between victims of traumatic historical events, and others
not directly experiencing them.”60 However, teaching the Holocaust does
present the tutor with some specific challenges,61 which have been outlined in
detail by Holocaust and genocide educationalists such as Paul Salmons and
Matthias Haß.62 These are not just in relation to the presence of ‘identity
politics’ in the seminar room, but also relate to student responses which might be
found on other courses but which are arguably intensified by the emotive,
violent and provocative subject matter associated with studying the Holocaust,
Nazi-era crimes and genocides. For example, throughout a course taught in 2011
there were instances where, despite class members’ distance from the events being
studied (no student said that they had lost a relative in the Holocaust, through
the Nazi terror system or as a result of any other genocide), the material on
display nonetheless occasionally evoked painful personal memories in students
which threatened to surface in class. For example, one mature student excused
themselves from a seminar on memorialization and restitution because it
reminded them of recent struggles in relation to a very close personal
bereavement; while another worried that they might break down during their
end of term presentation because of the recent death of a close relative. ‘Acting
Out’ or an over-identification with the suffering of the victims is a misleading
conflation and too strong a term for these encounters. However, it is arguable
that the themes of death, bereavement and loss which are entwined with the
study of the Holocaust can be challenging for some students. Here the delimited
use of ‘trigger warnings’ could be helpful, but only within the context that it is
59
Jennifer Medina, “Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm,” The New
York Times, May 17, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/us/warning-the-literary-canoncould-make-students-squirm.html?_r=0 [accessed August 4, 2016].
60
LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, ix.
61
This refers to teaching carried out on the BA History module ‘The Holocaust and its Histories’
in the spring term of 2011 at the University of Northampton.
62
Paul Salmons and Matthias Haß, “Comparing genocide in the classroom: challenges and
opportunities,” in Holocaust Education in a Global Context, eds. Karel Fracapane and Matthias
Haß, (Paris: UNESCO, 2014), 105-111.
19
Larissa Allwork
understood that as suggested by Stef Craps, a degree of productive discomfort is
central to the pedagogical and educational experience of studying the Holocaust
and genocides at university level.63
Third, despite the limitations discussed, certain elements of trauma theory can
still be particularly germane in thinking about aspects of what Lebow might call
‘collective’ memory, in particular in offering a critical framework for beginning
to unpick discourses of communal identity politics. For example, LaCapra’s
highlighting of the dangers of stereotyping and the need to challenge pre-existing
paradigms of identity politics holds particular resonance for the representation of
my authorship in a community newsletter following an invited lecture on the
British/Lithuanian ‘Liaison Project’ for the Northampton Hebrew
Congregation in February 2012. Although a low-key local event for a small,
regional Jewish community organization in the UK, the audience for this event
nonetheless shows how in Raphael Samuel’s terms history is a “social form of
knowledge”64 produced not only in academia’s ‘ivory towers’ but also in family
and communal circles. What happens when these two worlds intersect is the
subject of this short analysis.
This lecture was based on HRNT’s research on British/Lithuanian intercultural
efforts to promote Holocaust, research, remembrance and education in the late
1990s and early 2000s.65 A review of the lecture contained the following quote:
Dr Allwork pointed out that the Lithuanians believed themselves to be
the victims of Nazi persecution, as they had been under both the Nazi
and Soviet yoke. The Lithuanian nation is ultra-nationalistic, and as Dr
Allwork pointed out, the link between Communism and Nazism seems
to be embedded in their psyche.66
63
Stef Craps, Bryan Cheyette, Alan Gibbs, Sonya Andermahr and Larissa Allwork,
“Decolonizing Trauma Studies Round-Table Discussion,” Humanities 4/4 (2015): 905-923, 916.
64
Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, (London:
Verso. 1994), 8.
65
Chapter four of HRNT, 111-132. An initial version appeared as Larissa Allwork, “Intercultural
Legacies of the International Task Force: Lithuania and the British at the Turn of the
Millennium,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 19/2 (2013): 91-124.
66
Northampton Hebrew Congregation, “Northampton Hebrew Congregation News 2012.”
20
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
The use of stereotypes in this description was perplexing and a letter was
addressed to the congregation, clarifying my position.67 What provoked my
response was the use of stereotypes in the article. The talk had certainly been
critical of specific failures by the Lithuanian state to deal with the legacies of the
Nazi past as well as continuing expressions of ultra-nationalism by some
individuals and groups within Lithuania. The lecture was also strongly critical of
comparative approaches towards the Nazi and Soviet regimes that do not
increase historical knowledge of the similarities and differences between these
two ‘totalitarian’ systems, but rather serves a perturbing agenda of blaming all
Lithuanian Jews for the Soviet occupation during the Second World War, with
the intent of downplaying the responsibility of Lithuanian collaborators in the
Holocaust.
However, using essentializing terms such as ‘psyche’ or stereotyping the
Lithuanian state in 2012 as ‘ultra-nationalistic’ was both inaccurate and
ultimately unhelpful in encouraging constructive dialogues between
Lithuanians, Jews living in Lithuania and Lithuanian Jews living in the wider
world and Israel. Admittedly, authorial intentions in the synagogue review are
impossible to locate. It cannot be known if the reviewer’s comments were based
on a misunderstanding of me, my failure to communicate effectively or a simple
slip in the reviewer’s writing style. In any case, LaCapra’s assessment of the pain
of traumatic pasts, the challenges of working beyond entrenched subject
positions and moving towards new dialogues seems pertinent: “I think that one
of the great problems in research is that there is a grid of subject positions, and
through processes of identification or excessive objectification, one remains in
that grid.”68
This article has reflected on trauma theory as a key context and intellectual
horizon line for the research underpinning HRNT. It has been suggested that
the limitations of trauma theory for the scholar of the history of collective
remembrance are all too apparent. This is particularly due to the Euro-centricity
of trauma theory in global comparative approaches, the dangers of front-loading
melancholic trauma theory, as well as the limitations of constructing
psychoanalytic narratives of national and communal pasts that simplify the
diverse remembrance practices of the Shoah in the 1940s and 1950s. As Robert
67
It was requested that this letter be distributed to members of the congregation although it has
not appeared on the organization’s web-page. A copy of this letter can be found in the University
of Northampton’s online NECTAR research database.
68
LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 175.
21
Larissa Allwork
Moeller has pithily noted, there are key “methodological challenges involved in
putting an entire nation on the couch.”69 Nonetheless, this article has also
suggested that the lessons of a revised and self-reflexive trauma theory remain
relevant, holding important analytical possibilities for scholars working at the
intersections of the over-lapping public and private spheres of ‘individual,’
‘collective’ and ‘institutional’ memory.
______________
Larissa Allwork is an Impact Fellow at the AHRC Centre for Hidden Histories based at
the University of Nottingham. She is also an Honorary Associate Fellow at the Stanley
Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Leicester, UK.
How to quote this article:
Larissa Allwork, “Interrogating Europe’s Voids of Memory: Trauma Theory and
Holocaust Remembrance between the National and the Transnational,” in Holocaust
Intersections in 21st-Century Europe, eds. Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra, Quest.
Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, n. 10 December
2016
url: www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=382
69
Robert Moeller in Doris Bergen, Volker Berghahn, Robert Moeller, Dirk Moses and Dorothea
Wierling, “The Changing Legacy of 1945: A Round-Table Discussion,” German History 23/4
(2005): 519-546, 528.
22
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
Remembering and Forgetting:
the Holocaust in 21st Century Britain
by Kara Critchell
Abstract
This article explores the politics of Holocaust memorialization by examining the
intersection of education, commemoration and national identity in 21st-century Britain
since the inaugural Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001. The article shows how
institutionalized spheres have intersected with contemporary cultural discourse
surrounding questions of civic morality, immigration and the memory of other
genocides. The main argument put forward is that the way in which the Holocaust has
been indelibly associated with these issues has both implicitly and explicitly connected
Holocaust discourse to contemporary debates on what constitutes British identity in the
21st century. The article also suggests that highly domesticated narratives of the period
are often used to promote a self-congratulatory notion of British identity and supposed
British exceptionalism.
Introduction
Holocaust Memorial Day: “Too Much History”?
Education and Holocaust Memorialization
An Absence of Intersections? Britishness and the Kindertransport
European Holocaust Consciousness or Domesticated Holocaust Identity?
Conclusion
__________________
Introduction
“The world has lost a great man. We must never forget Sir Nicholas Winton’s
humanity in saving so many children from the Holocaust.”1
“MPs have voted against an attempt to compel the Government to offer
sanctuary in the UK to 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees from Europe.”2
1
David Cameron cited in Adam Withnall and Paul Gallagher, “Sir Nicholas Winton: Britain’s
Oskar Schindler,” The Independent, July 1, 2015.
2
Alexandra Sims, “Immigration Bill: MPs Vote Against Child Refugee Amendment,” The
Independent, April 25, 2016.
23
Kara Critchell
The latter part of the 20th century had borne witness to a heightened engagement
with the Holocaust in British political and public debates. With the
establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) on 27 January 2001, Britain
entered a new phase in the development of its Holocaust consciousness. Since
then, Britain has sought to position itself at the very forefront of Holocaust
remembrance and education on a national, international, and supranational
level.3 As such, the Holocaust has emerged as a dominant socio-political symbol
in 21st century Britain despite the fact that, as Bob Moore has highlighted, “the
Holocaust intersects with British history in very few ways.”4 This article will
discuss the increasingly central role of Holocaust commemoration and education
in 21st century Britain and its impact not only on the conceptualization of this
historical event, but also on broader interpretations of British identity.
Given the increasing presence of the Holocaust in British historical
consciousness, there are multiple intersections which could be discussed in order
to ascertain how the various threads of Holocaust remembrance affect 21st
Century Britain. The intersection of education and commemoration is certainly
one of the defining features of Holocaust institutionalization within Britain to
the extent that Holocaust pedagogy and the politics of commemoration cannot
be analyzed separately notwithstanding their supposed differences. Reflecting on
their similarities the article will show how these institutionalized spheres have
intersected with contemporary cultural discourse surrounding questions of civic
morality, immigration and the memory of other genocides. The article argues
that the way in which the Holocaust has intersected with these issues has both
implicitly and explicitly connected Holocaust discourse to contemporary debates
on what constitutes British identity in the 21st century. The main argument is
that a domesticated and at times rather mythical narrative of events situated at an
“experiential and geographical distance” are often used to promote a selfcongratulatory notion of past and present British identity.5
The growing inter-dependence between education and commemoration means
that they intersect in a myriad of ways both reflecting and reinforcing the
3
FCO, Envoy on Post-Holocaust Issues Submits Report on Holocaust education in the UK, 15
December, 2010; FCO, “ITF Country Report of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland,” October, 2012, 1; Holocaust Commission, Britain’s Promise to Remember:
The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report, January, 2015, 9.
4
Bob Moore, “Should More be Done to Remember the Holocaust in Britain?” History Extra,
(February 2014), http://www.historyextra.com/...holocaust-britain, [accessed April 18 2016].
5
Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, (New York: Routledge, 2014),
25.
24
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
meaning of, and supposed messages from, the Holocaust that each project. These
meanings and messages domesticate and decontextualize the Holocaust in
popular understandings and in so doing they help to develop and re-orientate a
conceptualization of an inherent British identity that has existed in various forms
since before the Second World War had even begun. Charting the increasing
prominence of the Holocaust in British commemorative culture, education and
political discourse this article will show how interpretations of the historical
event are becoming ever more central in the continuing quest for a positive
British identity in the post-imperial age. In a global community in which
Britain’s influence has been steadily diminished this reconfiguration of identity
encourages the British people to retain a sense of moral authority based on
allusions to supposed stoicism, unity and heroism. This narrative not only draws
heavily on the Second World War but, increasingly, on the Holocaust as an event
which is the antithesis of what it means to be British. Pace Sharon MacDonald’s
assertion that "self-definition in contrast to national others - though it still goes
on - has become less advisable in an era of increased global communication, trade
and supra-national organizations,” it is apparent that self-definition based on
contrast as opposed to shared experience is still an integral ingredient in
contemporary constructions of British identity.6 The centrality of the Holocaust
in British consciousness and this self-definition through contrast entwines
Britain closer into European history while at the same time distancing her from
the Holocaust and the continent in which it took place. This ideological distance
thus reinforces a post-imperial sense of British exceptionalism built on moral
values that are deemed in some way to be exclusively ‘British’.
Holocaust Memorial Day: “Too Much History”?
When discussing the commemoration of Yom HaShoah in 1997, one British
journalist observed that the “desire to commemorate the Holocaust is so acute
that Jews have a special day set aside on which to do so.”7 This short article
concluded with the reflections of William D. Rubinstein that the Holocaust
“was such a traumatic, central event in modern Jewish history that if anything
there is more of a desire to commemorate it, not less. It’s more real to modern
6
Sharon Macdonald, “Commemorating the Holocaust: Reconfiguring National Identity in the
Twenty-First Century,” in The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of Race, eds. Jo Littler and
Roshi Naidoo, (Abdingdon: Routledge, 2005), 49-68; 55.
7
C. Garner, “Rabbi calls for end to Holocaust Memorial Day,” The Independent, October 20,
1997.
25
Kara Critchell
people than events of biblical times.”8 Although recognizing the need for
members of the Jewish community to commemorate the Holocaust this article
offered no suggestion that a day devoted to Holocaust remembrance was
necessary for wider British society. The fact that this was not mentioned is
indicative of the place of the Holocaust in British culture in the 1990s. It was not
that the British people were unaware of the Holocaust or its significance, nor was
it the case that they were callously indifferent. It was more that the event itself
remained on the margins of mainstream society and culture. This is not the space
to explore the changing shape of British engagement with the Holocaust in the
post-war years but, in essence, it can be said that “awareness of and interest in the
Holocaust was generally confused and contradictory, fluctuant and turbid” in
the decades following 1945.9 That being said the early years of the 1990s had been
marked by an increasing engagement with the Holocaust and the decade bore
witness to an evolution in the development of British Holocaust consciousness.
The culmination of a variety of factors including the success of Schindler’s List
and the multitude of public acts of remembrance which had taken place across
the country in 1995 to mark the fiftieth anniversaries of the liberation of the
camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen all encouraged greater
awareness of the genocide. Nonetheless, the Holocaust was commemorated as
part of a more holistic memory of the Second World War, often projected
through the lens of British moral superiority and accompanied by allusions to
the myth of societal cohesion and accolades to British heroism in the face of
German tyranny. In short, the Second World War, not the Holocaust, was the
central focus of the fiftieth anniversaries.10 This was, however, soon to change
when the inaugural Holocaust Memorial Day took place on 27 January 2001.
The establishment of the day marked the biggest shift towards a sustained and
deliberate institutional engagement with the Holocaust since the subject became
a mandatory part of the National Curriculum for British Secondary Schools in
1991.
The creation of the day itself certainly “followed an international trend” towards
more coordinated commemoration of the Holocaust.11 Despite the clear
8
Rubinstein as cited in Ibid.
Andy Pearce and Kara Critchell, “Holocaust Consciousness in Britain” (paper presented at the
University of Winchester, February 12, 2015).
10
Mark Donnelly, “We Should do Something for the Fiftieth: Remembering Auschwitz, Belsen
and the Holocaust in Britain in 1995,” in Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and
Representing War and Genocide, eds. Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen, (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), 171-189; 172.
11
Nira Yuval-Davis and Max Silverman, “Memorializing the Holocaust in Britain,” Ethnicities,
9
26
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
influence of European and international engagement with the Holocaust on the
evolution of British Holocaust consciousness, however, Britain did not simply
import transnational trends in Holocaust education and commemoration. Such
“reductionist interpretations” are, as Andy Pearce rightly states, “fundamentally
flawed” and imply indifference or apathy in Britain towards developing its own
institutionalized Holocaust consciousness.12 Contrary to such interpretations the
day emerged as a result of interweaving international and domestic influences
including lobbying by interested parties, burgeoning political interest within the
Labour Party and Government, and the domestic turn towards civic morality
and multicultural ideals. To suggest that the nation state is the sole mediator and
container of the past is, as Levy and Sznaider observe, “a breathtakingly
unhistorical assertion” and it is certainly not the intention of this article to
suggest otherwise.13 Whilst transnationalism and the so-called ‘cosmopolitan
memory’ have certainly helped in shaping Holocaust discourse in 21st century
Britain this trend is still in what Emiliano Perra describes as the “embryonic”
stage of development.14 As Jean Marc Dreyfus suggests, in the end “Holocaust
memory is in fact only superficially globalized. Each country actually
renationalizes it” and, as such, is still in essence continually being shaped by
national considerations and interpretations of identity.15
2/1, (March 2002): 107-123; 107.
12
Andy Pearce, “The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain,”
Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 14/2 (2008): 71-94; 72. Due to the
limitations of space I am unable to offer a full discussion of the interplay between these
international developments and their influence on the domestic landscape of Holocaust
remembrance. For further information on this and the role of the Stockholm International
Forum see Andy Pearce, “Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day: Inculcating ‘British’ or ‘European’
Holocaust Consciousness?” in Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War
and Genocide, eds. Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013),
190-211; and Larissa Allwork, Holocaust Remembrance between the National and the
Transnational: The Stockholm International Forum and the First Decade of the International
Task Force, (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
13
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of
Cosmopolitan Memory,” European Journal of Social Theory, 5/1, (2002): 87-106; 89.
14
Emiliano Perra, “Between National and Cosmopolitan: Twenty-First Century Holocaust
Television in Britain, France and Italy,” in Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture
in the New Millennium, eds. Axel Bangert, Robert S. C. Gordon and Libby Saxton, (London:
Maney Publishing, 2013), 24-45; 25.
15
Jean-Marc Dreyfus, “Battle in Print: Deshistoricising the Holocaust: Remembrance and the
Abandonment of History,” October 19, 2010, http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/...5404, [accessed
January 7, 2016].
27
Kara Critchell
Scholars’ reactions to the announcement of a day of Holocaust remembrance
varied. David Cesarani, who later became a founding trustee of the Holocaust
Memorial Day Trust, emphasized the inherent value in having a day in the
national calendar that could act as “contested terrain for interpretations of the
Holocaust and genocide.”16 Others, most notably Donald Bloxham, Dan Stone
and Tony Kushner, were far more wary about the lack of confrontation with
some of the more difficult questions associated with the day, including amongst
others the failure to address the issue of Britain’s own colonial past.17
Tensions and conflicts surrounding the day were also to enter the public and
political spheres before the inaugural ceremony in what Yair Auron describes as
“a particularly stormy controversy” over the exclusion of victims of the
Armenian genocide from the commemorative program.18 The omission of any
reference to Armenia in the conceptualization of the day was quickly noted by
journalist Robert Fisk who referred to the exclusion as an act of “sheer political
cowardice” on the part of the British government.19 Initial efforts by the AngloArmenian community to be represented during the first Holocaust Memorial
Day came to no avail but interest in, and growing criticism of, the absence of
Armenia gained momentum in the national press. Reflecting growing public
interest in this decision, representatives from the Home Office were asked during
a House of Commons debate in November 2000 whether the Government
would include any reference to the massacre of Armenians during the
commemoration of the Holocaust Memorial Day. The Minister of State for
Immigration, Mike O’Brien reiterated the government’s line that:
Holocaust Memorial Day is focused on learning the lessons of the Holocaust
and other more recent atrocities that raise similar issues. We took a conscious
decision to focus on events around the Holocaust and thereafter, although we
16
David Cesarani, “Seizing the Day: Why Britain Will Benefit from Holocaust Memorial Day,”
Patterns of Prejudice, 34/4, (2000): 61-66; 66. See also David Cesarani, “Does the Singularity of
the Holocaust make it Incomparable and Inoperative for Commemorating, Studying and
Preventing Genocide? Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day as Case Study,” The Journal of
Holocaust Education, 10/2, (Autumn 2001): 40-56.
17
Donald Bloxham, “Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Days: Reshaping the Past in the Service of
the Present,” Immigrants & Minorities, 21/1-2, (2002): 41-62; Tony Kushner, “Too Little, Too
Late? Reflections on Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day,” Journal of Israeli History, 23/1, (2004):
116-129, Dan Stone, “Day of Remembrance or Day of Forgetting? Or, Why Britain Does Not
Need a Holocaust Memorial Day,” Patterns of Prejudice, 34/4, (2000): 53-59.
18
Yair Auron, The Pain of Knowledge: Holocaust and Genocide Issues in Education, (New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2005), 100.
19
Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest for the Middle East, (London:
Harper Collins, 2005), 423.
28
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
did examine requests to consider the atrocities and other events that preceded
the Holocaust… It is always difficult to draw a line and wherever it is drawn it
20
runs the risk of being misinterpreted.
Nonetheless, for many the marginalization of the genocide undermined the
entire ethos of a day commemorating the Holocaust. Mark Levene attributed
this lack of inclusion and the British government’s persistent failure to recognize
the Armenian genocide to “the government’s current political sensitivities, not
only with regard to any direct relationship with Turkey but, much more
profoundly, as a result of the complex set of interconnections enmeshing Britain
within the Atlantic alliance.”21 Levene’s interpretation that present-day political
concerns took precedence over the legitimate acknowledgement and
commemoration of the Armenian genocide was shown to be justified after the
release of a Foreign Office memorandum stating that whilst the British
government would be "open to criticism in terms of the ethical dimension [,]
recognizing the genocide would provide no practical benefit to the UK"
particularly in light of the importance of the British relationship with Turkey.22
In an attempt to deflect growing anger from interested parties, a small number of
representatives from the Armenian community were invited to attend the
inaugural ceremony “after the event was seen to be in danger of descending into
an unseemly row over recognition between different groups.”23 It was also agreed
that the “massacre of Armenians” could be referred to by the BBC and within the
ceremony itself.24 Armenia, however, has remained a topic of debate over the
years, particularly in 2015 with the centenary of the event. In response to the
heightened arguments surrounding Britain’s lack of recognition of this genocide,
rather euphemistically dubbed as the Armenian “tragedy,” the British
Government shifted its position preferring to account for this lack of
engagement by suggesting that:
…the British Government recognise as genocide only those events found to be
so by international courts – for example the Holocaust and the massacres in
Srebrenica and Rwanda. We do not exercise a political judgement in ascribing
20
Mike O’Brien, “House of Commons Debates Written Answers: Holocaust Memorial Day,
Hansard, Col. 917, November 30, 2000.
21
Mark Levene, “Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day: A Case of Post-Cold War Wish-Fulfilment,
or Brazen Hypocrisy?” Human Rights Review, (April-June 2006): 26-59; 28.
22
FCO’s Eastern Department, “FCO Memorandum to Minister Joyce Quin,” April 12, 1999.
23
Kamal Ahmed, “Holocaust Day Mired in Protest,” The Guardian, January 21, 2001.
24
Holocaust Memorial Day: Remembering Genocide: Lessons for the Future Commemorative
Programme, (London: HMSO, 2001).
29
Kara Critchell
the term “genocide” to a set of events, whether in Armenia, the Holodomor in
25
Ukraine or the massacres of the Kurds by Saddam Hussein in 1998.
The decision by the British government to frame their interpretation of genocide
as those decreed by international courts, as opposed to genocide as it is defined
by the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide reflects the tension between officially
remembering the Holocaust and remembering other genocides in contemporary
society. The response to criticism of the omission provided by Neil Frater, a
representative from the Home Office’s Race Equality Unit responsible for
overseeing the consultation process for Holocaust Memorial Day, provided a
fascinating insight into the confusion endemic to the conceptualization of the
day itself. Although referring to the atrocities in Armenia as “an appalling
tragedy” and offering the British government’s “sympathies” to the descendants
of those who had perished, after consulting with the Holocaust Memorial Day
Steering Group the decision was taken not to include Armenia in the day “to
avoid the risk of the message becoming too diluted if we try to include too much
history.”26 This fear that the message of the day might become too ‘diluted’ raises
significant questions about the way in which the Holocaust intersects with other
genocides in British consciousness and, in turn, what exactly the ‘message’ of the
day is intended to be.
Although the Holocaust was the principal hub around which this day had been
created, incorporating other genocides also appeared to be one of the main
objectives of the day. In the program created to accompany the 2001 inaugural
memorial service at Westminster Abbey, Home Secretary Jack Straw noted that
“Holocaust Memorial Day is about learning the lessons of the Holocaust and
other more recent atrocities that raise similar issues.”27
The supposed emphasis on ‘more recent’ genocides not only ensured that
Armenia did not, and does not, feature prominently within the remembrance
day but also led to the somewhat uneven treatment of past genocides in British
commemoration. Other genocides that have occurred since the Holocaust, in
25
David Lidington, “House of Commons Business of the House: 1915 Armenian Genocide,”
Hansard, Cols. 1260-1269; Col. 1265, Mar 23, 2015. Despite this controversy some organisations in
Britain did seek to develop initiatives to promote awareness of the genocide to coincide with the
centenary. This included the Weiner Library, which established the ‘Fragments of a Lost
Homeland Exhibition’ that ran for 6 months.
26
Neil Frater as cited in Fisk, The Great War for Civilization, 424.
27
Jack Straw, “Holocaust Memorial Day: Remembering Genocide Commemorative
Programme.” MPs and Peers by and large agreed with this interpretation of the event; see for
example Lord Bassam, “House of Lords Debate: Crimes Against Humanity Commemoration,”
Hansard, Col. 354, January 25, 2001.
30
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
particular those committed in Bosnia and Rwanda, have to varying degrees come
to be absorbed into the day of remembrance. Yet the position of the Holocaust
as the central genocide of the day, and the subsequent hierarchy of suffering this
implies, has been evident since the opening ceremony. The official program for
Holocaust Memorial Day 2001 asserted that “over 169,000,000 people died
during the 20th century as a result of state sponsored mass murder” before going
on to clarify the government’s position that “among them all, the Holocaust
stands out as an example at the extreme.”28 Sentiments such as these articulated
the extent to which the Holocaust was designed to be the main focus of the day.
The strapline “Remembering Genocides: Lessons for the Future” was, Cesarani
noted, only included due to criticism of the apparent focus on the Jewish victims
of Nazi persecution.29
What then of the ‘message’ that the Government was trying to convey? The
message that, they feared, would be so easily diluted by “too much history”?
When announcing the establishment of the day, Tony Blair articulated his hope
that, “Holocaust Memorial Day will be a day when we reflect and remember and
give our commitment and pledge that the terrible and evil deeds done in our
world should never be repeated."30 The way in which both this and later
memorial days were framed reveals the start of an institutional trend with regards
to how the Holocaust was thought about in the opening years of the 21st century.
This distinctive trend encouraged the abstraction and de-contextualization of the
Holocaust within British consciousness in which its ‘lessons’ center on tolerance
and anti-racism. This abstraction can ultimately be seen in the “unmooring of
the Holocaust from its historical specificity and its circulation instead as an
abstract code for Evil and thus as the model for a potential antiracist and human
rights politics.”31
In its formative years, responsibility for the day lay under the auspices of the
Home Office and the Department for Education and Skills. In 2005, however,
the independent charitable organization the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
(HMDT) was established to promote, support and deliver Holocaust Memorial
Day to the country on behalf of the British government. Although the HMD is
now run independently from the government, it continues to be centrally
funded and is therefore still reflective of official policy. Despite this continuity,
28
“Holocaust Memorial Day: Remembering Genocide Commemorative Programme.”
Cesarani, “Does the Singularity of the Holocaust make it Incomparable and Inoperative,” 41.
30
Tony Blair cited in “UK to Mark Holocaust Memorial Day Each Year,” Birmingham Post,
January 27, 2000.
31
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
Decolonisation, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 229.
29
31
Kara Critchell
the creation of the HMDT had considerable implications for the way in which
the Memorial Day was framed over the following years.
Every year the Memorial Day is based on a specific theme, thereby providing “a
focus for events and education in local and national commemorations.”32 The
inaugural ceremony “Remembering Genocides: Lessons for the Future” was
followed by “Britain and the Holocaust” (2002) and “Children and the
Holocaust” (2003). Although these themes aroused controversy, they also
contained the potential for historical rootedness and even critical self-reflection,
as in the case of the 2002 theme “Britain and the Holocaust.” On that occasion,
the theme paper referred to the fact that the “ambiguity of Britain's response to
Nazi tyranny and racism is lodged in our heritage,” and that such ambiguity
acted as “an inspiration, a warning and a guide.”33
After the establishment of HMDT, however, there was a shift towards more
abstract themes promoting civil morality and democratic values. The emphasis
on the “lessons” that contemporary society could draw from the event became
increasingly more central to the day than engagement with the historical event
itself. This emphasis on moral instruction as opposed to encouraging critical
reflection has been termed by Donald Bloxham as being the “pathos approach”
to Holocaust commemoration and education, favoring moral judgment and
ceremonial processes of remembrance at the expense of tackling more complex
historical questions regarding how people came to commit such crimes and why
they were able to do so.34 The 2006 theme “One Person Can Make a Difference”
is a case in point; people were encouraged to learn “to use one’s voice to enhance
positive human values.”35 By the same token the 2008 theme “Imagine…
Remember, Reflect, React” “challenges us all to imagine the unimaginable” and
stands as a “call to action to remember the past, reflect on the present and react to
create a better future.”36 The importance of remembrance was also raised by the
2015 “Keep the Memory Alive,” which in its theme paper reiterated the
imperative of remembrance to ensure that “we pay respect to [the victims’]
32
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, “Previous Years Themes,”
http://hmd.org.uk/resources/previous-years-themes, [accessed on May 1, 2016].
33
David Cesarani, Holocaust Memorial Day Theme Paper: Britain and the Holocaust, (2002).
34
Bloxham, “Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Days,” 47.
35
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, “Theme Paper: One Person Can Make a Difference 2006,”
(2005).
36
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, “Theme Paper: Imagine… Remember, Reflect, React 2008,”
(2007).
32
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
unimaginable suffering while retaining the lessons of the past for future
generations.”37
As the years went by the themes became ever more focused about the way in
which learning from the Holocaust could generate positive active participation in
contemporary society. The vision paper for the “Legacy of Hope” event in 2010
explicitly asked those participating in the day to “to look within and without, to
be sure of our moral compass, to be certain of our choices and to use our voice,
whenever we can, to speak out.”38 Such an inducement to speak out was later
encouraged by the theme vision of 2012, which specifically demanded that people
“Speak up [and] Speak out” against discrimination and exclusion in their
communities. Community was also at the heart of the day the following year,
“Communities Together: Build a Bridge” and the traditional ceremony was
accompanied by a special public event held on the Millennium Bridge in which
“members of the public signed personal statements, pledging to build a bridge in
their communities for HMD.” Such shifts away from contextualized historical
engagement and towards abstract identification in the service of moral civic
instruction makes the government’s concern with having ‘too much history,’
especially uncomfortable history, somewhat less pressing.
Not everyone fully agreed with this approach. In discussing the reasons behind
his skepticism towards Holocaust Memorial Day, the son of one survivor
observed: “I suspect that it is because remembering the Holocaust has become an
official ritual that allows every sanctimonious politician and public figure to put
their superior moral virtues on public display.”39 Increasingly, therefore, the
Holocaust is not only used to advance messages of tolerance but also as an
opportunity for politicians to be seen to demonstrate their own moral standing
through promoting their own role in the commemorations themselves. Every
year politicians are invited by the Holocaust Educational Trust to sign a
Holocaust Memorial Day Book of Commitment designed to illustrate their
commitment to the day of remembrance and their pledge to remember those
who died. MPs ‘speak out’ against prejudice and intolerance by signing the books
of remembrance.
The lucid and carefully sculpted entries of the Prime Minister of the time usually
contain messages for contemporary society through platitudes such as “humanity
survived our descent into evil and if we recommit today to remembrance and to
37
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, “UK Event,” (2016), http://hmd.org.uk/page/uk-event,
[accessed on April 14, 2016].
38
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, Theme Paper: Legacy of Hope 2010, (2009).
39
Frank Furedi, “The Holocaust should not be for sale,” Daily Telegraph, January 26, 2006.
33
Kara Critchell
resistance to evil, then that is the legacy of hope.”40 At the same time, backbench
MPs who sign the memorial books often express sentiments that never explain
why “we must always remember what happened” or define exactly why “each
new generation needs to know what happened.”41 The photographs taken of
those members of Parliament signing the book, in turn, are then placed on
individual MPs constituency website as proof of their actions and of their
dedication to remembering what happened.42 Regardless of sincere individual
commitment the cumulative effect is often that “Holocaust Memorial Day is
becoming a Victorian religious rally to which the audience is urged to subscribe
and those who don’t are cast as uncivilized.”43
Such abstraction from critical historical understanding alongside the continual
reference to Britain’s role in the Second World War ultimately reinforces
understandings of a national identity built on supposed, and inherent, British
values, thus validating the concern expressed as early as 2000 by Cesarani that the
event might “serve to celebrate Britain’s role in defeating Nazism and its
supposedly humane immigration record in the 1930s and since.”44 Such decontextualization and abstraction is also discernible in the educational initiatives
promoted by organizations committed to ensuring the Holocaust continues to
have a significant presence in British culture, as will be considered in greater
depth in the following section.
40
Gordon Brown, Holocaust Memorial Day Book of Remembrance 2010: The Legacy of Hope,
(Unpublished).
41
Annette Brooke, Holocaust Memorial Day Book of Remembrance, 2010; Robert Goodwill,
Holocaust Memorial Day Book of Remembrance, 2007.
42
For examples of Members of Parliament detailing their role in Holocaust remembrance please
see: Paul Blomfield, “I’ve signed the Holocaust Memorial Day Book of Commitment to ‘speak
out’ against prejudice,” January 18, 2012, www.paulblomfield.co.uk/news/news-story/article/ivesigned-the-holocaust-memorial-day-book-ofcommitment-to-speak-out-against-prejudice.html,
[accessed January 29, 2013]; Phillip Lee, “Local MP ‘Speaks Out’ Against Prejudice by Signing
Holocaust Memorial Day Book of Commitment,” January 20, 2012, www.philliplee.com/socialresponsibility/local-mp-speaks-out-against-prejudice-by-signing-holocaust-memorial-day-bookofcommitment/, [accessed January 28, 2013].
43
Adrian Hamilton, “Keep the Politicians out of Holocaust Day,” The Independent, January 26,
2006.
44
Cesarani, “Seizing the Day,” 66.
34
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
Education and Holocaust Memorialization
The question as to whether pedagogy has a “special and unique task in the
education of man in the world after Auschwitz” has been posed repeatedly.45
The establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day saw the firm institutionalization
of the Holocaust within British society as an educational event.46 Education
certainly emerged as a significant mediator of Holocaust consciousness in the
final decade of the twentieth century having become a mandatory part of the first
National Curriculum for all secondary school students in England and Wales in
1991. The development of Holocaust education since this time has frequently
been cited as a key turning point in terms of Britain's engagement with the Nazi
genocide, signalling a shift from the institutional silences or distortions that had
characterized previous decades.47
Following the establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day, pedagogy played an
even greater role in the transmission of the Holocaust in British society. As
Cesarani suggested, the commemorative day “will be reinforced by an
educational program informed by government departments but devolved on to
educational authorities and schools around Britain.”48 Education was thus
envisaged as being the means by which critical engagement with the day, and the
Holocaust, could occur. Reflecting this educational commitment, the HMDT
oversaw the publication and distribution of education packs tailored around the
specific theme of the year and the creation of individual resources with
accompanying guidance notes for educators. Although the HMDT holds overall
responsibility for the day, other educational organizations who are active
throughout the year have come to assume a role in encouraging participation in
45
Arye Carmon, “Problems in Coping with the Holocaust: Experiences with Students in a
Multinational Program,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 450,
July 1980: 227-236; 227.
46
Cesarani, “Does the Singularity of the Holocaust make it Incomparable and Inoperative,” 40.
47
For a detailed account of the emergence of the National Curriculum for History, see Lucy
Russell, Teaching the Holocaust in School History: Teachers or Preachers? (London:
Continuum, 2006). On Britain’s relationship with the Holocaust see: Pearce, Holocaust
Consciousness in Contemporary Britain; Pearce, “The Development of Holocaust
Consciousness”; David Cesarani, “How Post-War Britain Reflected on the Nazi Persecution and
Mass Murder of Europe’s Jews: A Reassessment of Early Responses,” Jewish Culture and
History, 12/1-2 (2010): 95-130; Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A
Social and Cultural History, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Sharples & Jensen, Britain and the
Holocaust.
48
Cesarani, “Seizing the Day,” 64.
35
Kara Critchell
HMD and in promoting Holocaust teaching and remembrance outside of this
framework.
Governmental guidance for teachers on how to tackle this complex and emotive
subject had been fragmentary at best during the formative years of Holocaust
teaching. This perhaps accounts for the influence which non-governmental
institutions like the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Imperial War Museum
and Holocaust Centre have had on the shape of Holocaust education. These
organizations were to play an even more significant role in promoting education
and remembrance after the establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day for
education, much like the community-based aspects of the day was always
"intended to be driven by grassroots activists."49 The most significant of these is
the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), a lobby turned charitable organization
formed in 1988 in the wake of the establishment of the All Party Parliamentary
War Crimes Group as a means of “promoting research, supporting Holocaust
education, producing resources and advancing the teaching of the Nazi genocide
in educational institutions.”50 In the years since its creation the Trust has grown
to be one of the most prominent educational charities in the country.
The material being promoted by the HET was specifically designed to inspire
integration, citizenship and community engagement. This mode of Holocaust
education, which developed in earnest after the establishment of HMD,
prioritizes the transmission and mediation of such contemporary ‘lessons’
applicable for all, reinforces a more malleable narrative of the Holocaust with
recognizable pertinence for contemporary British society. As a result of this
emphasis, it is possible to see a gradual shift promoted by HMDT and
organizations such as the HET and Anne Frank Trust away from the historical
context of the Holocaust in favor of imparting contemporary ‘lessons’ more
effectively.
The question as to whether there is a possibility of ‘lessons’ for contemporary
society being derived from the Holocaust has prompted fierce and prolonged
debate between educationists and historians alike.51 These debates cannot be
49
Stephen D. Smith, Never Again! Yet Again! A Personal Struggle with the Holocaust and
Genocide, (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2009), 116.
50
Pearce, “Development of Historical Consciousness,” 72; Geoffrey Short and Carol Ann Reed,
Issues in Holocaust Education, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 59.
51
For further information on these debates see Nicholas Kinloch, “Learning about the
Holocaust: Moral or Historical Question?” Teaching History, 93, (1998): 44-46; Nicholas
Kinloch, “Parallel Catastrophes? Uniqueness, Redemption and the Shoah,” Teaching History,
104, (2001): 8-14; Steve Illingworth, “Hearts, Minds and Souls: Exploring Values through
History’, Teaching History, 100, (2000): 20-24; Geoffrey Short, “Lessons of the Holocaust: A
Response to the Critics’, Educational Review, 55/3, (2003): 277-287; Peter Novick, The Holocaust
36
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
reproduced here but what is apparent is that the concept of ‘lessons’ has emerged
as a dominant aspect of the way in which the Holocaust is both taught and
conceptualized. Whilst this approach is reflected in other countries too, within
Britain the approach to Holocaust teaching transmitted through ‘lessons’ for the
future has achieved a particular pertinence and provides the moral justification
for the continued inclusion of the Holocaust on the National Curriculum. As
Andrew Burns observed, it is hoped that the “lessons from that disastrous period
of history guide us in the future.”52 Such sentiments are continually evoked in
both the classroom and in wider culture and used to reflect the righteousness of
Britain’s moral commitment to multiculturalism or as a means of emphasizing
the benefits of living in a tolerant democracy.
This move towards the Holocaust as holding ‘lessons’ for contemporary society
can even be discerned in the shifting emphasis of the aims of the Holocaust
Educational Trust. The founding aim of the Trust was originally to “show our
citizens and especially our youngsters what happened when racism replaced
diversity and when mass murder took over a nation.”53 Such an aim reflected the
relative dearth of easily accessible information for students and teachers at the
time and the seeming ambivalence of the wider British population towards
engaging with the Holocaust. In this vein, the organization’s primary purpose
was to inform the British people about the subject itself. In contrast, the aim of
the Trust at the present time is to “educate young people from every background
about the Holocaust and the important lessons to be learned for today.”54 Other
educational organizations have also adopted this conviction about moral ‘lessons’
being transmitted to students in a transformative manner. The Holocaust Centre
in Nottingham suggests that Holocaust education can help to foster “good
citizenship”55 values whilst the London Jewish Cultural Centre claims that
through learning about the Holocaust we are able to “fight prejudice and
and Collective Memory, (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 261-263; Alice Pettigrew, “Limited
Lessons from the Holocaust? Critically Considering the Anti-Racist and Citizenship Potential,’
Teaching History, 141, (2010): 50-55; Paul Salmons, “Moral Dilemmas: History Teaching and the
Holocaust,” Teaching History, 104, (2001): 34-40.
52
Andrew Burns, “Holocaust Memorial Day: Lessons for the Future,” January 24, 2013,
www.het.org.uk/index.php/blog/entry/holocaust-memorial-day-lessons-for-the-future,
[accessed on August 24, 2013].
53
Greville Janner, To Life! The Memoirs of Greville Janner, (Stroud: Sutton, 2006), 214.
54
Holocaust Educational Trust, “About Us,” www.het.org.uk/index.php/about-us-general,
[accessed on April 20, 2016].
55
The Holocaust Centre, “About Us,” http://www.nationalholocaustcentre.net/, [accessed on
April 24, 2016].
37
Kara Critchell
bigotry.”56 Such is the prominence of the notion of the Holocaust holding
contemporary meaning applicable to daily life that the idea that the Holocaust
contains ‘lessons’ for contemporary society is accepted almost without question
in the public sphere.
Reflecting, and shaping, the significance attributed to the existence of such
contemporary ‘lessons’ and the shift towards a more contemporary oriented
Holocaust education is the Lessons from Auschwitz (LFA) project run by the
Holocaust Educational Trust. Established in 1999, the LFA project is a four-part
program for sixth-form students aged between 16 and 18 and teachers; it includes
a one-day visit to the sites of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II. Originally created by
Rabbi Barry Marcus of the Central Synagogue in London as a way to inform the
Jewish community in Britain about the Holocaust, since the adoption of the
project by the Trust, the visits have now escalated to such an extent that they are
a high profile vehicle through which the Holocaust is mediated to British
students.57 The British government has funded the project since 2005 when the
Treasury pledged an annual sum of £1.5million to facilitate and expand the
project.
Since the adoption of the initiative by the Holocaust Educational Trust, the
project has been re-oriented towards a more multicultural audience through the
projection of a universalized British narrative espousing lessons for
contemporary society. Following the visit to Auschwitz, as part of the Follow Up
session, educators provide students with a selection of ‘historical conclusions and
contemporary lessons’ that the Trust feels that students should learn as a result
of being taught about the Holocaust.58 These contemporary ‘lessons’ which
students are provided with range from the fact that “Societies are made up of
individuals. If we want to make the world a more humane place, we must start
with our own everyday actions,” to “The UK government plays a key role in
global events and we, as citizens, can influence governmental policy” to “We
56
London Jewish Cultural Centre, “UK Schools Speaker Programme,” (2013),
http://www.ljcc.org.uk/holocaust, [accessed on December 12, 2014].
57
Barry Marcus, You are witnesses: Collection/Anthology of Personal Reflections from the One
Day Visits to Auschwitz, (London: Holocaust Educational Trust, 1999). For a more detailed
discussion of the Lessons from Auschwitz programme and the one day visits established by Rabbi
Marcus please see Kara Critchell, Holocaust Education in British Society and Culture,
(Unpublished PhD thesis, 2014).
58
Holocaust Educational Trust, “Lessons from Auschwitz: Historical Conclusions and
Contemporary Lessons Resource,” (Unpublished).
38
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
must promote tolerance of others by recognizing the role played by all regardless
of gender, race or creed.”59 Students then chose which of these contemporary
concerns resonates most with them and that is then defined as being a ‘lesson’ of
the Holocaust.
After participation in the project students become Ambassadors for the Trust. In
this role, the Trust asserts, these young people become part of the “driving force
behind our efforts to ensure that people across Britain understand the
importance of remembering the Holocaust.”60 This if often achieved by students
presenting their trip to their school, writing material for the local newspaper,
discussing their visit with local community groups or planting a memorial tree
and inviting those in the community to witness the dedication. As Chief
Executive of the Trust Karen Pollock observed, “The inspiring work students go
on to do in their local areas demonstrates the importance of the visit.”61
Martin Davies has asserted that “education is a simulacrum of the society it
serves.” 62 This is in part true, but it is clear that by intersecting with
commemoration, education does not simply represent the society it serves but
also concurs in shaping society’s self-perception. Much like Holocaust Memorial
Day the question with education is what exactly it hopes to achieve. Are
Holocaust educators seeking to teach the history of the event or are they
intending to use the Holocaust to provide moral instruction aimed at forging
feelings of citizenship and a sense of identity based on democratic values?
Perhaps more significantly, perhaps, what is the intention of the British
Government in funding these initiatives? The message that the Government
wants to mediate through education appears to be subscribing to the same
“pathos” approach to the subject observed in Holocaust Memorial Day.
Certainly the de-contextualization of the Holocaust, discernable in the National
Curriculum in which it is compulsory to teach about the Holocaust but not
mandatory to teach about the Second World War seems to point in that
direction.
59
Ibid.
Holocaust Educational Trust, “About the Ambassador Programme,”
https://www.het.org.uk/...programme, [accessed on April 28, 2016].
61
“A Project so Vital to Help Pupils Learning,” Western Daily Press, May 1, 2008.
62
Martin L. Davies, “Education after Auschwitz: Revisited,” in How the Holocaust Looks Now:
International Perspectives, eds. Martin Davies and Claus-Christian Szejnmann, (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 247-260; 253.
60
39
Kara Critchell
The use of the Holocaust to encourage civic sentiments and democratic values is
certainly not unique and is situated alongside a shift in British policy towards
education in response to international, and perceived domestic, threats. The
introduction of the Preventing Violent Extremism (more commonly referred to
as the ‘Prevent’) Programme in the wake of the terror attacks of 2001 and the
London bombings of 2005 to promote “mainstream British values: democracy,
rule of law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and the rights of all men
and women to live free from persecution of any kind”63 is just one example of
how the field of education has been recruited into helping to sculpt a sense of
British identity. This was taken even further in the summer of 2015 when the
Government made adherence to the program a statutory duty to respond to the
“ideological threat of terrorism” and to “prevent people from being drawn into
terrorism.”64 Situated alongside such discourse, and alongside institutionalized
attempts to both sculpt identity and counter extremism in the age of terror, the
moves in Holocaust education towards promoting citizenship and democracy
reflect a more significant shift in British educational policy over the last 15 years.
An Absence of Intersections? Britishness and the Kindertransport
If education is being overtly harnessed to project supposedly ‘British’ values to
counter subversive elements in society in the so called ‘pre-criminal space’ then
the use of the Holocaust as a way of asserting British identity is rather more
subtly employed.65 This is often achieved by drawing on powerful and emotive
‘symbols’ such as Holocaust survivors, who have become integral to education in
Britain, to the point that they are referred to as being the “Heart of Holocaust
Education.”66 As the Holocaust Educational Trust tells students: “survivor
testimonies are powerful because they challenge the process of dehumanization…
we cannot imagine the numbers of people that suffered during the
Holocaust….However, we can gain some understanding by focusing on the
63
HM Government, Prevent Strategy, June, 2011, 34.
HM Government, Protecting Vulnerable People from being Drawn into Terrorism: Statutory
guidance for Channel Panel Members and Partners of Local Panels, April, 2015, 3.
65
Homa Khaleeli, “Is the Prevent Strategy Demonising Muslim Schoolchildren?” The Guardian,
September 23, 2015.
66
Holocaust Educational Trust, “Survivor Stories,” www.het.org.uk/index.php/survivor-stories,
[accessed April 20, 2016].
64
40
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
individual stories and testimonies of those who suffered and died.”67 By using
survivor testimonies to encourage a focus on the individual experience, educators
are trying to ensure that the victims of the Holocaust are not simply reduced to
abstract figures. It is believed that, if students are able to engage with individual
testimony, their understanding of human experience within an
incomprehensible event can be enhanced.68
The form of education promoted by these organizations within their Outreach
programs has also helped to propel the survivor witness into the public eye,
thereby ensuring that they are increasingly accessible to the public in
commemorative events. The way survivors are encountered within British
commemorative culture helps to perpetuate narratives of supposedly ‘British’
liberal democratic values. The visible position of naturalized British survivors
during memorial days provides indisputable proof of the value of past British
actions on the international stage whilst at the same time championing deeply
ingrained self-perceptions of Britain that might end up hindering open
discussion about less uplifting past and present aspects of British life.
The role of survivors in British Holocaust talk is particularly discernible in the
way the theme of rescue epitomized by the Kindertransport features heavily in
both education and memorialization. Referred to by the Holocaust Memorial
Day Trust as a “unique humanitarian programme” the Kindertransport was
overlooked in British collective consciousness until the 50th anniversary of the
transports.69 Since that time, the Kindertransports have evolved so as to become
“a source of great national pride within the British historical imagination.”70 The
British scheme to allow approximately 10,000 children into Britain following
67
Holocaust Educational Trust, Lessons from Auschwitz Orientation Seminar Notes for
Educators, Unpublished, 2011, 8.
68
Samuel Totten, “The Use of First-Person Accounts in Teaching about the Holocaust,” The
British Journal of Holocaust Education, 3/2, (Winter 1994): 160 – 183; 160.
69
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, “The Kindertransport,”
http://hmd.org.uk/genocides/kindertransport-refugees [accessed April 20, 2016]. To mark this
anniversary Bertha Leverton, herself a Kindertransportee, planned a reunion for those who had
come to Britain as children in 1938. Publication of the event led to over 1000 Kindertransportees
attending and began the process of returning the memory of the transports to British
consciousness.
70
Caroline Sharples, “The Kindertransport in British Historical Memory,” in The
Kindertransport to Britain 1938/39 New Perspectives: The Year Book of the Research Centre for
German and Austrian Studies, eds. Andrea Hammel and Bea Lewkowicz, Vol. 13, (Amsterdam:
Rodopi B.V, 2012), 15-27; 21.
41
Kara Critchell
Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938 has been seen as Britain “securing the future”
of those Jewish children who came to Britain.71
That the Kindertransport has become enshrined within British cultural
imagination as an example of the British people rescuing thousands of innocents
in a time of adversity is unsurprising. The murder of 1.5 million children,
understandably, carries significant emotive power. Just as the murder of children
has assumed a prominent position within Holocaust consciousness so too the
rescue of children has become an equally dominant theme in British historical
understanding. This was enhanced by the decision to make the “Children of the
Holocaust” the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day 2003, thus highlighting the
contrast between the position of Jewish children in Nazi occupied territories and
the relative safety of those who had been permitted entry into Britain. This has
been further reinforced by the creation of an interactive exhibition referred to as
“The Journey” at The National Holocaust Centre & Museum in Nottingham.
The exhibition, built primarily for the mediation of the Holocaust to primaryaged children, follows the story of 10 year old Leo Stein, a German Jewish boy
who came to England as part of the Kindertransport. Given that the Holocaust,
with the oft-forgotten exception of the deportation of Jews from the Channel
Islands, did not take place on British soil it is perhaps not surprising that one of
the most significant roles of survivors in maintaining and reinforcing a notable
British connection to the Holocaust is through those who came to Britain.
Popular British understanding of the Kindertransport, mediated by politicians,
the media and organizations such as the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the
Imperial War Museum is, to varying degrees, one of prevailing pride in the
British rescue of thousands of Jewish children from the clutches of Nazi
aggression.72
One widely publicized commemorative event reinforcing this memory of Britain
as a place of refuge, and in which survivors appeared to play an integral part, was
the 70th anniversary re-enactment of the journey carried out by hundreds of
children from Czechoslovakia to Britain in what has become known as the
Winton Train, or the Czech Kindertransport. Independent of the
Kindertransport operation, but often considered in conjunction with it, the
rescue of 669 children by Nicholas Winton has become a significant part of
British historical consciousness of the Holocaust. On 1 September 2009, in order
71
Lembit Öpik, “House of Commons Debate, Holocaust Memorial Day,” Hansard, Vol. 477501, Col. 488, January 29, 2009.
72
Ruth Barnett, “The Acculturation of the Kindertransport Children: Intergenerational
Dialogue on the Kindertransport Experience,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish
Studies, 23/1, (Fall 2004): 100-108; 101.
42
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
to commemorate this act, a train carrying 170 people, including 22 of the child
evacuees who were originally involved in this transport and their descendants,
left Prague and followed the route taken by the original Winton Trains. They
were met in London on 4 September by Nicholas Winton himself with the
words, widely reported at the time, “It’s wonderful to see you all after 70 years.
Don’t leave it quite so long until we meet here again.”73
How can we interpret survivors’ roles in the remembrance of this event? On the
one hand their presence was vital. Without the survivors the journey could not
have been relived and the memory would undoubtedly have resonated less
widely with the public. Yet, conversely, whilst the survivors were necessary, their
experiences were somewhat supplementary to the commemoration, which
overwhelmingly centered on Winton himself. The same is also true within
popular consciousness of the Kindertransport and, indeed, within wider
commemoration of the Holocaust. For whilst the prominence of survivors
indicates an increased engagement with them, it can also be seen to promote
narratives of British heroism and righteousness.
The press contributed considerably to the perpetuation of the narrative
emphasizing the salvation provided to the children admitted into Britain, many
of whom are still living in this country. The BBC discussed the enactment under
the heading “Czech evacuees thank their saviour.”74 In fact so dominant is the
memory that the man who organized the transports from Czechoslovakia is often
referred to in the British media as the “British Schindler.”75 These traditional
interpretations of rescue are reinforced by the expressions of gratitude articulated
by survivors themselves. One survivor, Bronia Snow, is reported as stating that in
Britain she quickly became ‘an Anglophile… I became appreciative of this
wonderful country, its toleration, and its good manners.’’76 Sentiments such as
this expressing appreciation towards Britain are frequent and extremely
important when considering the role of survivors in British understanding of the
Holocaust and of Britain’s role within it. Survivors’ political value does not only
73
“WWII Rescue Train Recreated,” BBC News, (September 4, 2009).
Robert Hall, “Czech Evacuees Thank Their Saviour,” BBC News, September 4, 2009.
75
Daniel McLaughlin, “Survivors Gather to pay Tribute to British Schindler,” The Independent,
September 2, 2009.
76
Bronia Snow in Stephen Adams, “Schindler Train: I didn’t talk to a soul. I was traumatised,”
Daily Telegraph, September 4, 2009.
74
43
Kara Critchell
lie in the messages of humanity politicians want to promote but also in the
relationship they appear to have with the country in which they found refuge. 77
Due to the emotiveness of the subject, the expressions of gratitude expressed by
survivors and the political pride articulated during commemorative activities, the
Kindertransport and the Winton Train have been absorbed within British
historical consciousness as acts of rescue representative of tolerance and
liberalism at a time when other nations were embracing Fascism. Through
replicating the journey of the Winton Train the notion of British rescue, an
already powerful story, became firmly entrenched in Britain’s Holocaust
consciousness. It was not so much the Jewish children but the British man who
rescued them who took center stage during the commemorative events. As a
result, the survivors are necessary to the story not because of what their
experiences reveal about the Holocaust but because of what their presence in
Britain reinforces about British identity and past benevolence. This of course
should not suggest a belittling of Winton’s achievements, nor the achievement of
the Kindertransports, but rather that to consider them critically would create a
more grounded historical consciousness and place British attitudes both in the
past and in the present within a more contextualized and historically nuanced
understanding. Instead, the way in which the Kindertransport and British
attitudes towards immigration are remembered circumvent difficult questions
and risk turning a complex and multifaceted event into a simple redemptive
narrative. As Louise London suggests, “a gulf exists” between the memory and
history of British engagement with its past when considering this period and, in
particular, the notion of providing a safe haven for all those who required it.78
Despite the presence of survivors, the historical consciousness promoted is not
one primarily about their experiences but, increasingly, about British pride. This
positive narrative does not account for the fact that, as Mark Mazower has noted,
despite Britain ‘priding itself on its tolerance and liberalism, it has in fact only
accepted Jews on certain conditions and requires their conformism and
assimilation.’79 Thus, the position of the survivor in contemporary Holocaust
discourse allows for the continuation of a somewhat mythical remembrance both
77
Erich Reich, “Letters to the AJR,” Association of Jewish Refugees Journal, (January 2009);
Martin Stern, “Holocaust Memorial Day Trust Podcast,” Retrieved on April 21, 2016,
www.hmd.org.uk/resources/stories/martin-stern.
78
Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews, 1933-1948: British Immigration Policy, Jewish
Refugees and the Holocaust, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13.
79
Mark Mazower, “England, Liberalism and the Jews,” The Jewish Quarterly, 167, (1997): 33-38;
33.
44
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
of the Holocaust and of British treatment of the “Other.” This constellation is at
the core of statements such as, for example, that of Ian Austin MP:
It is true that our country did not do enough, of course, and that it could have
done more, and sooner, but no one can deny that when other countries were
rounding up their Jews Britain provided a safe haven. It was British troops, as
we have heard, who liberated the concentration camps, rescuing tens of
thousands of inmates from almost certain death and enabling many of those
80
to go on and prosper under the democratic values of the UK.
The domestication of Holocaust survivors and their experiences in education,
together with the relative de-contextualization of the Holocaust in the
commemorative sphere, combine to reinforce a narrative that, whilst
emphasizing the centrality of the Holocaust, also runs the risk distancing Britain
from Europe in British imagination.
European Holocaust Consciousness or Domesticated Holocaust Identity?
The way in which the Holocaust has come to be absorbed into British
consciousness since 2001 reflects the inherent tensions between the
decontextualized narrative that has evolved in British Holocaust education and
commemoration, and the subsequent impact this narrative has had on
contemporary conceptualization of British national identity. These
conceptualizations based on representations of the Holocaust also intersect with
dominant narratives of the Second World War and influence understandings of
Britain’s place in Europe. British narratives of the war and the Holocaust present
distinctive features. As Mark Donnelly noted, despite being “a global conflict
which killed some 60 million and which left the legacy of Auschwitz, Hiroshima
and countless acts of barbarism [the war] has evoked nostalgia, pride and even
sentimentality in Britain.”81
It is certainly difficult to separate the memory of the Holocaust from the
memory of the British defeat of Nazism and the prevailing of democratic ideals.
As a member of the House of Lords declared during a debate to discuss the 50th
anniversary of the end of hostilities, “after many years of fighting and after much
80
Ian Austin, “House of Commons Debate: Holocaust Memorial Day 2012,” Hansard, Vol. 538,
Col. 342, January 19, 2012.
81
Mark Donnelly, Britain in the Second World War, (London: Routledge, 1999), 1.
45
Kara Critchell
travail the Allies succeeded in defeating a determined, efficient and dedicated
enemy and it is right and fitting that we recall that feat of arms. Secondly, for us
and for many of our allies the end of the war represented a triumph for
democracy and for democratic ideals.”82 Since the establishment of Holocaust
Memorial Day, however, the Holocaust has become increasingly central to
popular understandings of the past and interpretations of British identity. As
Andrew Dismore MP noted, “the need to commemorate the Holocaust applies
in Britain as much as anywhere. Our country made terrible sacrifices to defeat
Hitler. The period of Nazism and the Second World War remain a defining
episode in our national psyche.”83 Subsequently, the association between Britain,
the Second World War and the Holocaust in cultural imagination contribute to
a sense of identity built on pride in British heroism during this time not only in
resisting Fascism but also for liberating Holocaust survivors, and the rest of
Europe, from the yolk of Nazism. That this pride has not abated and that this
narrative has continued to be perpetuated, was illustrated by an Early Day
Motion, tabled in 2006, concerning the recognition of the newly established
Veterans Day (renamed Armed Forces Day in 2009) which asserted that the
House of Commons recognizes that:
the courage and sacrifice of British servicemen made during the Second World
War was paramount to saving victims of the Holocaust; notes that on 15th
April 1945 British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration
camp, rescuing tens of thousands of inmates from certain death; further notes
the compassion, hope and freedom that liberators gave back to the Holocaust
survivors, many of whom have prospered under the democratic values of the
84
UK.
The narrative presented by this EDM is, of course, extremely simplistic, if
anything for its failure to reflect the complexities of the immediate postliberation period during which almost 14,000 people died within the camp.85
Of course national ‘myths’, and the subsequent interpretations of identity they
inspire, tend not to develop around negative actions of the state and are instead
82
Lord Richards, “House of Lords Debate: Fiftieth Anniversary of the End of World War II,”
Hansard, Vol. 563, Col. 790, April 25, 1995.
83
Andrew Dismore, “House of Commons Debate: Holocaust Remembrance Day,” Hansard,
Vol. 334, Col. 362, (June 30, 1999).
84
Early Day Motion 2414, “Holocaust and Veterans Day: 2005-06 Parliamentary Session,”
Tabled June 20, 2006.
85
Ben Shephard, After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen, 1945, (London: Pimlico, 2006), 4.
46
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
shaped around the affirmation of a positive self-identity through the assertion of
supposed national values such as heroism, liberal democracy or tolerance. Yet this
is also achieved by positioning the perceived characteristics of the nation against
the actions and characteristics of the ‘Other’. In the immediate aftermath of the
war and the liberation of the camps “Britain and its allies had begun to carve out
for themselves a new role as the moral teachers of a defeated Germany.”86 The
British government and the British public embraced the role of moral guide,
fueled by the sense of entitlement resulting from being the nation that had not
succumbed to Nazism. Rather than considering key figures such as Irma Grese
and Josef Kramer as being solely responsible for the crimes that they had
committed, they were also “dismissed as typical Germans, the products of a
warped and diseased nation.”87 The acts of those SS guards within the camps
were now being viewed by the British public as representing an entire nation of
depraved and bestial “barbarians” who needed to be re-educated before they
could be reintegrated into international society.88 Situated against prevailing
sentiments regarding British heroism and valor such depravity exemplified the
superiority of British national character.
The way in which the Holocaust was encountered in these early months has
helped to shape a self- perception of Britain as a nation of tolerance situated
against the negative characteristics of the ‘Other’. This self-image, drawn from
the domesticated narrative of the past and of Britain’s perceived role within
history, encourages a particular sense of entitlement to international leadership,
particularly with regards to issues with moral or humanitarian implications.
When asked about the importance of Holocaust Memorial Day the newly
appointed United Kingdom Envoy for post-Holocaust issues stated that
Holocaust commemoration was crucial for Britain, observing that, “we, of
course historically, we were the country that stood up to Nazism, and in the early
days of the war… And I think we have a lot of good things to, not to preach to
other people, but there’s good practice in the UK and so if we’re active we can
86
Aimée Bunting, “My Question Applies to this Country: British Identities and the Holocaust,”
Holocaust Studies, 14/1, (2008): 61-92, 66; Jon Bridgman, The End of the Holocaust: The
Liberation of the Camps, (Singapore, Areopagitica Press, 1990), 10.
87
“The Shackled Monster of Belsen,” Daily Express, April 21, 1945; “Belsen Beast Taken Back to
Death Camp,” Daily Worker, September 22, 1945; “Blonde Beastess has Confessed her Guilt,”
Daily Mirror, October 6, 1945; Tony Kushner, “The Memory of Belsen,” in Belsen in History
and Memory, eds. Jo Reilly, David Cesarani, Tony Kushner and Colin Richmond, (London:
Frank Cass, 1997), 181-205; 184.
88
H. Kinchett, “Letters: All These Horrors Must be Known,” Daily Mirror, April 23, 1945.
47
Kara Critchell
spread that good practice around Europe.”89 This evocation of British values
during the Second World War and British actions in ‘liberating’ survivors of the
Holocaust thus allows politicians, and the British public, to maintain a position
of moral superiority within the global arena whilst encouraging the view that
other countries should be grateful for British heroism and disinterested
benevolence. As one MP declared in 2012:
when other countries were rounding up their Jews and herding them on to
trains to the gas chamber, Britain provided a safe haven for tens of thousands
of refugee children. Think of Britain in the thirties. The rest of Europe was
succumbing to fascism… but, here in Britain, Mosley was rejected. Imagine
1941: France invaded, Europe overrun, America not yet in the war and just one
country standing for liberty and democracy, a beacon to the rest of the world,
90
fighting not just for our freedom, but for the world’s liberty.
Reflecting the Early Day Motion discussed previously, this rhetoric is also rooted
in misconception. The reality is of course that Britain did not go to war for the
liberty of the Jewish people, and the government were at pains to prove the
opposite at the time; moreover, whilst Mosley was rejected, antisemitism was still
a potent if less violent force in British society; furthermore, although the
Kindertransport memory is one in which Britain takes solace, resistance towards
further Jewish immigration was rife. Nor does this pride in British values take
into account issues surrounding immigration either past or present in British
society or Britain’s own role in acts of genocide and colonial violence.
The imperial decline of Britain in the wake of the cessation of hostilities in 1945
has ultimately meant that politicians and the wider population have clung to the
lingering memories of as the Second World War to sustain pride in British
national character. The unfortunate outcome is that introspective analysis of
both historical events and British actions (or lack thereof) in the present is
lacking. The Holocaust is certainly not alone in being represented in this way.
Even the Armenian genocide, which as previously discussed Britain has not
officially recognized, is sculpted around a highly selective narrative that seeks to
characterize Britain’s historical response as equally positive. When discussing the
genocide in 2015 the Minister for Europe reflected on the fact that “the British
Government of that time robustly condemned the forced deportations,
89
Andrew Burns, “Podcast for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust,” Retrieved on February 13,
2016, from www.hmd.org.uk/resources/podcast/sir-andrew-burns.
90
Ian Austin, “Holocaust Memorial Day 2012,” Col. 342.
48
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
massacres and other crimes. We continue to endorse that view. British charities,
as we look back, played a major part then in humanitarian relief operations.”91
The period after the General Elections of 2010 saw a newly invigorated political
impetus towards a domestic commitment to ensuring the future of Holocaust
remembrance, education and commemoration in British society and culture.
This renewed sense of commitment to Holocaust education was not necessarily
anticipated. Although the establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day had
achieved cross-party support, the decisive shift towards the greater
institutionalization of Holocaust memorialization and education in the first
decade of the 21st century had overwhelmingly been championed by the Labour
governments led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Following the General
Election of May 2010, however, the Labour Party’s 13 years in power came to a
close after the creation of a coalition government led by the Conservative Party
alongside the Liberal Democrats. Like the rest of the country, those invested in
Holocaust education and remembrance faced a period of considerable
uncertainty about what the future would hold for Britain as they waited to hear
how the shift in governmental control of the country would impact the future
direction of these spheres of Holocaust memory. Their concern was
understandable and was reinforced by the fact that in 2008 The Guardian had
reported that the then leader of the Conservative party David Cameron referred
to day trips to Auschwitz as among some of the many ‘gimmicks’ funded by the
sitting Labour government. The inference that this popular program was simply
a “short term gimmick” generated a swift popular, and political, backlash that
was played out across the pages of the national press.92
Contrary to these concerns, however, the new government not only pledged
their support for the Lessons from Auschwitz program but also expressed its
determination to augment the place of the Holocaust within British
consciousness. Reflecting this shift was the announcement of an Envoy for Post
Holocaust Issues in June 2010. The statements accompanying the announcement
of this role, and the sentiments they expressed, were revealing about the way in
which Britain was choosing to situate itself in regards to the wider European
context of Holocaust memorialization. Following his appointment, the new
91
David Lidington, “HOC Armenian Genocide,” Col. 1265.
Nicholas Watt, “Cameron under fire for Holocaust ‘gimmick’ remark,” The Guardian,
February 23, 2008; Helene Mullholland and Deborah Summers, "Cameron Branded ‘Sick and
Ignorant’ in Auschwitz Row,” The Guardian, February 22, 2008; Andrew Porter, “David
Cameron under fire over Auschwitz gaffe,” The Telegraph, February 22, 2008.
92
49
Kara Critchell
Envoy Sir Andrew Burns claimed that “the UK already plays a leading and active
role in promoting Holocaust education, remembrance and research, in tackling
and resolving outstanding issues and claims and in raising public awareness of
the continuing relevance of the lessons and legacy of that terrible moment in
European history.”93 The explicit reference to the UK as being a leading figure in
the sphere of Holocaust education and remembrance was reiterated by Burns’
successor, Sir Eric Pickles, who used his opening statement as an opportunity to
praise the fact that “the UK is a leader internationally in ensuring the Holocaust
is properly commemorated and the lessons learnt” and to pledge his
commitment “to ensuring we retain and build on this position over the years to
come.”94
Whilst acknowledging that “the UK has taken an increasingly active approach to
preserving the memory of the Holocaust,” the new Foreign Secretary William
Hague went on to suggest that although “this has worked well to date […] I am
concerned that the UK is not taking the leading role it should in these
international discussions or best representing the interests of the many
Holocaust victims and their families in the UK affected by these issues.”95 The
expression of such sentiments not only implies the need for Britain to show
greater initiative in international discussions about the Holocaust but also
articulates idea that the UK can, and should, be taking a leading role within the
international community. The sense of British exceptionalism encountered
within historical conceptualizations of the Second World War appears to be
situated alongside an on-going quest and “deep craving” for leadership which,
Anne Deighton suggests, is “one facet of what has remained of Britain’s postimperial political culture.”96
The danger of connecting the Holocaust with overt expressions of British
identity is that it allows the perpetuation, and indeed evolution of, a postimperial identity based on positive notions of liberal democracy and tolerance
93
Andrew Burns cited in FCO Press Release, “UK appoints post-Holocaust Issues Envoy,” June
9, 2010.
94
Eric Pickles cited in FCO Press Release, “Sir Eric Pickles announced as UK Envoy on PostHolocaust Issues,” September 10, 2015.
95
William Hague, “Statement to the House of Commons on appointment of post-Holocaust
issues envoy,” June 9, 2010.
96
Anne Deighton, “The Past in the Present: British Imperial Memories and the European
Question,” in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, ed.
Jan-Werner Müller, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 100-120; 100.
50
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
that ignores or omits critical evaluation of Britain’s own past actions of atrocity
and state crimes whilst also helping to defend limited responses to humanitarian
crises in the current time. It is certainly the case, as Bloxham and Kushner have
observed, that in “Britain racism is often seen as someone else’s problem particularly the Germans since the Second World War - yet it does not take a
fascist regime for the proliferation and implementation of racism to take place.”97
Through the repetition of such sentiments a considered and critical selfreflection is discouraged whilst also distancing Britain from Europe by drawing
on past ‘achievements’ such as not being invaded during World War Two (aside
from the Channel Islands) and through acts such as the Kindertransport or the
Winton Train. As Mark Levene observed in 2006, “the underlying spuriousness,
indeed mendacity of Britain’s recent foreign policy record destroys any moral
basis upon which it can make claim, let alone offer leadership on the basis of any
Holocaust association.”98 Considering the conflicts which Britain has
participated in in the years since this article was published, and the apathetic if
not outright callous treatment of refugees fleeing conflict in Syria in 2015 and
2016, one is entitled to question the truthfulness of British claims to moral
distinction and the extent to which Holocaust ‘lessons’ can really be said to be
learnt.
The years after 2010 were, however, defined by the establishment of initiatives
similar to that of the Envoy designed to expand, develop and reinforce the British
government’s commitment to, and leadership in, Holocaust education and
commemoration. Following a plea from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation,
the UK pledged 2.1 million pounds of financial assistance to enable restorative
work to take place at the site to ensure the preservation of the camps as a place of
commemoration, education and remembrance.99 Such financial commitment
was also to enter the domestic landscape with the Prime Minister committing an
additional £300,000 worth of funding for the Lessons from Auschwitz project in
2013. The Holocaust Educational Trust were not only to feature as recipients of
financial support but were also to feature significantly in this drive by returning
more visibly to their earlier lobbyist roots by encouraging further public
commemoration of the Holocaust, the survivors and the liberators. In 2009,
97
Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner, “Exhibiting Racism: Cultural Imperialism, Genocide
and Representation,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 2/3, (1998): 349358; 352.
98
Levene, “Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day,” 27.
99
Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Report 2008, (Auschwitz-Birkenau w Oświęcimiu, Państwowe
Muzeum, 2009).
51
Kara Critchell
MPs drafted Early Day Motion 1175 calling for “Recognition for British Heroes
of the Holocaust” in honor of those who had performed acts of rescue. Whilst a
number of those had been named as Righteous among the Nations in Israel, the
campaign highlighted the fact that none of those who had initiated acts of rescue
had been honored within Britain itself. Despite this omission, as the Jewish
Chronicle reported, “such individuals embody all that is best about Britain - and
deserve formal recognition, not only to acknowledge their deeds but to serve as
an example to future generations about the importance of making a stand against
racism, discrimination and other forms of injustice.”100 The creation of this
award was the result of many months of forceful campaigning by the Trust for
institutional recognition of their actions.
In a similar vein it was announced in 2015 that Holocaust survivors across the
United Kingdom were to receive commemorative medals “to mark 70 years since
the end of the Holocaust.”101 The medals, another initiative of the Holocaust
Educational Trust, featured the inscription ‘Liberation 1945’ emerging through
barbed wire on one side and on the other an inscription to commemorate the
British forces who liberated the camp of Bergen-Belen and “a stylized eternal
flame” that, it was claimed, “has come to memorialize the Holocaust victims.”102
The medals were awarded to Holocaust survivors at a special ceremony presided
over by the Chancellor of the Exchequer who stated that, “here we stand in
Downing Street in tribute to fight against Nazism. In tribute to the millions who
died. In tribute to the brave survivors. In tribute to the liberators.”103 Echoing the
Heroes of the Holocaust awards the emphasis on Britain as liberators and as
defenders of freedom and liberty dominated the official rhetoric of the day as
Holocaust survivors were, once again, absorbed into a domesticated narrative of
national distinctiveness and superiority.
The Home Secretary’s desire for Britain to take a more “active approach to
preserving the memory of the Holocaust” during this period was also achieved
100
Robyn Rosen, “Gordon Brown Honours British Holocaust Heroes,” The Jewish Chronicle,
March 8, 2010; Retrieved on March 28, 2016, www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/29169/gordonbrown-honours-british-holocaust-heroes.
101
HM Treasury and Department for Communities and Local Government Press Release,
“Commemorative medal marks 70 years since the end of the Holocaust,” January 14, 2015.
102
Ibid.
103
George Osbourne, “Speech Delivered at Reception for Holocaust Educational Trust,” January
14, 2015.
52
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
within the educational system.104 In February 2013 the Department for
Education published its draft proposals for the reform of the National
Curriculum. The suggested reforms for Key Stage 3 history (when pupils are
between 11 and 14 years of age) proposed that pupils should be taught about the
“Nazi atrocities in occupied Europe and the unique evil of the Holocaust.”105
The deliberate framing of the Holocaust as an event of “unique evil” caused
astonishment amongst historians, educationists and teachers, many of whom
raised concerns about how the Holocaust was being utilized politically and
positioned historically.106 Tony Kushner interpreted the proposals as a
demonstration of the extent to which “crude ethical readings of the Holocaust
have now permeated the sphere of pedagogy in Britain.”107 Others raised
concerns that to situate the ‘unique evil of the Holocaust’ alongside a new
history curriculum aimed to inspire a positive affirmation of British history and
identity would not only ignore other genocides, but also encourage the view that,
as one history teacher observed, the Holocaust took place “outside of history as
something which was perpetrated by aliens from the planet evil who were
defeated by the forces of good.”108
Although this line was removed after the initial consultation, the original
decision to define the Holocaust as being an event of ‘unique evil’ is revealing
about the way in which the Holocaust has been absorbed into sections of British
society.109 Reference to genocide had been made in 2008 in a previous revision of
the curriculum, explaining teachers that students should explore the “changing
nature of conflict and cooperation between countries and peoples” including
104
William Hague cited in FCO Press Release, “Foreign Secretary urges active approach to
preserving the memory of the Holocaust,” January 27, 2011.
105
The Department for Education, The National Curriculum in England: Framework Document
for Consultation, February, 2013, 171.
106
Pearce, Historical Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, 223-225; “History Curriculum
Newsprint & BBC Debates, (2013), http://historyworks.tv/...updates/ [accessed April 26, 2016].
107
Tony Kushner, “Loose Connections? Britain and the Final Solution,” Sharples and Jensen,
Britain and the Holocaust, 51-70; 52.
108
Peter Morgan, “New History Curriculum Draft Proposal - Have your Say!,” The Historical
Association, http://www.history.org.uk/forum/...160, [accessed December 17, 2015]. On the
backlash to Gove’s policy, see ‘Michael Gove Redrafts New History Curriculum after Outcry,’
The Guardian, June 21, 2013; ‘Gove’s ‘Gentle Tweak’ to History Curriculum,’ Times Educational
Supplement, July, 10, 2013; “A History Teacher’s Appraisal of Michael Gove’s Approach to the
Teaching of History,” Independent, January 8, 2014; Richard J Evans, “Michael Gove’s history
curriculum is a pub quiz not an education,” New Statesman, March 21, 2013.
109
The Department for Education, The National Curriculum in England: Framework
Document, July, 2013, 210.
53
Kara Critchell
“the Holocaust and other genocides.”110 Although the Holocaust was the only
genocide explicitly named, the introduction of ‘other genocides’ into the
curriculum offered the opportunity for greater contextualization of the
Holocaust within this field. In contrast, the term ‘genocide’ was notable by its
absence in the 2013 revisions.
In 2011 the newly appointed Envoy for Post Holocaust Issues had claimed that
“Britain is a very cosmopolitan society… and so the events that have taken place
in other countries that are of comparable dreadfulness, in Cambodia or in
Rwanda or in Bosnia, Sudan are issues which the British public are interested in
and care about.”111
Whilst these sentiments are not wholly without foundation they do perhaps
invest the British population with greater awareness and understanding about
these genocides than might be the case in reality. Research conducted by the
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust in 2014 found that “half the UK population
cannot name a genocide that has taken place since the Holocaust despite millions
being murdered as a result of persecution in Cambodia, Rwanda Bosnia and
Darfur.”112 The figures shocked many and the Daily Telegraph responded by
expressing their barely concealed outrage at the sheer “scale of ignorance of major
world events among young people” after reporting that for those aged 16-24,
only eight out of ten were able to name an act of genocide to have taken place
since World War Two.113 The exclusive emphasis on the Holocaust and the
concurrent removal of genocide from the National Curriculum, however, might
not necessarily be the best way to counter this lack of awareness.
As part of the government’s renewed drive towards a more rigorous domestic
engagement with the Holocaust, a Parliamentary Inquiry into Holocaust
education was launched in 2015. The Education Committee responsible for
overseeing the Inquiry requested written submissions from interested parties to
investigate a range of issues relating to the scope and quality of Holocaust
education in Britain. The Committee asked for submissions specifically
110
Department for Children, Schools and Families and Qualifications and Curriculum Authority,
The National Curriculum Statutory Requirements for Key Stages 3 and 4, (2007), 116.
111
Andrew Burns, “Podcast for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.”
112
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, HMDT survey: Half of UK population unable to name a
post-Holocaust genocide, January 24, 2014, http://hmd.org.uk/news/hmdt-survey-half-ukpopulation-unable-name-post-holocaust-genocide, [accessed on April 24, 2016].
113
John Bingham, “Towie Generation have never heard of Rwandan Genocide,” Daily Telegraph,
January 24, 2014.
54
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
addressing ‘the focus on the Holocaust in the national curriculum and the
absence of teaching of other genocides’ for, as they were later to report, “the
teaching of other genocides and atrocities is an important aspect of young
people’s understanding of the modern world.”114 Ironically the launch of an
inquiry into the absence of genocide in education was carried out by the very
same government that had removed reference to genocide from the curriculum.
Yet it is not simply a matter of the Holocaust relegating the memory of other
genocides to the periphery of public consciousness. The way in which the
Holocaust has been represented in Britain has exerted a significant influence on
public engagement with other genocides. For example the popularity of
initiatives like the Lessons from Auschwitz program, and the subsequent
political and financial value attached to them, has certainly inspired the creation
of other organizations, such as Remembering Srebrenica to campaign for the
institutionalization of a Srebrenica Memorial Day, which was achieved in 2013. If
not fueling public engagement with the genocides themselves the success of the
way in which organizations committed to Holocaust memory have structured
themselves, and framed the history that they want to remember, has certainly
inspired those invested in the promotion of the importance of remembering
other acts of atrocity and genocide.
The renewed frenzy towards Holocaust remembrance and education culminated
in the establishment of a cross party Holocaust Commission in 2014. The
Commission, the Prime Minister declared, had to carry out the “sacred task” of
ensuring that the country “has a permanent and fitting memorial to the
Holocaust and educational resources for future generations.”115 The memorial
will be designed to “serve as a focal point for the national commemoration of the
Holocaust and stand as a permanent affirmation of the values of British society”
and will be accompanied by the creation of a Learning Centre overseen by the
newly established UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation (UKHMF) dedicated to
the advance of Holocaust learning.116 As the language employed here shows,
despite the reservations expressed following this announcement, the Holocaust is
114
“Government response to the House of Commons Education Committee on Holocaust
nd
Education,” 2 Report of Session, April 21, 2016, 4.
115
David Cameron, “Holocaust Commission Speech,” delivered January 27, 2014; David
Cameron as cited in Prime Minister’s Office Press Release, “Prime Minister Launches Holocaust
Commission,
January
27,
2014,
Retrieved
April
24,
2016,
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-launches-holocaust-commission.
116
United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Foundation, National Memorial and Learning Centre:
Search for a Central London Site, September, 2015, 5.
55
Kara Critchell
still being used as a means by which to reinforce interpretations of British
identity through the evocation of ‘British’ values.117 The location of the new
memorial, directly alongside the Houses of Parliament also appears as an attempt
to physically demonstrate the centrality of the Holocaust in the British
imagination and the importance to remembering the event to the British people.
Sharon Macdonald has argued that the shift from a focus on ‘the war’ to an
emphasis on ‘the Holocaust’ “allows for a less nation- and more European-based
form of commemoration. The fact that Holocaust Memorial Day has been
achieved as part of a European initiative, to coincide with commemoration in
other European countries, is expressive of European cooperation."118 This claim is
partially true; at the same time, however, the way in which the Holocaust has
been remembered and taught does not simply imply a growing proximity to
Europe in British imagination. The Holocaust then, particularly when viewed
through the lens of heroism, liberation and moral tenacity, subscribes to, and
reinforces, wider notions of Britain being somehow distinct from Europe in
terms of identity whilst paradoxically positioning itself as a European leader in
Holocaust memory. Even those committed to the future of Britain in Europe
and the consolidation of a broader European identity evoke the imagery of
exceptionalism through allusion to an identity based on victory in the war.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was certainly an advocate for greater
European integration and identity, described Britain as “the victor in WWII, the
main ally of the United States, a proud and independent-minded island race
(though with much European blood flowing in our veins)...” during a speech
delivered in Warsaw.119 The lack of critical engagement inherent in the narrative
encountered within Britain, however, fails to encourage deeper understandings
of the politics of British, European and international identity, and resists
confrontation with Britain’s imperial past.
Conclusion
Discussion about the Holocaust and its place in British society has grown since
the first Holocaust Memorial Day took place. This growth is marked by some
defining features: the increasingly symbiotic relationship between Holocaust
117
“Debate: Should More be Done to Remember the Holocaust in Britain?” History Extra,
January 27, 2016.
118
Macdonald, “Commemorating the Holocaust,” 66.
119
Tony Blair, “Prime Minister’s speech to the Polish Stock Exchange,” October 6, 2000,
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/...3384, [accessed on April 16, 2016].
56
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
education and commemoration, the decontextualized narrative projected by
these institutionalized representations, and the way in which they have come to
intersect with existing interpretations of British identity. As a result, British
Holocaust commemoration and education has helped to solidify a sense of
exceptionalism and disconnection from Europe whilst, paradoxically,
centralizing a European event into British domestic imagination.
The terms of reference for the recently established Holocaust Commission state
that “The Holocaust is unique in man’s inhumanity to man and it stands alone
as the darkest hour of human history.”120 As Tom Lawson rightly observes, “this
is an absurd statement, and it immediately ignores or consigns to lesser
importance all other incidents of genocide, some of which might be more
challenging and more difficult to deal with in Britain.”121 Yet despite the
absurdity of the statement the sentiment that “there is nothing equivalent to the
Holocaust” has gained powerful political, cultural and societal value drawing as
it does on the inherent connection between the Holocaust and the British
public’s perception of their own national identity framed through the lens of
World War Two as the heroic liberators of Europe.122 Such interpretations of
identity allow the British public and the government to assume a position of
leadership built on supposed British values whilst avoiding engagement with
more sensitive issues like colonial genocides.
Of course this narrative has not gone unchallenged. Academic criticism of the
direction of mainstream Holocaust consciousness has accompanied Holocaust
Memorial Day consistently since its establishment. Public discussion about the
omission of Armenia from the commemorative day accompanied the first event
in 2001, and has perhaps grown in intensity since then. Survivors themselves have
also become increasingly willing to voice some of the more negative experiences
they encountered and endured within Britain, even when these stories run
counter to the narrative of the country as welcoming and tolerant. It is clear that
inherent tensions continue to haunt the relationship between remembering the
Holocaust and navigating identity in 21st century Britain.
These tensions and conflicts can, in part, be attributed to the way in which the
Holocaust has been used, framed and shaped by successive governments in order
to promote particular domestic and international agendas and to respond to
continually changing world affairs. Attending the 25th anniversary of the
120
HM Government, The Prime Ministers Holocaust Commission: Consultation Terms of
Reference, January 27, 2014.
121
Tom Lawson, “Should More be Done to Remember the Holocaust in Britain?”
122
David Cameron, “Prime Minister’s Speech: 25th Anniversary of the Holocaust Educational
Trust,” September 16, 2013.
57
Kara Critchell
Holocaust Educational Trust, David Cameron stated that “the Holocaust stands
apart as a unique moment. It is the darkest hour of human history. And we must
ensure that it is always remembered in that way.”123 Herein lies the heart of the
contradictions and tensions inherent in the way in which the Holocaust is
encountered within British education and commemoration. For as long as the
British government, society and culture continue to perpetuate such sentiments
that indirectly infer a hierarchy of relevance it unfortunately remains likely that
remembering the Holocaust will, ultimately, not result in remembering genocide
to any significant degree.
Furthermore, this lack of honest critical engagement affects public discourse
about whether or not to accept refugees into the country. By defeating the Nazis
in the Second World War Britain assumes the role of moral leader of Europe
whilst seemingly being exempt from further interrogation about their presentday actions including the isolationist policy they are following regarding the
treatment of refugees. In 2013 Richard Evans observed:
If we want to help young people to develop a sense of citizenship, they have to
be able and willing to think for themselves. The study of history does this. It
recognises that children are not empty vessels to be filled with patriotic myths.
History isn't a myth-making discipline, it's a myth-busting discipline, and it
124
needs to be taught as such in our schools.
Despite the aspirations of Evans it is apparent that Holocaust education, being as
it is inextricably linked to commemoration and remembrance, is contributing to
a patriotic British narrative whilst also perpetuating a somewhat mythical and
redemptive interpretation of the Holocaust, infused with politically charged
representations of the past, as opposed to one rooted within historical
understanding. In such context the emotive and commemorative emphasis in the
approach to Holocaust teaching runs the risk of unwittingly stifling
contemporary debate about sensitive political and historical issues.
The Prime Minister’s reference to “a bunch of migrants” on 27 January 2016
mere moments after he proclaimed that a statue to commemorate the Holocaust
would be established in Parliament square to stand “as a permanent statement of
our values as a nation,” and the Government’s rejection of providing refuge to
3000 children who had fled the brutal conflict in Syria a few months later, show
that decontextualized and self-congratulatory Holocaust memory can co-exist
with much less pleasant attitudes in the present, pace its supposed ‘lessons.’
123
124
Ibid.
Richard Evans, “Myth-busting,” The Guardian, July 13, 2013.
58
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
______________
Kara Critchell is Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Chester. Her
PhD, completed in 2014 at the University of Winchester, explored the role of Holocaust
education in the development of British historical consciousness of the Holocaust. Her
current research considers the role of Britain in Mandate Palestine and post-imperial
British identity.
How to quote this article:
Kara Critchell, "Remembering and Forgetting: the Holocaust in 21st Century Britain," in
Holocaust Intersections in 21st-Century Europe, eds. Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano
Perra, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, n.
10 December 2016
url: www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=383
59
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
‘Il clandestino è l’ebreo di oggi’:
Imprints of the Shoah on Migration to Italy
by Derek Duncan
Abstract
Drawing on Rey Chow’s notion of entanglement and Michael Rothberg’s work
on multidirectional memory, I look at the ways in which certain visual, lexical, and
historical representations and tropes operate to create points of connection
between the Shoah and contemporary migration to Italy across the
Mediterranean. I argue that the deployment of these images is not intended to
indicate similarities, or indeed, dissimilarities, between historical events. The
network of association which is produced offers a space in which to critically and
creatively interrogate past and present, and their possible interconnections. I then
analyze in detail the work of novelist, Igiaba Scego, and film-maker, Dagmawi
Yimer, to uncover an entanglement bringing together cultural memories of the
Shoah, and silenced histories of Italian colonialism to indict political and cultural
practices informing responses to death by drowning in the Mediterranean.
Introduction
The entanglements of language
Cultural Memory?
Igiaba Scego: entanglements of place
Dagmawi Yimer: audio-visual entanglements
Ethical entanglements
__________________
Introduction
Moni Ovadia, the Italian Jewish musician and actor and a prominent public voice
against the resurgence of racism in contemporary Italy, commented that ‘the
60
Derek Duncan
clandestine migrant is today’s Jew’ [‘il clandestino è l’ebreo di oggi’] in a short
postface to Marco Rovelli’s Lager italiani1.
Rovelli’s book is about the experiences of migrants held in Italy’s detention
centers, and his provocative choice of title makes an immediate link between these
centers and Nazi concentration camps. The testimonies contained in Rovelli’s
book convince him of the validity of the parallel even as he makes clear, as does
Rovelli himself, that life in Italy’s detention centers is not on any material level like
that in the Lager. There is little gain in making comparisons between these
experiences in terms of number, scale, or intentionality. Drawing on the work of
Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, Ovadia finds a truer parallel in the
mechanisms which strip the undocumented migrant of any legal status in ways
reminiscent of the logic of the Lager. The migrant becomes “subhuman.” Rovelli’s
achievement is to have taken the reader beyond possible feelings of “indifference”
to the human ruination perpetrated by the detention camps, and towards a time
when the “shame” of the camps will be properly exposed. The two terms I have
highlighted here recall the work of Primo Levi who has provided an indispensable
lexis with which to describe and respond to the Shoah. It is difficult for someone
familiar with Levi’s writing not to register their presence.2 So while direct historical
equivalence is explicitly denied, this denial is partially disavowed by what I will call
the historically textured memory of language. In the course of what follows, I will
attempt to track and explicate what I see as a very strong “attraction” between the
Shoah and current migration to Europe in terms of how the latter is represented
and conceptualized. This attraction is particularly powerful in discourses which
aim to contest the dehumanization of the migrant.
I want to avoid interpreting this attraction as a kind of improper equivalence,
using instead Rey Chow’s notion of “entanglement” as my preferred conceptual
tool. For Chow, an “entanglement” does not rely on parallels of similarity, but is
more “a figure for meetings that are not necessarily defined by proximity or
1
Moni Ovadia, “Il nazismo che è in noi,” in Marco Rovelli, Lager italiani (Milan: Rizzoli, 2006),
281-83. Two years later, another book was published with the same title referring however to
Italian camps for Yugoslav prisoners: Alessandra Kersevan, Lager italiani. Pulizia etnica e campi
di concentramento fascisti per civili jugoslavi 1941-1943 (Rome: Nutrimenti, 2008). The
imprecision is resonant of what I will discuss here. (All translations from Italian are my own. I
have retained the original Italian in a few cases to highlight a particular word or expression the
recurrence of which is in itself significant).
2
Rovelli’s book contains many lexical reiterations of Levi. For a discussion of the presence of Levi
in postcolonial studies more broadly, see Derek Duncan, “The Postcolonial Afterlife of Primo
Levi,” in Destination Italy: Representing Migration in Contemporary Media and Narrative, eds.
Emma Bond, Guido Bonsaver and Federico Faloppa (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), 287-301.
61
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
affinity.” She asks: “What kinds of entanglements might be conceivable through
partition and partiality rather than conjunction and intersection, and through
disparity rather than equivalence?”3 By remaining attentive to the difference
inherent in the attraction of the Shoah to contemporary representations of
migration, I will attempt to follow what she calls “a certain contour of the
entangled” in both visual and textual modes of representation. In both media, I
will suggest, it is possible to discern a memory of the Shoah but, at least in the
examples which I explore here, the mnemonic imprint does not imply the
equivalence or even repetition of human catastrophe; it is more to do with the
aesthetics and politics of dehumanization and resistance.
The entanglements of language
Since the late 1980s, migration to Italy has been of significant concern to successive
Italian governments. The ways in which this concern has been expressed have
remained remarkably consistent. This consistency defies fluctuations in number,
legal status, country of origin, mode of arrival, and many other variables.4 The
Italian press has been widely criticized for generating a climate of hostility around
these issues and for the prejudicial language it has adopted. The term “clandestino”
is one of the words considered particularly problematic. In both adjectival and
nominative forms, it was the term most frequently used in the press from the late
1980s onwards to designate people who had migrated to Italy without the requisite
documents to enter or stay in the country. Federico Faloppa has noted how its
constant association with undocumented migration in the press forced a shift in
meaning from “hidden” to “illegal.”5 Use of the term persisted even after 2008
when the “Charter of Rome,” a protocol which seeks to promote the use of
accurate language in reporting migration as well as a sense of social responsibility
towards migrants themselves, was put in place. In 2011, the “Association of the
Charter of Rome” was set up to encourage the diffusion of these aims amongst
journalists and anyone else communicating publicly on these issues which that
3
Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2012), 1-2.
4
For excellent introductions to the terms of the debate, see Graziella Parati, Migration Italy: the
Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005);
Alessandro Del Lago, Non-persone: l’esclusione dei migranti in una società globale (Milan:
Feltrinelli, 2004).
5
Federico Faloppa, “Media and Migration: Some Linguistic Reflections,” in Destination Italy, 105123; 118.
62
Derek Duncan
Charter had expressed only in very broad terms. In 2009, what was referred to as
“clandestinità” or “immigrazione clandestina” was made a criminal offence thus
ensuring the term’s continued currency.6 Ovadia was in fact one of a number of
prominent intellectuals who signed a petition against the legislation condemning
it as the re-introduction of the fascist “Race Laws” promulgated in 1938.7
Writing in 2006, Ovadia’s adoption of the term “clandestine” is significant.
Arguably, it represented an act of resignification in a discourse that presented
migrants to Italy as a national threat. Indeed, not all uses of the term are equally
prejudicial, yet neither are they ever neutral. In November 2003, the Catholic
weekly Famiglia Cristiana dedicated its main feature to “illegal migration”
[immigrazione clandestina], prompted by the official funeral in Rome of thirteen
people from Somalia who died trying to cross the Mediterranean.8 Walter
Veltroni, the then Mayor, orchestrated the event which took place in the Piazza
del Campidoglio attracting a great deal of public and media attention.9 Famiglia
Cristiana adopted a very sympathetic tone and very firmly placed the blame for the
deaths on Europe’s inability or unwillingness to assume proper responsibility for
what was taking place. In many respects, the magazine’s perspective was at odds
with the general hostility to migration expressed in the Italian media at that time.
The magazine’s front-cover shows a close-up of a dejected young African man, eyes
downcast wearing some kind of waterproof jacket [Fig. 1]. We are invited to read
the man who remains unnamed as a survivor of the journey across the
Mediterranean. The image seems resolutely contemporary, but the accompanying
text suggests a historical parallel. The phrase “If this is a man” [Se questo è un
uomo] appears in large white capital letters underneath the less prominent “illegal
migration” [Immigrazione clandestina]. The direct reference to Primo Levi’s first
book contextualizes the image in a particular, albeit inconclusive, way. A short
6
Analysing responses to what took place in Rosarno in 2010, where African workers clashed with
police and local farmers, Gabriela Jacomella, a former journalist with Il corriere della sera, notes the
prevalence of the term “clandestine” in all sections of the Italian press in spite of the Italian
government’s clear statement that most of the workers involved in the uprising were legally
resident in the country. Gabriela Jacomella, “The Silence of Migrants: The Underrepresentation
of Migrant Voices in the Italian Mainstream Media,” in Destination Italy, 149-163; 161.
7
“Appello contro il ritorno delle leggi razziali in Europa,” http://temi.repubblica.it/micromegaonline/camilleri-tabucchi-maraini-fo-rame-ovadia-scaparro-amelio-appello-contro-il-ritornodelle-leggi-razziali-in-europa/ (this and all websites accessed 11 September 2016).
8
Famiglia Cristiana, November 2, 2003 .
9
For a very well-informed and detailed contextualization of the sinking and the funeral in relation
to Italian government policy, see David Forgacs, “Coasts, Blockades and the Free Movement of
People,” in Italian Mobilities, eds. Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Stephanie Hom (Routledge: New York,
2016), 175-199; 185-186.
63
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
editorial piece asking “If these are men, let us welcome them,” stresses the
dehumanizing experience of the crossing and Europe’s failure to provide an
adequate response. The reference to Levi invokes a sense of the migrants
beleaguered, yet abiding, humanity, and the risks of denying that humanity to
both him and the reader. A triangular circuit of empathy is set up through which
the (Catholic) reader is invited to understand what to make of the migratory
experience. The subtitle of the magazine’s main feature, “the testimonies of the
Somali survivors,” reinforces a link with Levi’s own literary and ethical,
memorializing project and post-Holocaust paradigm of testimony. What is
particularly interesting is how text and image enter into a reinforcing rhetorical
knot, a complex metonymic figure of historical transfer.10
Fig. 1. Famiglia Cristiana: the humanitarian gaze
Cover of Famiglia Cristiana, n. 44, November 2, 2003.
10
There are other visual histories connecting representations of beleaguered Africans and
Holocaust survivors. T.J. Demos suggests that the origins of this history began in Biafra in 1968
when stark images of starving children evoking a very specific representational memory were used
to encourage charitable aid: T.J. Demos, Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in
Contemporary Art, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 99.
64
Derek Duncan
The lapidary reference to If This Is a Man indicates the diffusion of Primo Levi’s
cultural presence and the availability of his work to function as a kind of readily
intelligible shorthand. This symbolic capital is even more evident with the title of
his final work, The Drowned and the Saved [I sommersi e i salvati], recurrently
used to refer to those who drown in the Mediterranean or indeed survive the
crossing.11 The collection of essays Bibbia e Corano a Lampedusa illustrates Levi’s
textually marginal but rhetorically potent presence.12 The text is a multi-voiced
commentary on annotated extracts from the Qur’an and the Bible discovered
washed up on Lampedusa. Who actually added the annotations to the texts is not
known, but the editors of the volume quite reasonably assume that they offer
some insight into the experience of the journey itself; indeed the annotations are
seen as a kind of indirect testimony.13 The book is dedicated “to the migrants, to
the memory of those who drowned [sommersi] in the Mediterranean, to the
people of Lampedusa and Linosa” [my emphasis]. In his wide-ranging
introductory essay, Francesco Montenegro, Archbishop of Agrigento, makes
specific comparisons to the Jewish exodus from Egypt. He makes an extended
reference to the Book of Lamentations and the imperative to remember, closing
his essay by quoting from “Shemà,” the poem/epigraph to If This Is a Man.
Introducing this quotation, however, he expresses some hesitation in referring to
those who drowned as “sommersi,” wary of creating “inappropriate overlaps.”14
Yet he uses this disavowal to talk about the return of “genocide,” which inevitably
indexes the systematic racial extermination of the Shoah. The parish priest Stefano
Nastasi makes an even more explicit parallel in his intervention suggesting that the
situation of the “sommersi” “lends itself to analogies and affinities with the
twentieth century tragedy of Auschwitz.”15 He also refers to Pope Francis’s visit to
Lampedusa in July 2013 and the homily where he indicts the “globalization of
indifference” and particularly the failure to empathize with the dead demanding
11
As just one example of this, see the comment of Alessandro Triulzi on migrant survivor
testimony: the survivors are “in Primo Levi’s words, either ‘drowned’ or ‘saved.’” Triulzi’s
shorthand erases the complexity of Levi’s formulation. Alessandro Triulzi, “Hidden Faces, Hidden
Histories,” in Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, eds. Cristina LombardiDiop and Caterina Romeo, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 103-113; 104.
12
Bibbia e Corano a Lampedusa, eds. Arnaldo Mosca Mondadori, Alfonso Cacciatore and
Alessandro Triulzi (Brescia: Editrice La Scuola, 2014).
13
The final section of the volume comprises a series of testimonies of a more direct sort ranging
from transcriptions of oral accounts and diaries to academic reflections on practices of
memorialization.
14
Francesco Montenegro, “Una riflessione,” in Bibbia e Corano, 19-36; 36.
15
Stefano Nastasi, “Testimonianza,” in Bibbia e Corano, 37-56; 48.
65
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
that they be treated “as if they were white.”16 The Pope’s reference to the racial
politics of the Mediterranean is unusually explicit.17 Yahya Pallavicini, Iman of the
Al-Wahid Mosque in Milan brings the history of Italy’s Jewish community and
the history of Nazi/Fascist persecution into this entangled constellation more
directly: “our Jewish brothers to whom we offered our support on Wednesday
October 16 at the Synagogue in Rome on the anniversary of the rounding up
[rastrellamento] of Jews in Rome.”18 Commenting on the annotated sections of
the Qur’an recovered from the sea, he remarks on the lexical inseparability of the
terms witness/martyr in Arabic.19
What is significant here is not the deployment of each term or reference in
isolation, but rather the combined result of their proximity.20 Their articulation is
all the more powerful as almost every contributor to the collection makes explicit
reference to the events of 3 October 2013 when more than 360 people, mostly
Eritrean, drowned off the coast of Lampedusa after a boat they were travelling on
from Libya, caught fire and capsized. The scale of the disaster intensified interest
across the political and social spectrum, and significantly, led to a greater
preoccupation with issues of representation and commemoration. The island of
Lampedusa is formally part of the region of Sicily, although it is closer to Africa,
only 70 miles off the coast of Tunisia.21 While international attention moved
16
Ibid., 51-52.
See Miguel Mellino, Cittadinanze postcoloniali: Appartenenza, razza e razzismo in Europa e in
Italia (Rome: Carocci, 2013), 117. For an account of the Pope’s visit and details of the Mass he
celebrated, see R. Tina Catania, “Making Immigrants Visible in Lampedusa: Pope Francis,
Migration, and the State,” Italian Studies: Cultural Studies, 70/4 (2015): 465-486.
18
Yahya Pallavicini, “Preghiera islamica per i defunti,” in Bibbia e Corano, 103-108; 106-107.
19
Robert Gordon makes the similar point about the origins and proximity of the terms in relation
to Christian theology: Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 3-4.
20
My work here is heavily indebted to Robert Gordon’s, The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 19442010 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), and particularly the chapter “Shared Knowledge,”
109-138, where he charts the ways in which the Holocaust as a point of cultural reference spread in
various directions. His comments on how the diffusion of certain images ranging from emaciated
bodies to the gate at Auschwitz came to stand as a “shorthand for the entire appalling history, its
messages and meanings” (110) have strong parallels with contemporary visual representations of
migration. His broader point that so many of the standard ways of representing the Holocaust,
both visual and linguistic, became commonplace “as both literal markers of an historical event and
flexible and highly recognizable analogies or metaphors” (136) underlies the easy cultural
availability of the images and tropes I identify here. Levi’s own name may arguably function as a
kind of cultural trope or shorthand. See, for instance, note 34 below.
21
There is now a very substantial bibliography on Lampedusa. See, for example, Joseph Pugliese,
“Crisis Heterotopias and Border Zones of the Dead,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural
Studies, 23/5 (2009): 663-79; Paolo Cuttitta, Lo spettacolo del confine: Lampedusa tra produzione
17
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Derek Duncan
during 2015 to focus primarily on migration from Syria through Turkey and
Greece, Lampedusa had previously been seen as the main point of entry into
Europe for migrants setting out from the North African coast.22 The history of
this migration route is very complex, and numbers have fluctuated according to
international circumstance and pressure. The countries of origin of those crossing
the Mediterranean have varied in the twenty-five or so years since migration has
become a palpably mass experience. While many boats have taken their passengers
directly to Lampedusa, more have been directed there by coastal patrols. A
migrant holding center based on the island has changed in status and function over
the years according to the number of people disembarking on the island. Whoever
survives the crossing is usually transported quickly to Sicily or the mainland;
typically, there is little contact between the islanders and the migrants. With a
permanent population of a little more than 6,000, Lampedusa has had to
accommodate a huge array of governmental and non-governmental agencies
whose presence on the island has created tensions over scarce resources. Concern
for those who survive the crossing has always been mixed with a sense of grief for
the dead and missing. The artist, Mimmo Paladino, erected the five meter high
“Porta a Lampedusa” in 2008 to remember those who had lost their lives.23 The
association of the island with the catastrophe of migration across the
Mediterranean has transnational significance. Groups such as “Lampedusa in
Hamburg” use the island’s name to mobilize politically around migration issues.24
The sinking of 3 October had such potency that the date has been adopted as a day
on which to commemorate all those who have died crossing the Mediterranean.25
e messa in scena della frontiera (Milan: Mimesis, 2012); “Special Thematic Section: The
Mediterranean Migration Frontier,” ACME: An international e-journal for critical geographies,
13/2 (2014), http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/acme/issue/view/77; Nick Dines, Nicola Montagna,
and Vincenzo Ruggiero, “Thinking Lampedusa: Border Construction, the Spectacle of Bare Life
and the Productivity of Migrants,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38/3 (2014): 430-45; “Special issue:
Reimagining Europe’s Borderlands: the social and cultural impact of undocumented migrants on
Lampedusa,” Italian Studies: Cultural Studies, 70.4 (2015). This body of work reflects a significant
diversity of emphasis, in part due to disciplinary difference, but also due to the shifting geopolitical
forces which envelop the island.
22
The number of migrants landing in Lampedusa has again increased in the wake of the agreement
of March 2016 restricting migration from Turkey to the EU.
23
For details of the project see http://www.amaniforafrica.it/cosa-facciamo/la-porta-dilampedusa.
24
See http://lampedusa-hamburg.info. I am indebted to Jacopo Colombini for my understanding
of “Lampedusa” as a transnational signifier.
25
In terms of sheer numbers, the shipwrecks of April 2015 exceeded those of 3 October 2013, but
the symbolic capital of that date has made it a recurring and stable point in the discursive
constellation I refer to. The Missing Migrants Project maintains on-going statistical information
67
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
Cultural Memory?
Before taking my investigation any further, some thought needs to be given to the
term “memory” itself, for it is not clear to me that this term conveys an appropriate
sense of the traces and echoes of the Shoah I identify. “Memory” as a category of
cultural reference, let alone of critical analysis, is notoriously broad. Astrid Erll’s
preliminary definition as “an umbrella term for all those processes of a biological,
medial, or social nature which relate past and present (and future) in sociocultural
contexts” gives an indication of memory’s reach not just with respect to its
complex temporality, but also to the diverse locations of its production,
communication, and consumption.26 Contemporary understandings of memory
extend far beyond the actual capacity of witnesses of a particular event to recall,
memorialize, or commemorate it either individually or as a collective.27 Digital
modes of communication have intensified debates around questions of memory
and historical representation. The availability of these representations does not
necessarily ensure their preservation nor guarantee their veracity even beyond the
usual vagaries of subjective recall. Liberal distribution of images and texts
complicates questions about the possession of memory, and also about who might
legitimately claim to be affected by the pressures of the past. The processes of
subjective identification may lay claim to, and in turn be moulded by, events
which have not been experienced directly.
I referred briefly in my introduction to “the historically textured memory of
language” which I see as something akin to what Michael Rothberg has called, in
reference to the work of Aimé Césaire, a “multidirectional rhetorical
constellation,” a configuration of meaning which invites quite separate historical
events to work to illuminate each other without ever falling prey to redundancies
of comparison or precedence.28 Rothberg’s influential concept of
on lives lost in the process of migration: http://missingmigrants.iom.int.
26
Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 7. Erll’s work is
particularly relevant for this article given her emphasis on “the increasingly globalizing pressures
and constellations of cultural memory” (27).
27
The bibliography in this area is substantial. See for instance Marianne Hirsch, The Generation
of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust, (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2012); Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory,
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The
Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004); James Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in
Contemporary Art and Architecture, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000).
28
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
68
Derek Duncan
“multidirectional memory” was developed through a series of close analyses of
memories of French colonialism and the Holocaust as he sought to move beyond
the competitive logic which often besets memory work and sidestep sterile and
antagonistic debates on history versus memory. He aspired instead to “an ethical
vision based on commitment to uncovering historical relatedness and working
through the partial overlaps and conflicting claims that constitute the archives of
memory and the terrain of politics.”29 In discussing the evocation of the Shoah as
a point of reference for representations of contemporary migration to Italy, I hope
to retain a sense of Rothberg’s ethical ambition. I also want to prioritize three
aspects of his analysis which seem particularly helpful:
1.
His adoption of Walter Benjamin’s notion of “constellation” which offers
“an image of encounter in which different temporalities collide and in which
movement and stasis are held in tension.”
2.
His insistence that memory operates beyond the borders of the nation to
generate what he calls a “transnational encounter.”
3.
An abiding interest in the narrative form of multidirectional memory:
“what narrative forms correspond to and express the work of intercultural
remembrance and what the effects of those narrative forms are.”30
Constellations of multidirectional memory do not produce either synthesis or
resolution; they do not stick to conventional spatial and temporal boundaries and
their expression may also take on unexpected shapes. Rothberg concludes his book
on a note of undecidable complication: “understanding political conflict entails
understanding the interlacing of memories in the force field of public space. The
only way forward is through their entanglement.”31 Like Chow, Rothberg does
not aim to “disentangle” the intersections of different cultural memories but
rather to work “through” them, investigating their “partial overlaps,” or to pick
up on the echo of another expression, their “inappropriate overlaps.”
Before exploring in some depth two extended representational entanglements, I
set out some “partial overlaps” or, what Chow has called “scenes of entanglement”
Decolonization, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 77. For an interesting take on the
potential conflict and competition of other traumatic pasts in relation to the Holocaust, see Sissy
Helff, “Memories of Migration: Tracing the Past Through Movement in Film,” African and Black
Diaspora, 8/1 (2015): 1-14.
29
Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 29.
30
Ibid., 44; 133; 137.
31
Ibid., 313.
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QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
where the Shoah and migration touch. Their detail maps the contours of its wider
cultural discourse.
At the Berlin Film Festival in 2016, the Golden Bear for Best Film was won by
Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea). The film was shot on
Lampedusa and shows the separate lives of migrants and islanders sharing the same
space. In the run-up to the film’s screening in Berlin, Rosi’s parallel between the
current refugee crisis and the Holocaust was very widely quoted in the press. In an
interview given to the Italian daily La Repubblica, he is more specific in his analogy
as he recalls boarding a vessel with a team of coastguards and discovering that those
on the boat were dead. Unsure if he should film the scene, the coastguard tells him:
“It has to be done. It would be like standing outside a gas chamber during the
Holocaust and not filming anything because its too disturbing” (emphasis in the
original).32 Rosi’s work and his commentary on it raise ethical questions about the
aesthetics of film and its testimonial function.
The term “Lager” is widely used in Italy to refer to the Shoah.33 In a piece
published in October 2015, the highly-regarded journalist Flore MurardYovanvitch deploys the term to talk about conditions in Libyan “concentration
camps” where many of those hoping to cross to Italy have been held. In the same
article she adopts the near synonyms “extermination” and “genocide” to underline
the determining role of racial difference in governmental management of the
crossing.34
In December 2013, an inmate in the migrant detention center on Lampedusa
managed to film scenes of naked migrants being forcibly showered and
disinfected.35 It emerged that those subjected to this treatment included some of
32
Arianna Finos, “Berlino, applausi per “Fuocoammare": ‘Raccontiamo l'Olocausto di oggi’,”
http://www.repubblica.it/spettacoli/cinema/2016/02/13/news/berlino_applausi_per_fuocoam
mare_-133340575/.
33
For a detailed analysis of this and other terms see Robert S.C. Gordon, “From Olocausto to
st
Shoah: Naming Genocide in 21 -century Italy,” Modern Languages Open (2015),
http://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/index.php/mlo/article/view/75. Often associated with
Levi himself, the term “Lager” had earlier been widely used by activists in ANED. Guri Schwarz
very usefully reminded me of this in a private note. The term’s ongoing association with Levi
underlines the degree to which his name functions as a kind of cultural shorthand for a much more
variegated and densely populated field of activity.
34
Flore Murard-Yovanvitch, “I nuovi lager. L'incubo dei migranti nei campi di concentramento
libici,” http://www.huffingtonpost.it/flore-murardyovanovitch/...8354772.html.
35
In much attenuated form, the footage recalls the photographs taken secretly in Auschwitz and
discussed in Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz,
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Again the point is not to compare two
historical instances, but rather to reflect critically on the production, dissemination, and reception
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Derek Duncan
the survivors of the 3 October shipwreck. The footage was broadcast on Rai2, an
Italian state television channel. The images were generally seen as reminiscent of
concentration camps and the practice loudly condemned by politicians from all
sides. Giusi Nicolini, the high profile mayor of Lampedusa was forthright: “It’s
what they did in the Lager.”36
In September 2015, Czech officials used felt-tip pens to inscribe identification
numbers on the arms of arriving migrants. Although the aim was to record rather
than obliterate their identity,37 the perception that this procedure imitated too
closely the tattooing of prisoners by the Nazis led to international outcry and
condemnation. Elie Wiesel berated the practice and the growing feeling of
intolerance towards migrants but affirmed “This is not the Shoah” reiterating the
view that: “The Shoah is not comparable to any other crime in the history of
mankind.”38 Shaul Bassi, the Jewish Italian postcolonial critic, has commented on
a similar incident in Catania where migrants who had been “saved” by a British
warship were seen to have identification numbers written on their hands. Like
Wiesel, Bassi explicitly expresses his mistrust of facile analogies, but reflects on why
certain people “are easily forgettable and reduced to having no identities. Perhaps
black bodies are easier to write about than white ones, because we are used to
representing them en masse with no identity or name, to seeing them as one
suffering body not as individual subjects with a particular identity.”39
Two one-day conferences organized by the Italian Senate’s Human Rights
Committee under the title “A Moral Lesson: The Sin of Indifference. Europe, the
Shoah, the disaster in the Mediterranean” in the early summer of 2015 are a further
point of reference for Bassi.40 The first event was held in Rome in the Palazzo
Giustiniani, the seat of the Senate, while the second was held in Milan at Binario
of visual documents and their complex temporalities.
36
“Cie Lampedusa, il video-shock del Tg2 indigna e scuote le coscienze,”
http://www.repubblica.it/solidarieta/immigrazione/2013/12/17/news/cie_lampedusa-73848222/;
for responses to
the footage which
is now
accessible on
Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1c48pYG4yU. The incident is analysed by Dines et al.
“Thinking Lampedusa,” 435.
37
I would like to thank one of the anonymous readers of this article for reminding me of the
different aims of what seems a similar practice. This difference underlines, however, the power of
the visual to entangle quite distinct instances.
38
Andrea Tarquini interview with Elie Wiesel, http://www.repubblica.it/...122109689/.
39
Valeria Brigida, “Migranti, Catania, gli sbarchi, e i numeri,”
http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/...1769346/.
40
Gad Lerner, “Il peccato dell’indifferenza. L’Europa, la Shoah, la strage nel Mediterraneo,”
http://www.gadlerner.it/2015/09/29/il-peccato-dellindifferenza-leuropa-la-shoah-la-strage-nelmediterraneo.
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QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
21, the city’s memorial to the Shoah, located in the main railway station. In his
opening address, the President of the Senate, Pietro Grassi reiterated the idea of
the Shoah as a “unique event,” even though the stated aim of the debate was
specifically to explore the validity and value of making comparisons between the
Shoah and the current situation in the Mediterranean. The conferences were
inspired by an article written in 2009 by the journalist Gad Lerner where he gave
his conditional approval to a piece in the Catholic daily L’avvenire comparing the
two historical episodes. Lerner had argued that using the Shoah to provoke the
reader to reflect on what was going on today constituted a “good use” of history.
Lerner’s argument was that the general feeling of “indifference” or willful
ignorance which allowed the Shoah to happen might also be detected in attitudes
towards people dying in the Mediterranean. This sense of indifference was the
focus of Lerner’s intervention in 2015. He specifically mentions fascist Race Laws
and invokes the term “genocide” to demand a robust response to the deaths
occurring off Italy’s shores. “Indifferenza” is inscribed in large letters at the
entrance to Binario 21.
In January 2015, on Holocaust Memorial Day, the Istituto centrale per i beni
sonori e audiovisivi (Central Institute for Sound and Audiovisual Collections)
hosted a commemorative event in Rome, “Push back and memory: from the
Shoah to today.” The event aimed to draw on the historical memory of the Shoah
to create and promote an awareness of the inadequacy of responses to the current
situation in the Mediterranean. Various groups representing people who had
crossed the Mediterranean were involved including the “Truth and Justice
Committee for the new Desaparecidos” named after Argentina’s “disappeared”
politicizing death in the Mediterranean through transnational association.41
Comparisons between the Shoah and migration are often interwoven with other
references. The most frequently invoked parallel is the Middle Passage in which
millions of black Africans died in the forced Atlantic crossing. Writing in October
2015, in memory of the sinking two years before, the commentator, Vittorio
Vandelli conflates all three: “Migrant’s Holocaust, the modern Middle Passage: do
we really care?.”42 He also references the Italian experience of Ellis Island as a means
41
See: http://www.icbsa.it/index.php?it/792/respingimenti-e-memoria-dalla-shoah-ad-oggi.
Vittorio Vandelli, “Migrants’ Holocaust, the modern middle passage: do we really care?,”
http://www.vittorio-vandelli.com/migrants-holocaust/. As I have noted elsewhere, an
entanglement with the Middle Passage has also been made in academic literature. By way of
example see Cristina Lombardi Diop, “Ghosts of Memories, Spirits of Ancestors: Slavery, the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic,” in Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local
Communities, Global Connections, eds. Annalisa Oboe and Anna Scacchi (Routledge: New York,
2008), 162-180.
42
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Derek Duncan
of rendering the migrants’ aspirations and motivations intelligible to the Italian
public.
These are only a few examples of the figurative associations drawing the
Mediterranean crossing into networks of entanglement for which cultural
memories of the Shoah provide an indispensable lexis. In what follows I will read
two extended examples of this “rhetorical constellation” examining the work of
Igiaba Scego, a contemporary novelist and journalist who writes on the memory
of Italian colonialism, and Dagmawi Yimer, a film-maker whose experience of
crossing the Mediterranean is strongly imprinted on his work. Their historically
informed and politically urgent work is also intimately biographical.
Igiaba Scego: entanglements of place
Igiaba Scego is one of Italy’s most prolific and high-profile writers, an active and
well-established presence in the press and on social media. Her work interrogates
postcolonial Italy and the absence of a robustly conscious and critical memory of
the colonial past.43 Her last three books have focussed on Rome, and in different
ways are excavations of that colonial past which Scego reveals as always effectively
present even when ostensibly invisible.44 The first two books combine personal
anecdote and historical reflection in different measure while the most recent
volume is a work of historical fiction. Yet as I will show, the articulation of this
colonial memory has a very particular and convoluted chronology and form across
Scego’s output; it has in effect its own microhistory of entanglement which alights
on a memory of the Shoah after multiple detours which are themselves
retrospectively illuminated by it.45
The scene of Scego’s entanglement is set in La mia casa è dove sono (My House Is
Where I Am). This extended autobiographical essay is an exploration of Scego’s
affective attachment to Rome and to Mogadishu, the two cities which form her
emotional landscape. She devotes one chapter to the Axum stela which had stood
43
For an excellent introduction to Scego’s earlier work see Piera Carroli, “Oltre Babilonia?
Postcolonial Female Trajectories towards Nomadic Subjectivity,” Italian Studies, 65/2 (2010): 204218.
44
Igiaba Scego, La mia casa è dove sono (Milan: Rizzoli, 2010); Roma negata: Percorsi postcoloniali
nella città (Rome: Ediesse, 2014); Adua (Florence: Giunti, 2015).
45
For a complex sense of Rome as the scene of Holocaust entanglement, see Gordon, The
Holocaust in Italian Culture, 86-108.
73
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
in Piazza Porta Capena since 1937, booty from Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia
two years before. After years of protracted negotiation and logistical difficulties,
the stele had been returned to Axum in 2005, and nothing had been placed in the
square to fill the gap it left: “There is nothing in that spot today. A void.”46 Scego
goes on the recount her family’s own colonial history which she intertwines with
the symbolism of that now empty space. Her chapter concludes with the wish that
the space might one day be filled: “Every time I pass Porta Capena Square I am
afraid of what might be forgotten. In that square there used to be a stele, now there
is nothing, It would be great one day to have a monument to the victims of Italian
colonialism.”47 Scego herself begins this work of commemoration as she
interweaves the biographies of her grandfather and uncle with that history of
colonial violence. She wonders about her grandfather’s relationship to colonial
Italy and his role as an interpreter close to Rodolfo Graziani, responsible for the
forced internment of thousands of nomads in Libya in the early 1920s as well as
the use of chemical weapons outlawed by the League of Nations in the invasion of
Ethiopia in 1935. In her account of the violence of Italy’s colonial presence, she
adopts a lexis which both anticipates the Shoah, but which invites her reader to
infer a pre-history to the Nazi genocide. She uses the term “Lager” to describe the
camps where the Italians had incarcerated and slaughtered the Libyan nomads,
adding that these same “concentration camps” were set up in Ethiopia in the mid1930s.48 While a historical parallel is not bluntly stated, the “partial overlap” of
memories created by a shared lexis invites connections to be made across historical
difference.
In Roma negata: percorsi postcoloniali nella città (Rome Denied: Postcolonial
Paths in the City), Scego more explicitly pursues the traces which Italy’s colonial
past has left on the urban fabric. The book starts however with another point of
entanglement as Scego returns to Piazza Porta Capena. The emptiness left in the
square by the removal of the Axum stele had been filled subsequently by a
memorial to the events in New York of 11 September 2001. In 2009, two Roman
columns were placed in the square to remember those who died. While the words
of Gianni Alemanno, the then mayor of Rome, suggested to Scego the wish to
commemorate victims of any kind of political violence, for her, the ongoing
absence of any kind of monument to those who died in Italy’s colonies clearly
shows that “not every memory… is treated the same.”49 As a resonant example of
46
Scego, La mia casa, 71.
Ibid., 90-91.
48
Ibid., 81.
49
Scego, Roma negata, 16.
47
74
Derek Duncan
this, Scego cites the fact that the Italian media remained silent about the historical
link between Italy and Eritrea in their reports on the shipwreck of 3 October 2013.
There was no acknowledgement that most of these people came from a former
Italian colony. The “memorial pact” between Italy and the US, sealed by the
columns in the square, has no postcolonial parallel.
3 October 2013 stands at the heart of Scego’s text, yet it is the particular tenor of
Italy’s response to this loss of life that motivates her critical reflection on colonial
memory which is the book’s true subject.50 The scale of lives lost on that day
provoked immediate and very public expressions of sympathy and condolence in
the media from across the political spectrum. An initial proposal for a state funeral
was quickly abandoned and those who died were buried in various cemeteries in
Sicily. The survivors, still at that point mainly on Lampedusa, were not invited to
take part; neither were they awarded the Italian citizenship conferred on those who
perished.51 Government ministers as well as representatives of Afwerki’s repressive
Eritrean government attended the official commemoration ceremony held in
Agrigento, boycotted by the city’s mayor as well as by the mayor of Lampedusa.
No memorial to the dead has ever been erected which Scego feels “would let Italy
reflect and the Eritrean regime come to terms with its cruelty.”52 In contrast, Scego
recounts an alternative funeral ceremony which took place outside Montecitorio,
the Italian parliament. The funeral was part of a public protest against political
responses to deaths in the Mediterranean. The crowd comprised of Italian activists
and Eritreans from across Europe. Scego describes the two coffins carried in the
procession: a large coffin inscribed with the number 369 and a smaller one to
remember the children who had died in the crossing. An actress, playing the role
of a drowned girl, recites in Tigrinya the suffering of the dead. Scego hears this
voice as a call not to be forgotten: “the Eritreans took their funeral back.”53
Taking possession of the management of death reverses the subordinate role
afforded to postcolonial subjects in the domain of necro-politics.54 Rosi Bradotti
50
For a very full and nuanced analysis of the commemorations after October 3 see Gianluca Gatta,
“Lampedusa, 3 ottobre 2013. Vita, morte, nazione e politica nella gestione delle migrazioni,” Studi
culturali, 112 (2014): 323-332.
51
The affective burden of this exclusion is conveyed in a letter to the Italian people written by one
of the survivors denied permission to travel to his brother’s funeral in Agrigento: “Lettera di Zerit,
biologo marino: Al popolo italiano,” in Bibbia e Corano, 193-196.
52
Scego, Roma negata, 38.
53
Ibid., 48.
54
The term “necro-politics” is drawn from the work of Achille Mbembe who extends the idea of
the “camp” to produce an analysis of the neocolonial management of demographic movement and
75
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
argues that the state’s entitlement to manage death as well as life means that the
loss of those who do not survive the journey across the Mediterranean is the
consequence of a rigorous logic of national defence which depends on the
dispensability of certain human lives. Theorizing this “disposable humanity” in
terms of Agamben’s “homo sacer,” Braidotti invites her reader to infer the shadow
presence of the Shoah in her reminder of the centrality of the camp to modern
regimes of state power.55 The Holocaust is barely mentioned in her book yet
affirmative postcolonial responses to the inhumanity of racial categorizations
inform her argument. The proximity of the Shoah and colonialism is evocatively
suggested by a photograph given to Scego by the Italian Jewish writer, Giacometta
Limentani. The photo, taken in 1937, shows Limentani as a ten-year old standing
beside three ascari, indigenous soldiers from East Africa serving in the Italian army.
The African troops were in Rome on the occasion of the first anniversary of
Mussolini’s declaration of Empire. Looking at the image, Scego is moved by its
unbearable poignancy: “In that picture were four people who very soon would
suffer the consequences of those awful race laws.”56 The text’s memory of the past
makes necro-politics of contemporary Italy palpable. Recalling the murder of two
Senegalese men in Florence by a sympathizer of the racist far-right, Scego relates
this to the growth of neofascism across Europe concluding: “the possibility of a
holocaust isn’t so remote.”57
The penultimate chapter of her book deals with a recent memorialization of Italy’s
fascist, colonial, and anti-semitic past. In 2012, the small town of Affile built a
memorial to Rodolfo Graziani. Graziani had been nominated Viceroy of Ethiopia
after the declaration of empire and the most brutal excesses of the Italian presence
in East Africa are attributed to him. The monument, paid for by municipal
funding, was controversial, receiving coverage in the international press. Graziani
also had his advocates, locally and further afield, clearly demonstrating the
unresolved nature of Italian colonial memory.58 In a radio interview, Scego
death. His influential essay cited by Braidotti is: “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, 15/1 (2003): 11-40.
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 127.
56
Ibid., 115. Gordon makes the point that from the late 1980s, there was an increased tendency to
see the introduction of the Race Laws in 1938, rather than the Nazi deportations of 1943, as the
starting point of the Holocaust in Italy. By anticipating the start date, Italians themselves become
more tightly entangled in the narration and network of events: Gordon, Holocaust in Italian
Culture, 101-102.
57
Scego, Roma negata, 23.
58
An extreme instance of this support is offered by the ‘Associazione Culturale Maresciallo d'Italia
Rodolfo Graziani,’ http://www.rodolfograziani.it . The breadth of the organization’s ambition
and activities need to be studied as an alternative articulation of counter-memory in their own
55
76
Derek Duncan
entangles Graziani in the events of October 1943 in Rome and the rounding up
[rastrellamento] of the city’s Jewish population.59 On 7 October, Graziani, at that
point Minister of Defence in Mussolini’s Republic of Salò, ordered the disbanding
of the Carabinieri, Italy’s military police, which had become hostile to the regime.
Over 2000 were deported to camps in Germany. It is widely believed that his
action facilitated the mass deportation.60 Acutely attentive to the lexical legacy of
the Shoah, Scego had earlier contested the comments of Matteo Salvini, the
virulently anti-immigration right-wing politician, who advocated the
“rastrellamento” of migrants in Milan 2010, in the wake of, what he perceived as,
civil disorder.61 Although Salvini swiftly retracted the term, Scego returns the word
inexorably to October 1943 insisting that the memory of the “rastrellamento” and
of what it then led to, still inhere in the term, and demand to be justly
remembered.
In Adua, Limentani’s photograph is credited in the Acknowledgments as a source
of the novel’s inspiration, and the unbearably poignant anticipation of what was
still an unimagined catastrophe. Scego translates the image into a subplot in the
novel. When Zoppe, a Somali translator working in Rome under Fascism, is
arrested and is being beaten in prison, he recalls the white Jewish family with
whom he had made friends. Davide, Rebecca, and their young daughter Manuela
only ever appear in the novel as a kind of memory or fantasy. In particular, he is
haunted by Rebecca’s growing anxieties about the rising anti-semitism. After he
returns to Africa, she appears to him one final time, anxious and unconvinced by
her husband’s increasingly desperate patriotic claims: “He never stops talking
about his father who died at Vittorio Veneto, or his uncle Nathan’s gold medal.”62
There is also a fleeting mention of the proposal to relocate Italy’s Jewish
population to the Empire.63 At this point, she disappears never to return.
right.
‘“Beautiful Minds” in compagnia in Igiaba Scego,’ Broadcast July 5, 2013,
http://www.radiocafoscari.it/archivio/beautiful/beautiful130705.mp3 .
60
For an account of events of that day see Anna Maria Casavola, 7 ottobre 1943: la deportazione
dei Carabinieri nei Lager nazisti (Rome: Studium, 2008).
61
Igiaba Scego, “Il peso della parola,” http://www.unita.it/commenti/igiabascego/il-peso-delleparole-1.49013 .
62
Scego, Adua, 85.
63
For a discussion of the plan to resettle Jews in Ethiopia, see Richard Pankhust, “Plans for Mass
Jewish Settlement in Ethiopia (1936-1943),” Ethiopia Observer 15 (2005): 235-245. Also available at
https://tezetaethiopia.wordpress.com/2005/04/20/plans-for-mass-jewish-settlement-in-ethiopia1936-1943br-smallby-richarch-pankhurst/ .
59
77
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
Zoppe’s memory of the Limentani family occurs at a moment of extreme physical
violence and unjust incarceration. His daughter, Adua, is the novel’s other main
character. Her name and the book’s title recall the battle of 1896 when Ethiopian
troops defeated the invading Italian army. Part of Mussolini’s plan to conquer
Ethiopia was to avenge that defeat. In fact, Adua became a fairly popular girl’s
name in Italy as a result. Scego’s Adua occupies an ambiguous space in
postcolonial Italy; an aspiring actress she ends up in soft porn films in predictable
Black Venus roles. The novel’s layered temporality alternating between the
colonial voice of Zoppe and the postcolonial perspective of his daughter is made
strikingly contemporary through her marriage to Ahmed, or Titanic as she calls
him, a much younger Somali man who had survived the crossing to Lampedusa.
As a result, the Jewish family which befriends Zoppe in the 1930s is entangled in
the same “rhetorical constellation” which captures Ahmed some 80 years later.
Dagmawi Yimer: audio-visual entanglements
In Adua, Scego translates the photograph given to her by Limentani into a family
of ghosts which haunts Zoppe, the colonial subject in Rome. Her translation of
the familiar lexis of the Shoah into the register of the postcolonial is destabilizing,
or multidirectional, in that no single historical event or experience is given priority.
For Scego, language is a site of memory, and indeed a practice of commemoration
or memorialization, but also of hurt and damage. At the end of Scego’s novel,
Ahmed leaves Adua, offering her a digital camera as a parting gift: “Now you can
film what you like, and talk about yourself any way you want.”64 Adua, who had
been cynically exploited as a black actress, is now in possession of the technology
of visual representation and self-narration. The novel ends at this point, but a very
similar intersection of self-representation and digital technology informs
Dagmawi Yimer’s work as he like Scego follows through the entanglements of
Italian colonial memory and contemporary migration with the Shoah, albeit in a
different medium and modality.
Dagmawi Yimer arrived in Italy in July 2006, rescued by Italian coastguards after
the boat he was travelling on across the Mediterranean sank. Born in Addis Abeba,
Dagmawi left Ethiopia for political reasons and spent months crossing the Sahara
desert to reach Libya and get to Europe.65 After enrolling on a video filmmaking
64
65
Scego, Adua, 174.
For a full account of the journey, see Dagmawi Yimer, “Da Addis Abeba a Lampedusa: Cronaca
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Derek Duncan
course in Rome, he has gone on to produce a number of short and full-length
documentary films. His first long film, Come un uomo sulla terra (2008) codirected with Andrea Segre and Riccardo Biadene, exposed the brutality of Libya’s
treatment of migrants and the EU’s complicity in that brutality. He also appeared
in front of the camera recounting his own experience and recalling explicitly Italy’s
colonial links with Ethiopia. In his later Soltanto il mare (2010), Dagmawi returns
to Lampedusa to meet the island’s residents and, in a particularly charged scene,
thanks the coastguards who rescued him.66 The film self-consciously includes
shots of Dagmawi filming, underlining the authorial source of the camera’s gaze.
It also includes news footage taken of his arrival on Lampedusa, at that point an
unknown and unnamed face amongst so many others, part of an aesthetic of
anonymous migrant dejection, reminiscent of that shown on Famiglia Cristiana’s
cover page. The inclusion of the news footage does more than simply recall
Dagmawi’s arrival in Italy, which in itself would be of little more than curiosity
value. Its potency lies in the fact that it registers the measure of Dagmawi’s
transformation, not merely as a migrant who has successfully assimilated, but as
one who now is able to take charge of the medium of visual representation. In a
fascinating biographical essay, the Ethiopian American writer, Maaza Mengiste
describes Dagmawi as someone “who tells his story freely, but cannot seem to
speak it without a subdued voice, as if the terror has left a permanent scar.” 67
Dagmawi’s impairment, she suggests, has been offset by his work as a film-maker:
“Using his camera as a voice, Dagmawi Yimer is now helping others share what
had once been unspeakable.”68
di un viaggio,” in Colonia e postcolonia come spazi diasporici. Attraversamenti di memorie,
identità e confini nel Corno d'Africa, eds. Uoldilul Chelati Dirar, Silvana Palma, Alessandro Triulzi
Alessandro Volterra (Rome: Carocci, 2011), 335-352.
66
For more detailed analysis of Dagmawi’s career to date especially in relation to Soltanto il mare,
see Simona Wright, “Lampedusa’s Gaze: Messages from the Outpost of Europe,” Italica, 91/9
(2014): 775-802; Federica Mazzara, “Spaces of Visibility for the Migrants of Lampedusa: The
Counter Narrative of the Aesthetic Discourse,” Italian Studies: Cultural Studies, 70/4 (2015): 449464; Àine O’Healy, “Imagining Lampedusa,” in Italian Mobilities, eds. Ruth Ben-Ghiat and
Stephanie Hom (Routledge: New York, 2016), 152-173.
67
Maaza Meghiste, “The Madonna of the Sea,” http://granta.com/the-madonna-of-the-sea/ .
68
Underpinning my discussion of Dagmawi’s commitment to testimony and his ethical reluctance
to rely on the representation of the human body as evidence are the debates around Claude
Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985): see Sue Vice, Shoah (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). An increasing
interest in the transnational and transversal dimensions of visual representation of the Shoah is
seen in work such as Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global
Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual
Culture in the New Millenium eds. Axel Bangert, Robert S.C. Gordon, Libby Saxton (Oxford:
Legenda, 2013).
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QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
The attempt to find a language for experience which exceeds the limits of language
has been an ongoing challenge in the representation of the Shoah. Yet equally as
compelling has been the ethical imperative to find ways of bearing witness to the
experience of it. In a short essay in the volume accompanying Come un uomo sulla
terra in which he describes how he kept a diary assiduously during his journey
from Ethiopia, Dagmawi reflects on his ethical commitment to witnessing:
Apart from my wish to leave a testimony, I thought that there was a great moral
obligation to speak about what we had experienced: reveal the truth of what
happened to try to save anyone still undergoing all that violence and
69
discrimination.
Dagmawi’s sense of duty to the past is matched by a commitment to future
memory in ways which invite comparison to Primo Levi’s sense of duty and
purpose. The determination to bear witness has been a constant in his work along
with an attentiveness to the risks inherent in representation. In late 2015, he was
invited to direct a short film by “Redani – Network of the Black African Diaspora
in Italy” as part of their initiative against the use of morally exploitative images of
African children by NGOs in their fund-raising campaigns.70 This campaign
critiques the effects of images not dissimilar to the one on the cover of Famiglia
Cristiana. For Dagmawi, the duty of testimony also demands discretion. In an
article published in the Italian daily, La Repubblica, in early May 2015, shortly after
the catastrophic shipwrecks in which more than 1,000 are estimated to have lost
their lives Dagmawi expresses an unwillingness to attempt an account of his
journey’s full horror: “My duty is to remember those who drowned. Out of
respect there is only one part of our journey which I won’t talk about. The final
part. The sea.” He recollects in great detail the hardships of the journey by land,
undertaken in impossibly cramped conditions. He concludes the story by
remembering those who had already lost their lives at sea and also their names
whose meanings ironically seemed to have promised a better future. Saying these
69
Dagmawi Yimer, ‘Il mio diario non è scomparso’, in Come un uomo sulla terra, eds. Marco
Carsetti and Alessandro Triulzi (Rome: Infinito, 2009), 103-105. The essays in the volume contain
italicized references throughout to “sommersi” as well as to the Middle Passage and Guantanamo.
70
For details of the campaign and to access the video see http://ancheleimmaginiuccidono.org .
Barbie Zelizer has written of the “repeated aesthetic” through which images not of the Shoah recall
the Shoah by virtue of their closeness to “the familiar Holocaust aesthetic.” The potential loss of
specificity in repetition is the corrosive underside of cultural “shorthand”: Remembering to Forget:
Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1998), 221.
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names aloud has an incantatory force: “Although the bodies they belonged to are
no longer here, those names still exist on account of the fact that they have been
spoken aloud”71
The attention to naming as a mode of commemorative representation recalls the
Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project, one of the core activities of Yad Vashem.
It is also central to the work of the Holocaust Memorial Trust which encourages
naming as a potent strategy for countering the anonymity of numbers.72 In
Dagmawi’s work, names are ghosts. Their commemorative power is celebrated in
ASMAT: nomi per tutte le vittime in mare (ASMAT: Names in Memory of All
the Victims of the Sea), the seventeen-minute film he directed to remember those
who died on 3 October.73 The piece was commissioned by the “Comitato 3
ottobre,” an NGO set up with the specific aim of having that date declared an
official day of remembrance and welcome. In a short commentary on the film,
Dagmawi writes:
The film’s images create a space for these names without bodies. Names laden
with meaning even if their meaning is difficult to grasp completely. We are
obliged to count them all, name them one by one so that we might comprehend
how many names have been severed from their bodies, in a single day in the
74
Mediterranean.
The film explores precisely this separation of body and name through aesthetic
choices which represent the unrecoverable corporeal loss of the not-to-beforgotten dead. These choices not only represent their absence and mourn their
loss, but also present an alternative aesthetic to the spectacularization of the abject
African body familiar from standard media representations. The first half of the
film is a mixture of animation and footage of the sea and seabed which may
disorientate the spectator as the moving handheld camera doesn’t allow for any
71
Dagmawi Yimer, “Mediterraneo,” La Repubblica, May 3, 2015.
See http://hmd.org.uk/page/names-people-murdered . Shaul Bassi’s comments on the iniquity
of using numbers to identify migrants are accompanied by the call to collect individual names and
stories as a counter.
73
Both Italian and English versions of the film are accessible on Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/114343040; https://vimeo.com/114849871. For a reading of the film which
places it in the “rhetorical constellation” of Albanian migration to Italy in the 1990s and practices
of commemoration around the sinking of the Käter I Rades in 1997, see Daniele Salerno, “Stragi
del mare e politiche del lutto sul confine mediterraneo,” in Il colore della nazione, ed. Gaia Giuliani
(Milan: Mondadori: 2015), 123-139.
74
The full text is available at https://vimeo.com/114849871 .
72
81
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
single angle of vision. The opening sequence showing calm water painted in a
bright blue hue and the dark outline of an island in the distance is accompanied
by a woman’s voice humming and singing. There is an abrupt cut to underwater
scenes and choppy waves. The camera pans in on a stylized drawing of a boat with
a jump cut to a close-up of the blackness of the hold. The camera again pans across
watercolour paintings of people, embracing or with arms outstretched attempting
to swim to the surface.75 A further cut takes the spectator to a drawing of a broken
boat on the sea floor. A slow animated sequence of people standing with the upper
half of their bodies covered with shrouds is followed by actual footage of the same.
The soundtrack to this sequence alternates between the sound of gently lapping
waves and the music of a single instrument which accompanies the female voice.
She commands the spectator to listen to the collective “cry” of the migrant. Her
singing merges into a ferocious spoken indictment of the culpability of African
leaders and the indifference of European politicians, proud of the values of
Western civilization. The use of the second person plural “voi” form gives way to
a more tender invocation of the island of Lampedusa itself, a beacon of hope for
those crossing from Africa. The families of the dead are exhorted to call out their
names in remembrance. Before the female narrator begins the work of reciting
each name, she speaks a few lines over animated images of the shrouds denouncing
the longevity of what is often portrayed as an exceptional moment of crisis. Two
points in particular are forcefully made. “We are more visible dead than alive”
indicts a culture of reception fixated on those who never reach European soil [Fig.
2]. As mentioned above, Italian citizenship was conferred on those who drowned
on 3 October while the survivors were interned. The reminder – “we existed even
before October 3rd” - similarly critiques a cultural and political response unable to
acknowledge the life both of the dead and of those who survived. This disavowal
is integral to Braidotti’s “necro-politics.”
75
The artwork is by Luca Serasini and is taken from an unfinished graphic novel produced in
commemoration of October 3, http://www.lucaserasini.it/migrantes. The images recall graphic
underwater footage shot on the sunken boat. Now widely available online, the footage clearly
shows images of the dead including that of a couple locked in an embrace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XP6jsW9NNI. Serasini cites also the underwater
sculptures
of
Jason
deCaires
Taylor
as
a
source
of
inspiration
http://www.underwatersculpture.com/sculptures/overview/ . The underwater sculpture park he
created off the coast of Grenada contains figures which evoke memories of the Middle Passage
although the artist is reluctant to pin his work to a single referent.
82
Derek Duncan
Fig. 2: ASMAT: the visibility of the dead (detail)
Dagmawi Yimer, ASMAT - Names in Memory of All the Victims of the Sea
https://vimeo.com/114343040
Fig. 3: ASMAT: names (detail)
Dagmawi Yimer, ASMAT - Names in Memory of All the Victims of the Sea
https://vimeo.com/114343040
Dagmawi’s decision not to rely on photographic representations of either the
living or the dead is an incisive intervention in contemporary practices of
83
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
photojournalism and film-making.76 The second half of the film is taken up by the
recitation of the names of all those who died on that day. Many of the names are
accompanied by the literal translation of their meaning. In addition to hearing the
names, the spectator sees them hurtle directly towards her; the Tigrinya script
adding to the unfamiliarity of the experience [Fig. 3]. The recitation of the names
is a deliberate strategy to remember those who died and to displace that memory
from mere statistical enumeration. Translating the meaning of each name deepens
the existential and cultural roots of each life. Judith Butler ponders the relevance
of the name in her discussion of the ethical parameters of the Abu Ghraib images
of abused Iraqi prisoners.77 The names of the perpetrators of the abuse became
familiar in the media, but Butler makes the point that those of the victims were
withheld:
Do we lament the lack of names? Yes and no. They are, and are not, ours to
know. We might think that the norms of humanization require the name and
the face, but perhaps the “face” works on us precisely through or as its shroud,
in and through the means by which it is subsequently obscured. In this sense,
the face and name are not ours to know, and affirming this cognitive limit is a
way of affirming the humanity that has escaped the control of the
78
photograph.
Butler makes the point that in this particular instance the photographer is wholly
complicit in the scene. A different complicity entangles the Turkish photograph
Nilufer Demir whose images of the Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, who drowned on 2
76
Dagmawi’s work may be productively aligned with that of the contemporary artists focussing
on postcolonial Africa analysed by Demos in Return to the Postcolony. These artists share a similar
engagement with, and critique of, the image as document. Demos also works with the notion of
“entanglement”; his understanding of the concept is drawn from Achille Mbembe with its
emphasis on temporality and subjectivity. Demos’s conclusion is worth quoting at length as it
offers a potentially provocative placement of both Dagmawi and Scego in terms of their artistic
practice: “the postcolony shows itself as a temporal entanglement comprised of continuities and
discontinuities, overlapping histories and unacknowledged presences. One major accomplishment
of the art considered [in Return to the Postcolony] is that it proposes aesthetic meditations that
pursue these historical linkages and interlinked geographies to critical ends,” 158-59. Demos
develops the notion of “entanglement” mapped out in Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
77
As Gordon has noted, Agamben’s argument that the camp has been central to modernity is
foundational to how both Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are understood. Questions of visibility
are also common to both: Gordon, The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 138.
78
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, (London and New York: Verso, 2009),
95.
84
Derek Duncan
September 2015, resonated across the world. The most widely reproduced picture
showed the boy being carried away by a rescue worker, his lifeless body shielded
from the camera’s gaze.79 The campaigning Italian journalist Fabrizio Gatti
responded by making available on his blog hosted by the major Italian journal
L’Espresso, images taken by a Libyan journalist shown with no narrative
discretion the bodies of children who had drowned off the coast of Zuwara in late
August 2015 when two boats capsized.80 Alan Kurdi’s name became a cultural
shorthand for the war in Syria while the children on the beach in Zuwara remain
largely unknown and unnamed. In a roundtable discussion at the United Nations
in May 2016, Maaza Mengiste spoke about the “deception” generated by Alan
Kurdi’s image which moved those who saw it, but did nothing to register the
physical damage and emotional horror caused to those dying, named or unnamed,
in such conditions. Yet naming matters:
If your body cannot be named then it is just a corpse. It is a corpse that is less
than human, it is a thing. While this thing waits to be claimed, you will become
something else in this world: you will be called Missing. There is no ritual for
mourning the unclaimed. There is no paying of respects for unmarked graves.
While your body is thrown into a shallow grave and marked with a number,
the you that is attached to a name, the you that now lacks a body, will have
simply disappeared from this earth. You will become one of the disappeared,
81
“gli scomparsi.” You were here and now you are not.
Mengiste implicitly returns us to Butler’s “ungrievable lives” and to the aftermath
of 3 October, yet she asserts her conviction that the dead must be humanized by
returning directly to Primo Levi and his determination to communicate beyond
the horror he experienced. She refers specifically to The Drowned and the Saved,
and the chapter, “The Grey Zone” where Levi explores the necessity and the risk
79
Igiaba Scego contrasts the wide distribution of images of the horrific massacre at the university
campus in Garissa with the discretion shown to victims of comparable events in the West:
“Nessuno si è sognato di fotografare quei corpi senza vita oltraggiati dalle pallottole. E anche se
qualcuno lo avesse fatto sarebbe stato giustamente linciato sui giornali,”
http://www.internazionale.it/opinione/igiaba-scego/2015/04/05/garissa-campus-kenyamassacro-non-volevo-vedere-quella-foto. The conscious choice of the term ‘lynching’ used in
reference to the US adds to the rhetorical constellation of affect. Just as black bodies are less
identifiable than white one, they are also subject to different regimes of representation: “Death is
rarely seen in ragged human remains unless they are foreign”: John Taylor, Body Horror:
Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 129.
80
Available at: http://gatti.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it.
81
The text of Mengiste’s talk can be found at http://primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/primolevi-at-the-un/.
85
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
of understanding the world’s tangled complexity. For Levi does indeed talk about
“entanglement” – what he refers to as a “groviglio” – and how it threatens to
render the world unintelligible. Menghiste endorses his determination to work
through the entanglement, a commitment inherent to the projects of Scego and
Dagmawi.
Ethical entanglements
As I noted earlier, both Rothberg and Chow are deeply engaged in tracing the
forms of entanglement that memory assumes. Paul Gilroy does similar work in his
study of the Black Atlantic, a study which ends on a compellingly entangled
reading of Levi and Toni Morrison:
How are we to think critically about artistic products and aesthetic codes which
though they may be traceable back to one distant location, have been changed
either by the passage of time or by their displacement through networks of
82
communication and cultural exchange?
The traceable displacement I want to end on underlines the ethical purchase of the
entanglements proposed by Igiaba Scego and Dagmawi Yimer and relates to its
staging in one particular site. When Levi returned to Auschwitz in 1965, he was
taken aback at, and essentially unmoved by, the site which had been turned into a
monument, a museum, “something static, tidied up, meddled with.”83 On the
other hand, a visit to Birkenau, where he had never previously been, produced an
“feeling of violent anguish.” Totally unreconstructed, the site remained devoid of
any trace of aesthetic intervention or improvement. Since its inception, Binario 21,
the memorial in Milan station, has functioned as a very active space of
commemoration, not only to the Shoah but to other instances of mass slaughter.
The site has also given space to the testimonial voices of the marginalized and
persecuted. Yet a different form of intervention took place there between June and
November 2015, when Binario 21 offered overnight accommodation to
82
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, (Cambridge, Mass.:
Yale University Press, 1993), 80.
83
Primo Levi, “Appendice,” to Se questo è un uomo, in Opere, ed. Marco Belpoliti, (Turin:
Einaudi, 1997), I, 170-201; 184-185. For an extended discussion of Levi’s attitudes to, and
engagement with, Holocaust museums see Nancy Harrowitz, “Primo Levi and Holocaust
Tourism,” in Primo Levi: The Austere Humanist, ed. Joseph Farrell, (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004),
203-214.
86
Derek Duncan
approximately 5,000 refugees, mostly just passing through Milan, as they travelled
onwards to a destination in northern Europe. Working with the City of Milan
authorities, the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic charitable body, as well as
a large number of volunteers, Binario 21 became a site of action in, and on, the
present. It provided migrants with shelter, food, and clothing, and put on a range
of cultural activities including the gathering of testimonies from those eager to pass
on their stories. One of these activities required everyone to trace the outline of
their hand on a large piece of paper and write their name on it [Fig. 4]. This
corporeal and graphic act of self-inscription, of presence, defies the presumed
anonymity of the migrant. The symbolism of the hand gestures towards the
resignification of the forced finger printing introduced by the Italian government
to identify and process migrants.84
Fig.4: Binario 21: self-inscription
Anna Chiara Cimoli and Stefano Pasta have suggested that the activities in the
84
Proposals for compulsory finger-printing have been controversial. One of their most vocal
opponents has been the Italian Jewish intellectual Amos Luzzatto. In 2008, for example, he
explicitly denounced the initiative to finger-print all Roma children as “ethnic profiling,” a return
to the racism of his childhood. Italy he claimed is a nation “which has lost its memory”: Amos
Luzzatto, “C'è un segno razzista timbrati ed esclusi come noi ebrei,”
http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2008/06/26/luzzatto-un-segnorazzista-timbrati-ed.html?ref=search. The entanglements of visual, bodily, and mnemonic
inscription are integral to my argument here.
87
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
Memorial represent a “new chapter in civic positioning,” a particular
“entanglement” in which the still very new space of Binario 21 negotiates in
relation to the pressures of the present day, but with a clear memory of the past.85
Reflecting on the ambiguities of the representational strategies of Christian
Boltanski, who has used documents such as photographs to complicate rather than
confirm matters of historical record, Brett Ashley Kaplan focuses on the
determining potency of affect rather than fact.86 The networks of entanglement
worked through by Scego and Dagmawi are held in critical counterpoint by the
intensity of an intensely felt past. The Shoah haunts Scego’s postcolonial
perspective, and ghosts Dagmawi’s strategy of testimony: through their work both
contribute to the contemporary modality of civic engagement practiced
at Binario 21 through their production of historically textured memories.
_________________
Derek Duncan is Professor of Italian at the University of St Andrews. He has published
widely on modern Italian literature and film and currently works on representations of
migration to Italy in visual and text-based media.
How to quote this article:
Derek Duncan, ““Il clandestino è l'ebreo di oggi”: Imprints of the Shoah on Migration to
Italy,” in Holocaust Intersections in 21st-Century Europe, eds. Robert S. C. Gordon,
Emiliano Perra, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione
CDEC, n. 10 December 2016.
url: www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=384
85
Anna Chiara Cimoli and Stefano Pasta, “Il ciclo di vita della memoria: I profughi al Memoriale
della Shoah di Milano: rappresentazione, rotte, cartografie possibili,” Roots/Routes: Research on
Visual Cultures, 6/21 (2016), http://www.roots-routes.org/?p=16228 .
86
Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure and the Holocaust, (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2007), 108.
88
QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
La nostra fratellanza nel dolore:
the Jewish Community of Rome and the ‘Other’ Genocides
by Luca Peretti
Abstract
This paper investigates how, if, and to what extent the Jewish Community of
Rome interacts with the commemoration of other acts of genocide, mass killing,
and ethnic cleansing. I focus mostly on the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan
genocide, and the Nazi extermination of Romani people, and I analyze how the
Jewish community has been in dialogue with these communities and their
memory practices. As an introduction, I discuss the little-known story of the
unmade Museo delle Intolleranze e degli Stermini [Museum of Intolerances and
Exterminations], which was planned in the late 1990s to be built in the capital
city of Italy. In the conclusion, I highlight how we can speak of a ‘kaleidoscopic’
memorial world of the Jewish community of Rome that includes several
different acts of commemoration and memory practices.
Introduction
The Unmade (or Virtual) Museum
The CER and the Commemoration of “Other” Genocides
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
__________________
Introduction
During the 1990s and more extensively in the 2000s Italy witnessed an everincreasing presence of Holocaust remembrance and commemoration in politics,
arts, and culture at large. The Jewish genocide now firmly occupies a place in the
fabric of the memory of the nation – a place that is, however, neither
uncontested nor pacified. This process of establishment of the genocide as part
of the national memory was accompanied by the reinforcement of the idea of the
Shoah as a paradigm, as the lens thorough which other genocides and massacres
can, and perhaps should, be considered. The city of Rome plays a major part in
these processes; and in a sense, we could say that, for several reasons, it lies at the
89
Luca Peretti
center of them: first, because it is the place where the most symbolic and
important event of the Italian Shoah took place – the raid and round-up in the
former Jewish ghetto of Rome and in the rest of the city which took place on 16
October 19431 – and the commemorations of this event have occupied a highly
significant place in the landscape of memory; then, because Rome is the largest
city of Italy and its capital; and finally, and possibly most importantly, because
Rome has the largest and most active Jewish community of Italy. The peculiar
relation of Rome with the Holocaust, and particularly with Holocaust
remembrance, has brought Robert S. C. Gordon to note how “in ways both
historic and symbolic, Rome has returned again and again as a (perhaps the)
prime site of Holocaust stories and images in post-war Italy.”2
There is also another process, however, of memorialization of violence taking
place in Italy as elsewhere over this period, one perhaps less mediatized and
widely known, but nonetheless present: that is, the increased attention to other
genocides and mass killings (mostly modern ones), from other exterminations
perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War (most notably that of
the Romani people) to more recent ones (such as the Rwandan genocide) or to
older but still modern instances, such as the Armenian genocide.3 These other
memorializations have regularly interacted with and intersected the activities of
Holocaust remembrance in Rome, including particularly the activities of the
organized Comunità Ebraica di Roma [Jewish Community of Rome, henceforth,
1
Millicent Marcus talked of a ‘synecdochal value’ of this event, Italian film in the shadow of
Auschwitz, (Toronto and London: Toronto University Press, 2007), 161. The director Carlo
Lizzani, who made L’oro di Roma (The Gold of Rome, 1961) on the 16 October, highlighted how
“The story of the Community of Rome […] reproduced in a small scale, like ‘in vitro,’ but with
the same torment, the tragedy that at the time was happening all over Europe,” in L’oro di Roma
di Carlo Lizzani, ed. Giovanni Vento, (Bologna: Cappelli, 1961), 126. The bibliography on the
round-up of 16 October includes many contributions in different languages: see, among many,
Robert Katz, Black Sabbath: A Journey Through a Crime Against Humanity, (New York:
Arthur Barker, 1969); Silvia Haia Antonucci, Claudio Procaccia, Gabriele Rigano and Giancarlo
Spizzichino, Roma, 16 ottobre 1943. Anatomia di una deportazione, (Rome: Guerini e Associati,
2006); Anna Foa, Portico d'Ottavia 13. Una casa del ghetto nel lungo inverno del '43 (Rome and
Bari: Laterza, 2013); Fausto Coen, 16 ottobre 1943. La grande razzia degli ebrei di Roma,
(Florence: La Giuntina, 1995), and the recent Martin Baumeister, Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, and
Claudio Procaccia, 16 ottobre 1943, La deportazione degli ebrei romani tra storia e memoria,
(Rome: Viella, 2016). All translations from Italian are mine, revised by Karen T. Raizen.
2
Robert S. C. Gordon, The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010, (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2012), 87.
3
For a comparative introduction to these genocides, see Adam Jones, Genocide. A
Comprehensive Introduction, 2nd ed., (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).
90
QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
CER], which is frequently integrated through its institutional representatives
and (semi-)official publications with the memory and awareness of other acts of
genocide, mass killing, and ethnic cleansing.4 The CER is by far the largest Italian
Jewish community, and it is also one that, especially in the last few years, has
enjoyed extensive media attention and often seems to be considered as
representing Italian Jews as a whole, and not just one, albeit large, component of
the Italian community.5 Its former president, Riccardo Pacifici, enjoyed a
particular status and authority: despite being the president of the CER and not
of the national body, the Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane [Union of
Italian Jewish Communities, henceforth UCEI], he enjoyed high and increasing
media attention, becoming a sort of unofficial media spokesperson for Italian
Jews.6 But there are other reasons why it is significant to focus on Rome and on
the CER, the most significant of which is the fact that Rome as capital and as a
city of multiple, global interactions is a site of plural communities of memory
where we find the representatives of a number of other communities and
different entities with which Italian Jews are (or could be) in dialogue.
As a starting date, I have chosen 2001, the first year of the official Italian national
Memorial Day of the Holocaust, the Giorno della memoria [Day of Memory],
which takes place on 27 January, subsequently designated at the UN as the
International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the
Holocaust.7 The establishment of this Giorno had three consequences that speak
4
As all such communities, CER contains within it many different voices and opinions. In this
paper I have considered only the positions expressed by the elected officials of the community, by
members speaking as spokespersons or in similar functions, and those expressed in official or
semi-official publications of the CER.
5
This national prominence has been produced for a number of reasons that fall beyond the scope
of this paper. One of them is surely the key role of the former chief Rabbi of Rome, Elio Toaff
(1915-2015). As Anna Momigliano pointed out, he “was the ‘de-facto leader of Italian Jewry’ until
he retired... Unlike many European countries, Italy doesn’t have a national chief rabbi, but
Toaff’s status as a spiritual leader approached that level and extended well beyond the capital,”
“The End of an Era for Italy’s Jews: Why Young Italian Rabbis Are Bowing to Israeli
Orthodoxy,” Haaretz, April 27, 2015, http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/features/.premium1.653815 [all websites accessed 26 December 2015].
6
Or at least this was the way he was considered by Italian media who interviewed him on several
occasions regarding not just the CER but Italian Jews as a whole. For a biographical profile of
Catalogo dei viventi 2016 (forthcoming),
Pacifici
see
Giorgio
Dell’Arti,
http://cinquantamila.corriere.it/storyTellerThread.php?threadId=PACIFICI+Riccardo.
7
See the websites of The Holocaust and The United Nations Outreach Programme,
http://www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/.
91
Luca Peretti
to the topic of this paper. 8 First and most obviously, it inserted an official date of
remembrance of the Shoah into the Italian civic calendar, something that created
the opportunity and indeed the official obligation to organize events that
included, in some cases, also the commemoration of ‘other’ genocides - genocides
which, even though they did not take place on Italian soil nor were caused by
Italians, are nonetheless occasionally commemorated in Italy and by Italian
institutions as well, in a European and global framework of shared
memorialization. However, as we will see, this inclusion has also created some
tensions, as these other genocides are not included in the official definition of the
law that established the Day of Memory, which limits its focus to the Jewish
genocide.9 Further, the establishment of this Giorno triggered the creation of
other commemoratory dates.10 There is thus a double aspect to the question: the
commemoration of non-Jewish genocides and massacres has been incorporated
into this national day of remembrance, and the CER has participated in the
memorialization of these other genocides.11 I begin with a brief investigation of
the little-known story of the unmade Museo delle Intolleranze e degli Stermini
[Museum of Intolerances and Exterminations, henceforth MIS] in Rome, a
museum that was intended to represent a kaleidoscope of different memories
and genocides. I focus subsequently on public and official interventions and
statements by the leaders of the CER at commemorations, presentations of
books, inaugurations, and similar events, and the direct involvement of the CER
in the creation of memorials in so far as they bring into often complex contact
the Jewish memory of the Jewish genocide and other communities of memory.
8
On the genesis of the Giorno della memoria, see Furio Colombo, Athos De Luca and Vittorio
Pavoncello, Il paradosso del Giorno della memoria. Dialoghi, (Milan: Mimesis, 2014); Francesco
Rocchetti, “Il simbolo del voto unanime: l’istituzione del ‘Giorno della memoria’ attraverso il
dibattito parlamentare,” in Antigiudaismo, Antisemitismo, Memoria. Un approccio
pluridisciplinare, ed. Giuseppe Capriotti, (Macerata: Eum-Edizioni Università di Macerata,
2009), 331-346; for the issues that the Giorno raised in memory practices, see the provocative book
by Elena Lowenthal, Contro il giorno della memoria, (Turin: ADD Editore, 2014).
9
“Istituzione del "Giorno della Memoria" in ricordo dello sterminio e delle persecuzioni del
popolo ebraico e dei deportati militari e politici italiani nei campi nazisti,” Gazzetta Ufficiale, 177,
July 31, 2000, http://www.camera.it/parlam/leggi/00211l.htm.
10
The Giorno del Ricordo, [Day of Remembrance] established in 2004, commemorates the
victims of the foibe, and the Giorno della Libertà [Day of Freedom] remembers the fall of the
Berlin Wall: they both speak to a generic need of remembering the victims of Communism. For
the parliamentary debate on the Giorno della memoria, see Rocchetti, “Il simbolo del voto
unanime.”
11
Similar processes are apparent in the national contexts also: see for example, Andy Pearce,
Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, (New York: Routledge, 2014).
92
QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
The scope and focus of what follows, based as it is on a selection of recent case
studies, has shaped its use of local and at times ephemeral sources, including a
variety of articles from web-journals and websites, videos, and other content
available only online. Despite their limitations, these sources are the most
suitable and the most eloquent evidence available for the analysis of the
evolution of the CER’s attitude toward and actions in regard of other genocides
in recent years.
The Unmade (or Virtual) Museum
At the end of the 1990s a group of scholars introduced the idea of a Museo delle
Intolleranze e degli Stermini, a proposal for a museum that was planned to have
been built in Rome for the year 2000.12 The year was of course symbolic, as it
marked the beginning of the new millennium, but was also the year of the most
significant Catholic Jubilee of the modern era, which took place in the Vatican
and across the Italian capital and was accompanied by urban renovations and
constructions of new buildings. On the Advisory Board of the museum we find
major scholars in the field of contemporary history, who in a sense legitimated
the project with their presence: among others, Claudio Pavone, the historian and
former partisan and author of one of the most important books on the
Resistance,13 the genocide scholar and historian Marcello Flores, and the
historian of Italian colonialism Alessandro Triulzi. The coordinator of the
project was Annabella Gioia, director of the Istituto Romano per la Storia
d’Italia dal Fascismo alla Resistenza [Roman Institute for the History of Italy
from Fascism to the Resistance].
The name of the planned museum is striking in itself: it makes use of charged
plural words, such as ‘intolerances’ [intolleranze] and ‘exterminations’
[stermini], which immediately imply a broader scope than the already dominant
central genocide of the 20th century, the Nazi Final Solution, and not a focus on
any specific topic or genocide. It implies and includes the Enlightenment idea of
tolerance, although in its negative iteration, unlike for example the Museum of
12
The title of a chapter dedicated to the museum in the Annale Irsifar stated: “Perché un museo
delle intolleranze e degli stermini a Roma per l’anno 2000?” [Why a museum of intolerances and
exterminations for the year 2000?], see L’Annale Irsifar 1997. L’idea di contemporaneità e la
trasmissione storica (Rome: Carocci, 1998), 125.
13
Claudio Pavone, A Civil War. A History of the Italian Resistance, (London/New York: Verso,
2014). The first edition in Italian was published in 1991.
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Luca Peretti
Tolerance (MOT) of Los Angeles that opened in 1993.14 Furthermore, ‘stermini’
is a much broader concept than ‘Holocaust’ (albeit more restrictive than
‘genocide’): as a term, it is inclusive rather than exclusive, chosen for its capacity
of potentially fostering dialogue among different communities and
constituencies that have experienced mass killings and violence of different types,
including colonial and racial violence – a very important inclusion for a country
like Italy which had and indeed has yet to fully acknowledged its colonial past.15
This suggest that MIS would have been a museum like no other in Italy. The
goals of the museum in this respect are clearly delineated by Annabella Gioia,
one of its creators, who wrote that the museum would:
document racism, fundamentalism, and massacres which marked the path of
history... with the intent of identifying the cultural roots, the social
mechanisms and the situations which attracted and favored racism and
intolerance. Understanding these phenomena should push the visitor to
continually interrogate him/herself on his/her past and identity... Our final
goal is to contrast a historical path which still today is threatened by new
16
intolerances and new abuses, from which no-one can feel exempt a priori.
MIS was intended as a museum with a strong pedagogical purpose, one that
promoted understanding of history and the study of history as a means to a
better understanding of the present. Luca Zevi, one of the creators of MIS and
the architect of the monument commemorating the San Lorenzo bombings of
1943,17 spoke of two approaches that the museum aimed to employ: “1) an
analytical approach focused on retracing facts according to a geographical and
temporal sequence, 2) a kind of intertextual approach, which would enable the
visitor to find common matrices in episodes even if they took place far apart in
14
See “About us. An Education in MOTivation... at the MOT,”
http://www.museumoftolerance.com/site/.../About_Us.htm.
15
See for example Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, eds. Cristina
Lombardi-Diop, and Caterina Romeo, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and for the
hidden memories of colonialism in Rome, see Igiaba Scego and Rino Bianchi, Roma negata.
Percorsi postcoloniali nella città, (Rome: Ediesse, 2014).
16
Annabella Gioia, “La memoria dell’intolleranza,” in Tolleranza e libertà, ed. Vittorio Dini
(Milan: Elèuthera, 2001), 288-289.
17
19 luglio 1943, 4 giugno 1944: Roma verso la libertà (Rome: Gangemi, 2014), 172. Luca Zevi is
member of a prominent Jewish family: his mother Tullia was the president of the UCEI, and his
father Bruno was an important architect and historian of architecture. See Nathania Zevi and
Tullia Zevi, Ti racconto la mia storia: dialogo tra nonna e nipote sull'ebraismo, (Milan: Rizzoli,
2007).
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time and space.”18
Together with Giorgio Tamburini, Zevi went on to become the architect of the
Museo della Shoah [Museum of the Shoah, henceforth MS], planned since the
early 2000s and soon to be opened in Rome. The MS can be seen as a ‘foil’ to
this failed project of the end of the 1990s. If the MIS was intended to be “a
museum which is not born in place of memory and that consequently does not
have an evocative and emotive value; its specificity is the central role of history,”19
the MS will be built – or rather it is intended to be built – in the former
residence of Benito Mussolini in Rome, Villa Torlonia, which is also the location
of one of the two Jewish catacombs of Rome: that is, a highly charged place,
where the relationship between the fabric of memory of the space and the
museum is extremely strong.20 The dynamic between MS and MIS could have
resembled the dynamic between the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum of Washington, which were
built in exactly the same year, 1993.21 The Museum of Tolerance, while also
maintaining a Jewish focus (it is, after all, associated with the Simon Wiesenthal
Center), is much more inclusive in its historical range and has a similar scope to
the MIS. The MIS has now a virtual and online existence [Figg. 1 and 2]. By
looking at the ‘historical trails’ around which it is organized we can grasp how its
scope is much wider than a museum focused only on the Holocaust. These trails
are state as: Italian colonialism, East Germany, the genocide of the Rom and the
persecution of homosexuals under Nazism, the Armenian genocide, eugenics,
and the forced displacement of populations.22 The project is ongoing, at least in
its online version; as the curators write on the website, “the seven pieces of
18
Luca Zevi, “Uno spazio aperto sul labirinto dell’altra storia,” in L’Annale Irsifar 1997, 140.
Levi, “Uno spazio,” 127. See also Luca Zevi’s own book on memorialization and architecture,
Conservazione dell'avvenire. Il progetto oltre gli abusi di identità e memoria, (Macerata:
Quodlibet, 2011), 157-169.
20
A good synthesis, in English, of the problems which are delaying the construction of the
museum is in Anna Momigliano, “Rome May Cancel Plans for Holocaust Museum” Haaretz,
September 16, 2014, http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/features/.premium-1.615908. For more
recent developments, “Shoah: inaugurata sede Fondazione Museo Roma,” AGI, October 16,
2015, http://www.agi.it/cronaca/notizie/shoah_inaugurata_sede_fondazione_museo_roma....
The museum has already attracted scholarly attention; see for example Gordon, The Holocaust
in Italian culture, 14-24; and Robert S.C. Gordon, “Il mancato museo della Shoah,” in Cinema e
storia 2013. La Shoah nel cinema italiano, eds. Andrea Minuz, Guido Vitiello (Soveria Mannelli,
Cosenza: Rubettino, 2013), 151-171.
21
Andrea Minuz, La Shoah e la cultura visuale. Cinema, memoria, spazio pubblico, (Rome:
Bulzoni, 2010), 83-111.
22
See http://www.akra.it/amis/english/museo_en.html.
19
95
Luca Peretti
research that constitute the section “Historical trails” have been chosen to give
preference to the “places of oblivion,” issues rarely investigated and at times
repressed. This selection criterion can explain the absence, in this first phase, of a
theme such as the Shoah, the central “event” of the twentieth century, and the
inclusion of the persecution of the Rom and homosexuals.”23
Fig. 1: Homepage of the Virtual Museum of Intolerances and Exterminations
http://www.akra.it/amis/english/index.html .
23
Ibid.
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QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
Fig. 2: The ‘historical trails’ of the Virtual Museum of Intolerances and Exterminations.
http://www.akra.it/amis/english/ricerche_en.html
It is essential to note that two other Holocaust museums are being built in Italy,
the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara and the
Memorial of the Shoah (Platform 21) in Milan train station, although the latter is
more an extended memorial site than a fully-fledged museum.24 In an article for
the online magazine Gli Stati Generali, Guri Schwarz has highlighted how ‘Italy
does not have yet a Museum of the Shoah, but as many as three are being
planned/built’ and how all three have at some point received not just approval
from public institutions, including through Acts of Parliament, but also
substantial public funding.25 All three were proposed in the early 2000s, in the
24
For more information, see http://www.memorialeshoah.it/italiano/index.html.
Guri Schwarz, “Memoria e musei della Shoah: delegare tutto alle comunità ebraiche è
sbagliato,” Gli Stati Generali, January 26, 2015, http://www.glistatigenerali.com/beniculturali_storia-cultura/memoria-e-musei-della-shoah-perche-la-delega-alle-comunita-ebraiche-eun-errore/.
25
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Luca Peretti
wake of the establishment of the Giorno della memoria.26
What would have been the place and impact of the MIS, planned before any of
these three projects, in this picture? While we can only speculate on this
question, it is useful to note that the MIS project did indeed leave some traces:
this includes not only a series of conferences, scholarly discussions and events
which took place between 1997 and 2000,27 but also in the shape of the abovementioned virtual museum. It seems that the CER was never officially involved
in the project as an institution, even though several members and leaders of the
community participated. In its current form (i.e. the website/online museum),
the MIS is sponsored by the Lazio Region in collaboration with the municipality
of Rome and is hosted in the web domain of the Istituto piemontese per la storia
della Resistenza e della società contemporanea [Piedmont Institute for the
History of Resistance and Contemporary Society]. As Gordon noted, “Zevi
argued that Rome’s Jewish community, because of its particular history, was
ideally placed to co-sponsor such a distinctively broad conception of a memorial
museum; but [Zevi’s] project [MIS] was reined in and turned towards a more
conventional Holocaust-centered plan [MS].”28 Conversely, the CER played and
continues to play an active and ongoing role in the planning of the MS and in the
Foundation that has been working toward the its construction and
completion.29
The CER and the Commemoration of “Other” Genocides
Among scholars, activists and institutions, there is no general agreement on
precisely what a genocide is, and, consequently, which genocides should be
included in a hypothetical comprehensive list of genocides.30 It is fair to say that
26
On the complex nexus of political and local reasons behind the planning of these three
different museums, see also Gordon, The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 20-24.
27
See http://www.akra.it/amis/pres.html See also Flavio Febbraro, “Museo virtuale delle
intolleranze e degli stermini,” Novecento.org, 3 (2014), http://www.novecento.org/...stermini949/.
28
Gordon, The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 19.
29
See the website of the Foundation, in particular the section “Soci Fondatori,”
http://www.museodellashoah.it.
30
We can take Genocide Studies Program at Yale University as an example. It lists the following
as its ‘case studies’: “Amazon, Ancient genocides, Armenian Genocide, Cambodian Genocide,
Colonial Genocides, East Timor, Guatemala, Holocaust, Indonesia, Other, Papua, Rwandan
Genocide, Sudan, Yugoslavia (former);” http://gsp.yale.edu. The scholarly literature on genocide
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in recent times the CER has participated in the practice of memorialization of at
least the Armenian genocide, of the Nazi extermination of the Romani genocides
and of the Rwandan genocide, above and beyond the Holocaust of the Jews,
with different levels of involvement and different interests. In the remainder of
this paper, I will analyze the involvement of the CER in recents
commemorations of these three genocides.
In April 2015, the centenary anniversary of the Armenian genocide was
commemorated in Italy as elsewhere, providing the occasion for widespread
critical attention and remembrance from different institutions, including those
that had previously not paid extensive attention to this historical episode. This
anniversary coincided with the centenary of Italy’s entry into the First World
War, which was also an occasion for renewed attention to those years.
Furthermore, the anniversary took place during a time of increased ethnic and
political tension within Turkey, successor to the Ottoman Empire where during
the First World War approximately 1.5 million Armenians were killed. These
tensions developed later in 2015 into a series of politically and religiously
motivated massacres in Turkey, leading to the Turkish government’s violent
repressions of Kurds and leftist political forces.31
In April 2015, a number of important initiatives took place worldwide to
commemorate the Armenian genocide (a label that to this day Turkey, together
with a number of other countries, still refuses to accept). Among many others,
two important but very different institutions – the European Parliament and the
Pope – spoke openly and strongly about the genocide. As The New York Times
reported, ‘Pope Francis called the massacres “the first genocide of the 20th
century” and equated them to mass killings by the Nazis and Soviets. The
European Parliament, which first recognized the genocide in 1987, passed a
resolution [in April 2015] calling on Turkey to “come to terms with its past’.”32
is vast. See, among many others, Donald Bloxham and Dirk A. Moses, The Oxford Handbook of
Genocide Studies, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Bernard Bruneteau, Le Siècle des
génocides: Violences, massacres et processus génocidaires de l'Arménie au Rwanda, (Paris:
Armand Colin, 2005); Storia, verità, giustizia. I crimini del XX secolo, ed. Marcello Flores,
(Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2001).
31
See, for example, a recent op-ed , Abdullah Demirbas, “Undoing Years of Progress in Turkey,”
The New York Times, January 26, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/...in-turkey.html.
32
See Peter Baker, “White House Acknowledges Armenian Genocide, But Avoids the Term,”
The New York Times, April 21, 2015. The same article highlighted also how the US President
Barack Obama had not yet used the word genocide to refer to these massacres. He instead used
the definitions ‘the first mass atrocity of the 20th century,’ ‘the horrors of 1915’ and ‘a dark
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Luca Peretti
The commemorations in 2015 also included symbolic acts such as turning off the
lights of the Coliseum and the Eiffel Tower,33 or the first ever concert of the
Armenian-American band System of a Down, in Yerevan.34
The president of the CER at the time, Riccardo Pacifici, joined in the
commemoration, also speaking openly about and linking together genocides:
‘Unfortunately the Armenian genocide took place in the face of the indifference
of the people [popoli, plural, in Italian], allowing for other tyrannical minds to
conceive other genocides. The Shoah... found its space in that indifference.
Unfortunately, today the free world is still unable to fully express a decisive
reaction against similar phenomena.’35 Two key features emerge strongly from
this statement. First, the link between the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide
is not incidental, for Pacifici, but actually causal: the indifference that met and
continued to meet the Armenian genocide fed the indifference in the face of the
Holocaust. Secondly, Pacifici highlights the continuing danger of genocide and
acknowledges that these are not closed pages in history: implicit in this is the
suggestion that we can learn how to prevent new massacres by reflecting on these
two genocides.
The strong link between the two events was also present in the commemoration
which took place a year before, in April 2014, when for the first time ever the
Armenian Ambassador in Italy, Sargis Ghazaryan, talked about the genocide in
an Italian school: this happened, not coincidentally, at the Jewish school of
Rome. As the magazine Roma Ebraica [Jewish Rome] reported, ‘In the building
situated at Portico d’Ottavia, where the Roman Jews were gathered to be
chapter in history’. See also Peter Baker, “For Anniversary of Armenian Genocide, Obama Calls
It
an
‘Atrocity’
Instead,”
The
New
York
Times,
April
23,
2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/.../2015/04/23/for-anniversary-of-armenian-genocide... .
33
“Colosseo e Tour Eiffel si spengono per ricordare il genocidio armeno,” Comunità Armena,
April 24, 2015, http://www.comunitaarmena.it/colosseo-e-tour-eiffel-si-spengono-per-ricordareil-genocidio-armeno-24-apr-2015/.
34
Kory Grow, “Genocide and Kim Kardashian: The Bloody History Behind System of a Down’s
Tour,” Rolling Stone, January 8, 2015, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/system-ofa-down-serj-tankian-armenian-genocide-new-album-20150108#ixzz3tOLiwM9v.
On the relationship between music and the Armenian genocide, see Jack Der-Sarkissian, “Musical
Perspectives on the Armenian Genocide: From Aznavour to ‘System of a Down,’” in The
Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies, ed. Richard Hovannisian, (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction, 2007), 213-225.
35
“Genocidio armeno, Pacifici: ‘Si segua l’esempio del popolo ebraico e di quello tedesco,’” Roma
Ebraica, April 24, 2015, http://www.romaebraica.it/genocidio-armeno-pacifici-si-segua-lesempiodel-popolo-ebraico-e-tedesco/.
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deported to Nazi concentration and extermination camps, students listened to
the history of another massacre, that of the Armenian population, which took
place at the beginning of 20th century.”36 This was also the first time that the
CER and the Embassy of Armenia in Italy had collaborated. On the occasion
Pacifici commented that, “as a Jewish Community we also need to be vessels of
the memory of the Armenian genocide and I hope this will set an example for
others.” Ghazaryan insisted,” today we are proving our universality – not against
someone but against any form of relativism and historical revisionism, as well as
any form of negationism. I know I am touching some sensible chords [nervi] in
this community ... but these are also ours. We, who are heirs of the survivors,
have a message to bear.”37 For Pacifici, there is a further link between the two
genocides, relating to what the Turkish people can learn from the process of
repentance and overcoming of the past by the German people and their renewed
relationship with the Jewish people:
We would like to imagine that this 100-year anniversary could open the way to
reconciliation between the Armenian and the Turkish people. Today in
38
Germany on January 27, the Day of Repentance [Giornata del Pentimento ]
is celebrated. We hope that this model of collective and institutional
consciousness can be adopted by Turkish society and its leaders, within a
spirit of reconciliation that could open way to integration in the European
Union, an institution that rejects all xenophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic
39
sentiment.
The reference to the European Union is a pivotal one, as it highlights how the
wider geopolitical context and the transnational nature of memory cultures in
contemporary Europe have influenced the decision-making at a local, micro-level
in the contact between the CER and representatives of Armenian communities
36
“La scuola ebraica commemora il genocidio armeno,” Roma Ebraica, April 24, 2013,
http://www.romaebraica.it/la-scuola-ebraica-commemora-il-genocidio-armeno/.
37
Similarly Ruth Dureghello, at the time the schools councillor [assessore] of the CER and now
the president of the community, said: “Memory is a universal value because genocide is never
against one people but always against humanity” (Ibid.).
38
th
The official name of the January 27 celebration in Germany is Tag des Gedenkens an die
Opfer des Nationalsozialismus [literally, Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National
Socialism], therefore the word forgiveness does not appear. The German Parliament’s website
refers
to
it
with
a
generic
“Ceremony
of
Remembrance,”
http://www.bundestag.de/...remembrance/403466. Finally, Buß- und Bettag [Day of
repentance and prayer] is a Lutheran holiday celebrated in Germany – unrelated to Holocaust
remembrance.
39
“Genocidio armeno, Pacifici.”
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Luca Peretti
in Rome. This is true of course for Israel as well, a state with which, for obvious
reasons, the CER has very strong ties. Since diplomatic relationships between
Israel and Turkey have been notably turbulent in recent years, this could have
facilitated the strengthened relationship between the CER and Armenian
institutions in Rome. Israel is present as well, in different forms, in the practices
of memorialization that take place outside of its borders. For example, the CER
asked the Keren Kayemet LeIsrael [KKL, the Jewish National Fund] to plant
trees in Israel in order to commemorate the Armenian victims of genocide.40
Nonetheless, it is worth nothing that despite some steps in the last year in this
direction, Israel still does not recognize officially the events of 1915 as genocide.41
To conclude, the relationship between the CER and the Armenian
representatives in Italy is clearly one of friendship and mutual respect. Not only
did the CER participate in the commemoration of the Armenian genocide, but
the Armenian ambassador also commemorated the Italian Shoah. On 15 October
2015, the day before the commemoration of the deportation of the Jews of Rome,
Ambassador Ghazaryan spoke at a presentation of a book on the German soldier
and witness of the Armenian genocide Armin Wegner, highlighting how: “[o]ur
responsibility as Armenians and Jews who survived the genocides is to fill the
void of indifference. Unfortunately, crimes against humanity are not relegated to
the history books, but still belong to current events.” Furthermore, he stressed
the importance of commemorating the genocides together, Armenians and
Jews.42
This increasing attention paid to the genocide of the Armenians reflects how the
two genocides, Armenian and the Shoah, are also seen together in Holocaust
studies institutions and educational entities. Ian Hancock discusses this in a
provocative article, where he uses the Armenian genocide as a foil and contrast to
the Romani exterminations:
…the Facing History and Ourselves organization’s Holocaust Resource Book
40
“La scuola ebraica commemora.”
See Yair Auron, The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide, (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction, 2003). For recent developments, Raphael Ahren, “Why Israel still refuses to
recognize a century-old genocide.” The Times of Israel, April 24, 2015,
http://www.timesofisrael.com/why-israel-still-refuses-to-recognize-a-century-old-genocide/.
42
“Ambasciatore armeno, insieme a ebrei per combattere indifferenza (Ansa),” Comunità
Armena, October 15, 2015, http://www.comunitaarmena.it/amb-armeno-insieme-a-ebrei-percombattere-indifferenza-ansa-15-10-15/ .
41
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lists just five pages in the index for ‘Sinti and Roma,’ but eighteen under
‘Armenians’— who weren’t victims of the Holocaust... The 2005 annual
Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust included nothing in its program on
Romanies, though it does have a special session commemorating the
Armenian Genocide. There is Armenian representation on the U.S.
43
Holocaust Memorial Council too, but no Romani member. There was the
Final Solution of the Gypsy Question – but there was no Final Solution of
44
the Armenian Question. Does it take money to face real history?
Nonetheless, in Rome, the extermination of the Romani people has been in
these past years a topic of remembrance, with the support also of the CER. It is
probably fair to say that, in the case of Rome, Adam Jones’s remarks in his
Genocide. A Comprehensive Introduction are more appropriate than Hancock’s
polemic: “Perhaps more than any other group, the Nazi genocide against
Romani peoples parallels the attempted extermination of European Jews.”45 The
CER has in fact participated in several commemorative events honouring the
Porrajmos.46
But we must first backtrack and discuss the history of the Porrajmos and how it
has been acknowledged (or not) in Italy. If in many cases the idea of an Italian
Holocaust is still not completely established and often scholars have to explain
43
Recently the Romani scholar and activist Ethel Brooks, a professor of Sociology and Women's
and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, was appointed by President Obama to the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council. See John Chadwick, “Scholar of Romani Descent Ensures Legacy
of Her Ancestors Isn't Lost,” Rutgers News, May 23, 2016, http://news.rutgers.edu/.../scholarromani-descent-ensures-legacy-her-ancestors-isnt-lost/20160522.... Two other Romani members
have served on the Council appointed by the President: William Duna (1987-1997) and Ian
Hancock himself (1997-2002). I own this information to the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum.
44
Originally published in Ian Hancock, “Romanies and the Holocaust: a Reevaluation and an
Overview,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone, (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), 383-396; 392-393. The quotation here is taken from a slightly different version
of the paper published on the website of The Romani Archives and Documentation Center
(RADOC), http://www.radoc.net/...holocaust_porrajmos&lang=en now stored at Archive.org,
https://web.archive.org/...holocaust_porrajmos&lang=en. Hancock is the director of the center
and archive.
45
Jones, Genocide, 274.
46
On the use of this or other terms to name this genocide, see Luca Bravi and Matteo Bassoli, Il
porrajmos in Italia, La persecuzione di rom e sinti durante il fascismo, (Bologna: I libri di Emil,
2013). According to Bravi and Bassoli, the term was originally used by Hancock (13).
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Luca Peretti
how the Italian Jews were also affected by the Nazi exterminations,47 conducted
with the active cooperation of Italian Fascists, this is even truer for Romani
people in Italy. Only recently has the Romani genocide started being a topic for
serious academic research in Italy, as well as the subject of a recently established
virtual museum48 and a series of publications49 providing useful context and
information. At the conclusion of their book Il porrajmos in Italia, Luca Bravi
and Matteo Bassoli write: “It is possible to assert that the Porrajmos in Italy
existed and had a national character.”50 In Rome there is a Romani community
(or, rather, communities) of about 10,000 people,51 largely scattered among
camps, both legal and illegal.52 These camps, in Rome and elsewhere in Italy, are
often treated and described as ghettos,53 drawing a link—whether voluntary or
involuntary—between old forms of social exclusion that plagued Jews for
centuries, and the current situation of Rom and Sinti peoples in the Italian
peninsula in general and, in particular, in the city of Rome.
Although the Porrajmos has a separate dedicated date of commemoration (2
47
Iael Nidam-Orvieto refers to the “common perception of Fascist Italy according to which Italy
was a safe haven for persecuted Jews during the Holocaust,” which she describes as ‘extremely
incorrect’ and ‘false’. See “Fascist Italy and the Jews: Myth Versus Reality,” a video in the series
Insights and Perspectives from Holocaust Researchers and Historians, produced by Yad Vashem
and the Claims Conference, http://www.yadvashem.org/...video/fascist_italy1.asp. NidamOrvieto was at the time this video was shot (2010) editor-in-chief of Yad Vashem Publications.
48
See “Memors. Il primo museo virtuale del Porrajmos in Italia. La persecuzione dei Rom e dei
Sinti nel periodo fascista,” http://porrajmos.it/?lang=it
49
These publications are summarized in Bravi and Bassoli, Il porrajmos in Italia, 14-24 and 101104.
50
Bravi and Bassoli, Il porrajmos in Italia, 97. On the Romanies and the Holocaust in general, see
Hancock, “Romanies and the Holocaust.”
51
David Forgacs, Italy’s Margins. Social Exclusion and Nation Formation since 1861, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014), 265.
52
For a treatment of the politics surrounding the Romani people in Italy in the last fifty years, see
Nando Sigona, “The Governance of Romani People in Italy: Discourse, Policy and Practice,”
Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 16/5 (2011): 590-606.
53
“Sociologists, social workers, school teachers, politicians, and those who live near them, they all
say that Roma camps are ghettos, they trigger uneasiness and illegality,” Alessandra Coppola and
Rinaldo Frignani, “In Italia 40 mila persone vivono nei campi rom: il 60% ha meno di 18 anni,”
May 29, 2015, http://www.corriere.it/cronache/15_maggio_29/italia-40-mila-persone-vivonocampi-rom...shtml, emphasis added. The word “ghetto” is used also in the title of a book
dedicated to the Romani experience in Italy: Nando Sigona, Figli del ghetto: gli italiani, i campi
nomadi e l'invenzione degli zingari, (Civezzano, Trento: Nonluoghi, 2002).
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August),54 it is often remembered together with the Jewish genocide, on the
occasion of the Giorno della memoria and other commemorative events. In
Rome, a torchlight procession has taken place every year since 2001, ending at the
plaque in Via degli Zingari dedicated to the Rom and Sinti victims who died
during the Holocaust (see Fig. 3).55 This torchlight procession commemorates
the ‘stermini dimenticati’ [forgotten exterminations].56 The march is promoted
by a number of different associations, and it has been attended by delegates of
the CER, such as Claudio Procaccia in 2015 or Massimo Misano in 2007.57 In
2006, the then president of the CER, Leone Paserman, sent his greetings to the
people marching and to the organizers: “We Jews cannot forget our brotherhood
in pain [la nostra fratellanza nel dolore] because we shared the same pain in
Auschwitz ... I speak for the entire Jewish Community when I say that I am close
to you and hope that many citizens participate in your initiative, so that the
memory of all those who have been exterminated be kept alive and, moreover,
help us build a more just and more humane world.”58
This participation in the commemoration of the Romani genocide is part of a
larger effort to build a monument to commemorate other Nazi exterminations
in the city of Rome, as reported by Redattore Sociale:
In 2013 a deliberation approved by the Assemblea capitolina [the Rome
municipal council] ... gave some hope for the realization of a monument
which would commemorate all the victims of Nazifascism who are orphans of
memory – as the organizers of the meeting declared – that is, homosexuals,
59
transsexuals, disabled people, Roma and Sinti.
54
The day remembers the massacre of almost 3000 Roma in Auschwitz. In 2015 the European
Union voted to recognize this date officially; see “MEPs Urge End to Roma Discrimination and
Recognition of Roma Genocide Day,” European Parliament News, April 15, 2015,
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/...Roma-Genocide-Day .
55
Zingari mean gypsies, and like in English the word can carry a derogatory meaning. I am
grateful to officials at the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali in Rome for information
on this plaque and on the processes of proposal and installation of such memorials, on which I
draw in this section.
56
“Roma, un monumento per ricordare gli stermini dimenticati,” Redattore Sociale, January 25,
2014, http://www.redattoresociale.it/Notiziario/Articolo/...gli-stermini-dimenticati?stampa=s .
57
“Roma: fiaccolata della memoria dei diversi,” Archivio Romano Lil (website of Opera
Nomadi), January 29, 2007, http://archivioromanolil.blog.tiscali.it/2007/... .
58
“Il Porrajmos: Roma 27 gennaio,” Archivio Romano Lil, January 13, 2006,
http://archivioromanolil.blog.tiscali.it/2006/01/13/il_porrajmos... .
59
“Roma, un monumento per ricordare gli stermini dimenticati.” On this planned monument
see also, Mauro Cioffari, “Giorno Memoria, Cioffari (Sel): ‘Un monumento a rom, omosessuali e
105
Luca Peretti
The CER is involved at different levels in this project, one that include not only
the planning of a monument but also projects for pedagogical work in schools
and with young people. In the words of the organizers, “in 2009 three
associations ... presented to the department of educational policies of the
municipality of Rome, together with the CER and ANPI [the National
Association of Italian Partisans], a project for Roman schools, which would
include the production of a film and a book. The project was then revitalized in
October 2013.”60 The project was subsequently restructured and integrated with
a larger European project entitled “MEMOIR - Forgotten Massacres. Memories
And Remembrance of the Roma, Homosexual And Disabled People
Holocaust,” which was presented in Rome in October 2015. The CER is not one
of the partners of the project, but Claudio Procaccia participated in the
presentation.61
Even more important to note in this context is the involvement of the CER in
the installation of the only plaque dedicated in Rome to-date to these ‘other
genocides’ perpetrated by the Nazis and Fascists present in Rome, the plaque
mentioned above to the Romani in Via degli Zingari.
disabili
perseguitati
dal
nazifascismo,’”
Roma Today, January 27, 2015,
http://www.romatoday.it/...monumento-ai-rom-.html. The grouping of several exterminations,
all the while keeping them separate from the Holocaust, raises a number of issues that fall beyond
the scope of this paper: for example, it highlights the fact there are always genocides and
exterminations that are more forgotten than others, always an implied hierarchy of memory:
Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, are not included in the group.
60
“Roma, un monumento per ricordare gli stermini dimenticati.”
61
“Presentazione Progetto Memoir – Mercoledì 28 Ottobre ore 10.00,” Mario Mieli. Circolo di
Cultura Omosessuale, October 28, 2015, http://www.mariomieli.net/presentazione-progettomemoir...html. Another large project on the Porrajmos was launched in 2006 by the Opera
Nomadi in collaboration with UCEI. See “Il Porrajmos dimenticato, presentazione,”Archivio
Romano Lil, January 3, 2006, http://archivioromanolil.blog.tiscali.it/...porrajmos_dimenticato.
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QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
Fig. 3: A plaque dedicated to Rom and Sinti who died during the Holocaust, located in Via degli
Zingari, Rome. Author’s photograph.
This is a very important, if not very well known monument in Rome: it is the
only one of its kind in a sea of memorial plaques;62 its creation involved the
collaboration of different entities working together: the Opera Nomadi (a
national Romani group), the CER, the Comune di Roma (Rome city council),
together with a Roman school, the Istituto Commerciale ‘Lucio Lombardo
Radice’; and it was unveiled on the occasion of the first Giorno della Memoria,
in January of 2001. The place was chosen because, as the name suggests, the area
had been since the 1400s a meeting place for Roma and transient people
travelling to Rome.63 The proposal for the plaque was presented to the
Commissione Storia e Arte [History and Art Commission] of the Rome council
on 30 November 1998, that is before the approval of the Giorno della Memoria.
The Commission approved the placing of the plaque on the walls of a former
school64 which belongs to the city, in January 2001. The link between the
62
An important work of cataloguing is Giuseppe Mogavero, I muri ricordano. La Resistenza a
Roma attraverso le epigrafi (1943-1945), (Bolsena: Massari, 2002), now slightly dated as many
plaques have been placed since its publication in 2002. See also 19 luglio 1943, 4 giugno 1944:
Roma verso la libertà, 171-189.
63
See Benedetto Blasi, Stradario romano. Dizionario storico etimologico topografico, (Rome:
Edizioni del Pasquino, 1980), 343.
64
The former school is now abandoned. Between 2004 and 2006 it was an occupied center for
the arts and a squat. See Manuel Massimo, “‘Angelo Mai,’ la scuola che non c’è: cantiere fantasma
107
Luca Peretti
persecutions of the Romani people and the Jews is here extremely clear, as the
plaque declares its commemoration of “Rom, Sinti, and Travellers who died in
the extermination camps together with Jews.” The plaque also offers a warning,
“… so that this history should never happen again,” and evokes a universalistic
and humanitarian principle, “for brotherhood among all the peoples.”65 The
way it interacts with the immediate neighborhood is also interesting: much like
the former Jewish Ghetto of Rome (which was once a working-class
neighborhood and is now a hip, gentrified location), the Monti neighborhood,
where Via degli Zingari is located, is undergoing a similar transformation.
Curiously, there is no mention of the plaque in the unofficial monthly magazine
of the CER, Shalom, which in February 2001 dedicated many pages to the
commemoration of the Giorno della memoria.66
Before moving to a conclusion, I turn finally to highlight the CER’s participation
in events regarding the commemoration of another event of mass extermination,
the Rwandan genocide. The comparison of the Holocaust to Rwanda is far from
unique to Rome or Italy. In November 2014, for example, an important
conference was organized by Yair Auron (who has worked on Israel and ‘other’
genocides) at the Open University of Israel. Gabriele Nissim, Italian historian
author of several books on the ‘Righteous among the Nations,’ was present at
the event and he wrote that the conference aimed “not only to compare the two
genocide cases [Rwandan and Shoah], but to launch a true debate about the
distortions of memory that happen in Israel. While opening the proceedings,
[Auron] immediately expressed his sense of emotion: “It’s the first time in
seventy years that we in Israel discuss the other genocide cases and look at the
nel cuore di Roma,” La Repubblica, May 3, 2011, http://roma.repubblica.it/.../2011/05/03/.../.
The building is now intermittently under renovation; see Lili Garrone, “Scuola, il cantiere
infinito (e incompiuto) dell’Angelo Mai,” Il Corriere della Sera - Roma, January 22, 2016,
http://roma.corriere.it/.../16_gennaio_21/...shtml.
65
The Italian text reads: “Il Comune di Roma L’Opera Nomadi e la Comunità Ebraica posero a
perenne ricordo dei ROM SINTI E CAMMINANTI che insieme agli ebrei perirono nei campi
di sterminio ad opera della barbarie genocida del nazifascismo perché questa storia non si ripeta
più, per non dimenticare, per la fratellanza fra tutti i popoli” [see Fig. 3].
66
The same is true for newspapers based in Rome, which dedicated little space to the march that
preceded the unveiling of the plaque and to the unveiling itself. See for example: “Fosse
Ardeatine, i fiori della discordia,” Il Messaggero, January 27, 2001, 32; “Da Roma a Fossoli le
celebrazioni in Italia,” La Repubblica, January 26, 2001, 45. In both cases, the articles are general
accounts of events marking the Giorno della Memoria.
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QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
Holocaust through different eyes.”67 The event was attended, among others, by
the survivor of the Rwandan genocide and writer Yolande Mukagasana,68 who in
2008 also participated in a roundtable discussion hosted at the Jewish school of
Rome.69 The CER hosted and organized this event on the occasion of the
International Day of Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda, which takes place
on 7 April.70 As this demonstrates, the CER has been interested in the
commemoration of the Rwandan genocide for several years: we can add that in
April 2010 the CER participated in a similar event, organized this time at the
Teatro Piccolo Eliseo in Rome,71 and that in November 2015, the CER president
Ruth Dureghello talked at the presentation of the recently formed association
Ibuka Italia – Memoria e Giustizia – an umbrella organization for the
remembrance and commemoration of the victims in Rwanda, which took place
at the Italian Parliament.72
In an article of April 2014, Piero Di Nepi remembers the event that took place in
2008 at the Jewish school: Di Nepi puts the Nazi Holocaust in relation to the
Rwandan genocide (the subtitle begins significantly, ‘As in the Nazi genocide,
the Hutu genocide...’) but also highlights the risk of focusing only on the Shoah:
“We should stop being, in reality, Eurocentric: these are names [those of the
Rwandan victims] which are worth as much as those we carry with us and list
every 27 January.” 73 He also discusses the Rwandan genocide as a post-colonial
and neo-colonial one, echoing Michael Rothberg’s important work on the
67
Gabriele Nissim, “Israel, a revolution in the field of memory,” Gariwo – La Foresta dei Giusti,
November 11, 2014, http://en.gariwo.net/editorials/israel-a-revolution-in-the-field-of-memory11745.html. However, there is a longer history of comparative genocide debate in Israel: a similar
event, the ‘International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide,’ which sparked polemical
debate, took place in 1982. See the booklet http://web.asc.upenn.edu/gerbner/...2545 .
68
For the poster of the conference (in Hebrew) see: http://www.openu.ac.il/...genocide1114.html
See also Anna Foa, “…genocidi,” in Moked, November 17, 2014, http://moked.it/blog...genocidi4/. For a short biography of Mukagasana see: http://www.romamultietnica.it/...yolandemukagasana.html .
69
See “Giornata Internazionale della Memoria per il 16 anniversario del genocidio del Rwanda,”
Bene Rwanda, April 4, 2008, http://www.benerwanda.org/?p=282
70
See http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/...shtml .
71
See “Giornata Internazionale della Memoria per il 16 anniversario del genocidio del Rwanda,”
Bene Rwanda, March 23, 2010, http://www.benerwanda.org/?p=1589
72
See “Presentazione dell’Associazione ‘Ibuka Italia – Memoria e Giustizia’ per il genocidio del
Ruanda,” Camera dei deputati, November 20, 2015, http://www.camera.it/leg17/...9617.
73
Piero di Nepi, “Il massacro dei 100 giorni,” Shalom 7, (April 2014). In the same issue see also
D.T., “Ruanda, venti anni fa un genocidio dimenticato.”
109
Luca Peretti
‘multidirectional’ links between Holocaust memory and the post-colonial era.74
Conclusion
The events and acts of commemoration analyzed in this paper undoubtedly
represent a partial list, but they nevertheless give an idea of the involvement of
the CER in memorial practices which go beyond the remembrance of the Shoah,
of the intersection of Jewish memorialization with the acknowledgement and
shared memory of other genocides. Whether or not these interactions are
qualitatively and quantitatively ‘enough,’ they exist, and they generate a number
of different questions, such as the complex question of the internal and analytical
understanding of an idea of common grief (the fratellanza nel dolore, to use
Paserman’s words); the idea of the Jewish Holocaust as a paradigm for reading
and responding to other forms of genocidal violence; the ambivalences and
strengths of the attempt to join forces with other victims in order to prevent
future massacres and to focus attention on present ones. These in turn raise
further questions: what is to be included in acts of memorialization? What is
considered worthy of being remembered, and according to which principles?
The answers to these questions from the specific perspective of Rome and its
Jewish Community lie in the political-cultural choices of the CER, but it is also
important to consider how these practices in some cases may occur as the result
of the strong initiative of particularly motivated individuals, organizations, or
institutions (embassies, NGOs etc.), or may be influenced by international
politics. The CER case study is particularly fruitful for considering these
questions, precisely because of its specific positionality within the frame of
Roman, Italian, and international politics and culture – and Jewish Roman,
Jewish Italian, and Jewish culture. The CER case could be compared with the
practices of memory of other Jewish communities in Europe and elsewhere,
particularly in largely multi-ethnic cities and countries with large Jewish
communities, such as the Unites States or Argentina and Brazil – let alone Israel,
which presents a completely different set of questions. Comparable studies may
be carried out for cities like London and Paris, which have large Jewish
communities and which host also an array of different communities and ethnic
groups.
I want finally to conclude by noting how these practices are also part of a
74
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
Decolonization, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
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QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
complex contemporary Italian politics of memory in which the CER is deeply
involved. Such practices are far from being peacefully accepted and normalized –
on the contrary, in recent years they have sparked conflict, which has sometimes
even been violent in nature. Such is the case, for example, of the participation in
marches for the anniversary of the Liberation of Italy on 25 April,75 which
involved disputes with pro-Palestinian militants, or other occasional
confrontations with militants that exploded into fights and brawls.76 The CER
also celebrates other events that have affected the Italian nation as a whole: for
example, in 2014 the Jewish Museum of Rome organized an exhibition on the
participation of Jewish soldiers in the First World War.77 The CER also regularly
expresses its position on contemporary matters, often through the presence of
large banners on the Rome Synagogue or in other areas of the former Jewish
Ghetto area of the city: in some cases these are hung by non-official or semiofficial entities, such as the young people of the Community, while other
banners have been positioned by official entities within the Community. As an
example, a tall banner dedicated to Ron Arad (an Israeli soldier missing in action
since 1986) stood for some time next to another banner that advocated the
liberation of two Italian marines arrested in India, thus aligning with a campaign
that has been spearheaded largely by right-wing constituents in Italy. All of these
commemorative practices highlight the kaleidoscopic memorial and political
practices of the Jewish Community of the capital city of Italy, within which its
interactions with other genocides alongside the Holocaust need to be
understood.
75
Three contributions help to contextualize this complicated matter: Riccardo Pacifici, “Il 25
Aprile ritrovato al fianco della Brigata Ebraica,” romaebraica.it, April 26, 2015,
http://www.romaebraica.it/il-25-aprile-ritrovato.../; Giovanni Pietrangeli, “Disintossichiamoci il
25 aprile! Alcune riflessioni sulle commemorazioni oltre le identità,” Minima et Moralia, May 4,
2014, http://www.minimaetmoralia.it/wp/riflessioni-sulle-commemorazioni.../; Gad Lerner,
“Abu Mazen, la memoria della Shoah e la scelta regressiva della Brigata Ebraica,” GadLerner.it,
April 28, 2014, http://www.gadlerner.it/2014/04/28/abu-mazen-la-memoria-della-shoah-e-lascelta-regressiva-della-brigata-ebraica.
76
See, among others, “Luci spente al Colosseo per Shalit e rissa tra ebrei romani e ‘Free Gaza,’” La
Repubblica Roma, June 25, 2010, http://roma.repubblica.it/cronaca/2010/06/25/.../.
77
On this exhibition, see: http://lnx.museoebraico.roma.it/w/?page_id=4349. The foibe,
possibly the site where the most controversial battles over memory have been fought in recent
years in Italy, have also been occasionally used to counterbalance the memory of the Shoah in the
city of Rome, at times in contrast to the agenda of the memory practices of the CER. An example
is found in the position of the former mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, about which see
Damiano Garofalo, “La memorializzazione delle Foibe e il paradigma della Shoah,” Officine della
storia, 13 (2015), http://www.officinadellastoria.info/magazine/index....
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Luca Peretti
Acknowledgements
This paper, which was written before February 2016, originated in an email chain
with the editors of this issue, Robert S. C. Gordon and Emiliano Perra, whom I
warmly thank, for their initial inputs and all the comments, suggestions, and
endless patience which followed. I also own an acknowledgment to Karen T.
Raizen, Damiano Garofalo, Adrian Renner, Massimiliano De Villa, the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni
Culturali (particularly Anna Maria Cerioni and Maria Vittoria Mancinelli). This
paper is dedicated to the friends and former colleagues of the Fondazione Museo
della Shoah, for all the labor they put into the planning of a museum that does
not yet exist.
________________
Luca Peretti received a B.A. in Modern History from the University of Rome and an
M.A. in Film Studies from University College, London. He is now a PhD candidate in
the Department of Italian and in Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He has
published articles on cinema and terrorism, on the director Paolo Benvenuti and on
Italian Jewish culture. Together with Vanessa Roghi he edited the volume Immagini di
piombo. Cinema, storia e terrorismi in Europa (Milan: Postmediabooks, 2013), and
worked as research assistant for a project on ‘cine-panettoni’ led by Alan O'Leary
(University of Leeds). He has written essays and reviews for, among others, The
Italianist: Film Issue, Cinema e Storia, and The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media
Studies. He has worked as a journalist and held a position as archivist and researcher for
the Italian Museum of the Shoah; he has organized several film festivals across Italy.
How to quote this article:
Luca Peretti, ““La nostra fratellanza nel dolore”: the Jewish Community of Rome and
the ‘Other’ Genocides,” in Holocaust Intersections in 21st-Century Europe, eds. Robert
S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal
of Fondazione CDEC, n. 10 December 2016.
url: www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=386
112
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
Between Local and Global Politics of Memory:
Transnational Dimensions of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary
Serbian Prose Fiction and Film
by Stijn Vervaet
Abstract
Serbia joined the ITF (Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust
Education, Remembrance and Research) in 2011. This resulted in increased
institutional efforts to pay more attention to Holocaust education and
commemoration. However, critics have observed that many of these statesupported initiatives use the Holocaust to conceal the state’s role as perpetrator or
accomplice in mass war crimes and genocide committed during the Second World
War and during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Against this backdrop, I discuss
two recent Serbian Holocaust novels, Ivan Ivanji’s Man of Ashes (2006) and
Zoran Penevski’s Less Important Crimes (2005), and Goran Paskaljević’s film
When Day Breaks (2012). I argue that Holocaust memory in these works does not
function as a ‘screen memory’ – one memory that covers up or suppresses other,
undesired memories – but as a prism through which memories of the recent
Yugoslav past as well as stories of present injustice, which the dominant political
elites and mainstream society would prefer to forget or not to see, are filtered and
brought to light. Ivanji, who is well acquainted with the politics of memory both
in Germany and Serbia, also reflects critically upon the current globalization of
Holocaust remembrance, thus providing feedback on the possibilities and limits
of the memorial culture stimulated by the ITF.
Introduction
The IHRA in South-Eastern Europe: Towards the Europeanization of Holocaust
Memory in the Former Yugoslavia?
Ivan Ivanji’s Man of Ashes: Remembering the Holocaust in the Shadow of
Goethe’s Oak
Zoran Penevski’s Less Important Crimes: Towards a Digital ‘Constellation of SelfCritical National Memories’
Goran Paskaljević’s Film When Day Breaks: Between the Duty to Remember and
the Pitfalls of Didacticism
Conclusion
113
Stijn Vervaet
Introduction1
Since the foundation of the Task Force for International Cooperation on
Holocaust Education and Research (ITF, since 2013 known as IHRA –
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) at the Stockholm International
Forum on the Holocaust in January 2000, a European transnational politics of
memory has emerged that puts the Holocaust high on the agenda.2 Signed by more
than 40 participating countries at the closing of this conference, the Stockholm
Declaration not only put great emphasis on the importance of Holocaust
remembrance and education but also framed to a large extent the Holocaust in
terms of a universal moral lesson in good and evil.3 Aleida Assmann distinguished
two major goals in IHRA’s programme, which she aptly summarized as follows:
“1) to transform [the memory of the Holocaust] into a long-term memory at the
moment when the communicative memory of survivor-witnesses was fading
away” and “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.”4 Indeed, it is important to
keep in mind that international consensus about the importance of Holocaust
memory and the need to create institutions and networks to sustain and
disseminate it was reached because of the growing awareness that soon there will
be no Holocaust survivors alive who could bear witness to what they went
1
I would like to thank Robert Gordon, Emiliano Perra, Jakob Lothe, and Quest’s anonymous
reviewers for their helpful comments. All translations are my own: I am grateful to Vlad Beronja
for his help in making my translations from Serbian sound more natural. Finally, I would like to
thank Zoran Penevski for providing the cover image of his novel Less Important Crimes and for
giving his permission to reproduce it in this article.
2
The ITF / IHRA was initiated by Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson in May 1998. For the
history of the IHRA, see: https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/about-us/history-ihra (this
and all websites accessed 9 September 2016).
3
It says, among other things, that ‘the unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold
universal meaning’ (article 1), that “the magnitude of the Holocaust […] must be forever seared in
our collective memory. […] The depths of that horror, and the heights of the heroism [of those
who defied the Nazis] can be touchstones in our understanding of the human capacity for evil and
for good” (article 2). The full text of the Stockholm Declaration is available at:
https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/about-us/stockholm-declaration.
4
Aleida Assmann, “The Holocaust, a Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory
Community,” in Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, eds. Aleida
Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 97–117; 102.
114
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
through. The awareness of this coming ‘after testimony,’ as Jakob Lothe, Susan
Suleiman, and James Phelan suggest, “also implies an obligation to the future,’ a
requirement to ‘thin[k] about the future of Holocaust narrative and about the
afterlife of Holocaust narratives in different cultures.”5 It is against the backdrop
of this constellation – of the awareness of the ‘after-testimony’ era, of joint
international efforts to remember the Holocaust, and of their local reception and
implementation – that I will explore Holocaust literature and film as a medium of
transnational memory in post-conflict Serbia.
I will examine how recent Serbian Holocaust fiction ties in with and reflects upon
international debates about Holocaust commemoration and education. How do
authors from Serbia of different generations tackle the ‘obligation’ towards the
future of Holocaust narrative? How does their work relate to and reflect on the
shift towards the ‘Europeanization’ and ‘universalization’ of Holocaust memory
in the former Yugoslavia? I will examine two recent Holocaust novels from Serbia,
Ivan Ivanji’s Man of Ashes (2006) and Zoran Penevski’s Less Important Crimes
(2005), as well as Goran Paskaljević’s film When Day Breaks (directed by
Paskaljević, the scenario was written by Filip David, 2012).6 I will argue that in
these works, contrary to ‘official’ memory politics, Holocaust memory does not
function as a ‘screen memory’ (Deckerinnerung) in Freud’s sense, that is, as one
memory covering up or repressing other, undesired memories.7 Drawing on
Michael Rothberg’s model of multidirectional memory, I will show how in the
works discussed, Holocaust memory functions as a prism through which
memories of the recent Yugoslav past, as well as stories of present injustice that the
dominant political elites and mainstream society would prefer to forget or not to
see (or, crucially, to have them substituted by other memories), are filtered and
5
Jakob Lothe, Susan Rubin Suleiman and James Phelan, “Introduction: ‘After’ Testimony,” in
After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future, eds. Jakob
Lothe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and James Phelan, (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012),
1–19; 2-3.
6
Due to space limits, I will focus on a selection of works from Serbia only. Relevant works from
Croatia would have been Miljenko Jergović’s novel Ruta Tannenbaum (2005), Slobodan Šnajder’s
play The Fifth Gospel (Peto jevanđelje, 2004), and numerous novels by Daša Drndić.
7
In his rereading of Freud’s concept of screen memory, Michael Rothberg argued that “the
displacement that takes place in screen memory (indeed, in all memory) functions as much to open
up lines of communication with the past as to close them off.” See Michael Rothberg,
Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009), 12.
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Stijn Vervaet
brought to light in a non-competitive, intrinsically multidirectional way.8 My
reading of the these three works is particularly inspired by Max Silverman’s notion
of palimpsestic memory.9 In the works discussed, the figure of the palimpsest is
operative in both the principal ways pointed out by Silverman. First, the works all
show that the present is “haunted by a past which is not immediately visible but
progressively brought into view” so that the relationship between past and present
is evoked as multi-layered, as “a composite structure, like a palimpsest, so that one
layer of [temporal] traces can be seen through, and is transformed by, another.”10
Secondly, the figure of the palimpsest can be recognized in the ways in which the
works combine “not simply two moments in time (past and present) but a
number of different moments, hence producing a chain of signification which
draws together disparate spaces and times.”11 Very much like Rothberg, Silverman
argues that this palimpsestic understanding of memory brings “the prospect of
new solidarities across the lines of race and nation.”12 Of course, the interaction
between different temporal and geographical layers and how they superimpose on
one another is in each work realized with different means and to different ends.
Before turning to the novels, I will discuss briefly how the IHRA paved the way
towards a European memory culture focusing on the Holocaust and I will give a
succinct overview of the first results of this international infrastructure and
networking in Serbia.
The IHRA in South-Eastern Europe: Towards the Europeanization of Holocaust
Memory in the Former Yugoslavia?
As Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider have noted, the Stockholm declaration and
the formation of the ITF/IHRA can be seen as part of a broader development of
8
In his path-breaking work, Rothberg offers an alternative to competitive understandings of
memory, which perceive the interaction of different collective memories as a “zero-sum struggle
over scarce resources.” Believing in “a direct line between remembrance of the past and the
formation of identity in the present,” adherents to the “competitive memory model” fear that
public attention to one historical trauma necessarily implies the exclusion of other tragedies from
the public sphere. Instead, Rothberg suggests that “we consider memory as multidirectional: as
subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative.”
Ibid., 3.
9
Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and
Francophone Fiction and Film, (New York: Berghahn, 2013).
10
Ibid., 3.
11
Ibid., 3.
12
Ibid., 8.
116
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
“the de-territorialization of Holocaust memories,” which “opens up to an abstract
and hence universally accessible terrain on which cosmopolitan memories can
form.”13 While they rightfully consider ‘the Americanization of the Holocaust’ as
one of the important triggers of this process of universalization, it is equally
important to note that the Holocaust qua universal norm “helped Europeans
redefine themselves […]: the need to avoid another Holocaust provided a
foundation for (official) European memory.14
The first signs of the institutionalization of such an official memory became
apparent in 2005, when the European Parliament voted the establishment of
Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January (the date on which Auschwitz was
liberated by the Red Army), leading Claus Leggewie to claim that the Holocaust
had become Europe’s ‘negative foundation myth’ – that is, that the historical
trauma of the Holocaust actually paved the way towards European unification.15
It comes as no surprise, then, that the European Union also expects future
members to comply with this ‘memory codex.’ Or as Tony Judt remarked well
before Leggewie: “Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry
ticket.”16 This also applies to the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Parallel to or
as part of their rapprochement with and integration into the European Union,
Croatia (in 2005), Slovenia (in 2011), and Serbia (in 2011) became members of the
IHRA, while Macedonia currently has the status of observer country.17 As
member states, Croatia and Serbia committed themselves to the goals of the
IHRA, which includes “clear public policy commitment to Holocaust education
at a senior political level,” the establishment and observation of an annual
‘Holocaust Memorial Day,’ and “the opening of archives related to the Holocaust
for researchers,” as well as the guarantee that “there is or will be academic,
educational, and public examination of the country’s historical past as related to
13
Levy, Daniel and Nathan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age,
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 183.
14
Ibid., 184.
15
Claus Leggewie, “Seven Circles of European memory,” Eurozine, December 20, 2010,
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-12-20-leggewie-en.html.
16
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 803.
Larissa Allwork has recently proposed to see Holocaust remembrance as fostered by the IHRA as
a case of ‘civil religion.’ See Allwork: “Holocaust Remembrance as Civil Religion: The Case of the
Stockholm Declaration (2000),” in Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era,
eds. Diana I. Popescu and Tanja Schult, (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 288–304.
17
For
a
list
of
member
and
observer
countries,
see
https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/member-countries and
https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/observer-countries respectively.
117
Stijn Vervaet
the Holocaust period.”18 Both states are now gradually including the Holocaust
into the school curriculum, organizing teacher training (often in collaboration
with Yad Vashem), opening exhibitions, and investing in museums, for example.
In other words, since their IHRA membership, Croatia and Serbia have been
creating the institutions without which, as Assmann reminds us, any politics of
memory would be unthinkable and on whose stability the future of Holocaust
memory also depends.19
However, critics have noted that although the institutional efforts by Croatia and
Serbia might be theoretically in line with the IHRA’s and European memory
politics, in practice this ‘Europeanization of memory’ also has its flip side and has
sometimes led to rather ambiguous results that tend to avoid or conceal
uncomfortable issues from the national past.20 In Serbia, the first exhibition on
the Holocaust, held in spring 2012 in the Museum of Yugoslav History, received
criticism for concealing or even omitting the role of domestic collaborators,
specifically of the quisling regime of Milan Nedić and the Belgrade police forces
led by Dragomir ‘Dragi’ Jovanović, and for not addressing the anti-Semitism of
local intellectuals such as bishop Nikolaj Velimirović.21 As Milovan Pisarri put it
in his review of the exhibition: “The problem lies in the fact that the message it
conveys is clear […]: the Germans are held responsible for the Holocaust, and they
are the only ones to blame and hold accountable.”22 Pisarri further criticized the
18
For the complete list of membership criteria, see
https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/about-us/membership-criteria .
19
Aleida Assmann. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und
Geschichtspolitik, (Munich: Beck, 2006), 238–241.
20
For a critical analysis of the Croatian context, see Ljiljana Radonić, “Standards of Evasion:
Croatia and the ‘Europeanization of Memory,’” Eurozine, April 6, 2012,
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-04-06-radonic-en.html .
21
As early as in June 1942, the part of Serbia occupied by Nazi Germany and which was ruled in
alliance with the quisling regime of Milan Nedić, was declared to be ‘judenfrei.’ On collaboration
with the Axis forces in Serbia, see Ana Antić: “Police Force under Occupation: Serbian State Guard
and Volunteers’ Corps in the Holocaust,” in Lessons and Legacies X. Back to the Sources: ReExamining Perpetrators, ed. Sara R. Horowitz, (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
2012), 13–36; Olivera Milosavljević, Potisnuta istina. Kolaboracija u Srbiji 1941–1944, (Belgrade:
Helšinski odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2006); Walter Manoschek, Serbien ist judenfrei,
(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995), 109–154. On Velimirović, see Jovan Byford, Denial and Repression
of Anti-Semitism: Post-Communist Rehabilitation of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic,
(New York: Central European University Press, 2007).
22
Milovan Pisarri, “Exhibition on the Holocaust in Serbia: The Problem of Selective Memory,”
Blog Foruma za primenjenu istoriju, April 25, 2012, http://www.fpi.rs/blog/exhibition-on-theholocaust-in-serbia-the-problem-of-selective-memory.
118
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
exhibition for some serious factual errors and for representing the Jewish
population in pre-war Yugoslavia as “the ones who were really pulling the strings
of Serbian industry and economy on the whole at the time,” a statement that
comes close to the stereotypes that lay at the basis of Goebbels’ anti-Jewish
propaganda.23
Lea David has looked more broadly at the ways in which the Serbian state and
political elite deal with the memory of the Holocaust in the post-Milošević era. She
analyzed the implementation of the IHRA standards as reflected in the school
curriculum, Holocaust commemorations and the official speeches held at these
occasions, and embodied in the close Israeli-Serbian collaboration between Yad
Vashem on the one hand and the Serbian Orthodox Church led by bishop Jovan
Ćulibrk on the other. David points out the existence of two different agendas: one
that commemorates the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and another that
analogously portrays the Serbs themselves as victims of genocide.24 Characterizing
the state’s attitude as “simultaneously both neglecting and embracing different
segments of Holocaust memory,” David convincingly argues that Serbian policy
boils down to a double form of Holocaust instrumentalization. On the one hand,
Holocaust memory serves the Serbian state as “a means of dealing with the
contradictory demands at the domestic and international levels.” On the other, the
state uses the Holocaust as a ‘screen memory’ that not only emphasizes Serbian
victimhood during the Second World War and its role as “righteous amongst the
nations” but in doing so also redirects attention from “the Serbian role in the wars
of the 1990s” towards “a much more suitable discourse on WWII […] which can
be adjusted to both domestic and international demands.”25
23
Ibid.
Lea David, “Holocaust as Screen Memory: The Serbian Case,” in History and Politics in the
Balkans, eds. Srđan Jovanović and Veran Stančetić, (Belgrade: Center for Good Governance
Studies, 2013), 64–88.
25
Ibid., 65–66; 68; 84. The term ‘righteous amongst the nations’ is used by the state of Israel and
Yad Vashem to refer to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis. As David
suggests, the Serbian political and clerical elite embraces the Holocaust to selectively “promot[e]
the values of a Human Rights regime” (Ibid., 76). Promoting a master narrative about “Serbian
victimization throughout history” (Ibid., 81) the Serbian political and clerical elite avoids discussing
Serbian participation in the Yugoslav wars (including the country’s role in or logistic support to
the most serious war crimes, such as mass killings, mass rape, or concentration camps in which nonSerbs were interned, tortured and killed) in the same terms of human rights violations as used in
debates about the Holocaust or suffering of Serbs during the Second World War. For those
reasons, David argues that Holocaust memory is indirectly utilized to “construct and insinuate
Serbian righteousness and victimhood in the wars of the 1990s” (Ibid., 81).
24
119
Stijn Vervaet
As Assmann put it, “national memories cannot be integrated within a European
memory as easily as the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust
Education, Remembrance, and Research might wish.”26 Indeed, the “two
generally recognized and honourable roles for European nations to assume” in the
post-war period, the role of victim and that of resister, are characteristic of many
Eastern European nations after 1989, as Assmann notes,27 and also seem to be the
dominant memory templates in Serbia today. In the state-supported and
institutionalized memory of the country, there seems to be no place for what
Reinhard Koselleck called ‘negative memory’: the need for a nation to make the
effort to remember not only its own victims but also its own, homegrown
perpetrators from within the nation.28
To summarize, the IHRA has certainly stimulated Serbia to invest in Holocaust
education, leading to efforts that have in effect led to an increase in official
commemorations and educational materials ranging from school handbooks,
exhibitions, websites, teacher trainings, conferences, and scholarly works.
However, the zero-sum logic typical of post-Yugoslav identity building – which
puts the victims of the own national group in the limelight but has a blind spot
for victims of other nationalities killed by members of the own nation – prevails
and seems even in uncanny ways to be compatible with the ‘universalizing
template’ of the IHRA. In what follows, I will first examine Man of Ashes, in
which Holocaust survivor Ivan Ivanji, reflecting on the example of the
Buchenwald memorial complex, critically examines recent developments in
Holocaust memorialization in Germany and thinks through their consequences
for the broader European context.
Ivan Ivanji’s Man of Ashes: Remembering the Holocaust in the Shadow of
Goethe’s Oak
Ever since the publication of his prose debut They Didn’t Kill Man in 1954, the
26
Aleida Assmann, “Europe: A Community of Memory?” (Twentieth Annual Lecture of the
GHI, November 16, 2006), GHI Bulletin 40 (2007): 11–25; 15.
27
Ibid., 15; 16–18.
28
Reinhart Koselleck, “Formen und Traditionen des negatives Gedächtnisses,” in Verbrechen
erinnern: Die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord, eds. Volkhard Knigge and
Norbert Frei, (München: C. H. Beck), 21–32. Radonić, “Standards of Evasion,” came to similar
conclusions regarding Croatia.
120
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
writer, translator, and former diplomat Ivan Ivanji has been returning time and
again to the concentration camp Buchenwald and its sub-camps (Auβenlager) in
Magdeburg, Niederorschel, and Langenstein-Zwieberge where he had been
interned as a Jew during the Holocaust.29 In 1989, he published the novel Jumping
over Your Shadow (Preskakanje senke), followed in the late 1990s and 2000s by
many other novels, collections of short stories, and essays.30 His work is unique in
that it offers us insight into how a Holocaust survivor keeps writing about the
Holocaust over time, not only because he seems to be haunted by the memories of
the camps but also perhaps because the changed historical context seems to
challenge him to revisit his memories and re-narrate them in light of current
debates. While he wrote They Didn’t Kill Man in an attempt to work through the
memories of the horrors he went through – as he put it himself, “I just had to get
it down on paper”31 – in his more recent fictional and non-fictional work Ivanji
approaches the issue of the Holocaust and his own experience and memories of
the camps from a different perspective, anchored in and framed by the present.32
In his essays and novels, he reflects upon and problematizes the whole culture and
vocabulary of Holocaust remembrance that has emerged over the past decades,
particularly in Germany, where he is often invited as a speaker at commemorations
or conferences, a reflection that includes his own role as one of the few remaining
survivors. At the same time, he does not shy away from connecting the Holocaust
29
The period of Ivanji’s 1950s work lies beyond the scope of this paper, not least because Holocaust
memory (and countermemory) under socialism in Yugoslavia raises a very different set of
questions: in the 1950s Ivanji’s contemporaries who addressed the Holocaust included the
prominent playwright Đorđe Lebović. On Lebović, see Stijn Vervaet, “Staging the Holocaust in
the Land of Brotherhood and Unity: Holocaust Drama in Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1950s and
1960s,” Slavonic and East European Review 92/2 (April 2014): 228-254.
30
These include Balerina i rat (The Ballet Dancer and the War, 2003), Poruka u boci (Bottle Post,
2005), Aveti iz jednog malog grada (Ghosts from a Small Town, 2009), Slova od kovanog gvožđa
(Letters of Forged Iron, 2010), Moj lepi život u paklu (2016), and many essays in the Serbian weekly
Vreme (Time) and in journals and edited volumes in German. Many of these recent novels
appeared first in German, after which the author himself rewrote them in Serbian (Ivanji prefers
the term rewriting over translating). Interview with the author on 5 January 2016; on Ivanji’s
bi(tri)lingualism, see also his essay “Kinderfräuleinsprache und ‘naški jezik,’ unsere Sprache,” in
Erinnerung an Jugoslawien in der deutschsprachigen Literatur: zur Exophonie, eds. Kristian
Donko and Johann Georg Lughofer, (Ljubljana: Goethe-Institut, 2014), 4–7.
31
Interview with the author, January 5, 2016.
32
Thus, writing as ‘working through’ (Durcharbeiten) receives here a double meaning: writing as
an attempt by the author to free himself of those painful memories, and as Freud’s repetition
compulsion (Wiederholungszwang), that is, as the urge to revisit, rework, rewrite the same
memories in order to get them somehow under control and give them a place in his life narrative.
See Freud, “Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten” (1914) and “Jenseits des Lustprinzips”
(1920).
121
Stijn Vervaet
to stories of non-Jewish suffering or dissecting critically new forms of right-wing
extremism, xenophobia, and racism or organized state violence in the light of his
own experience of Nazism.
Set in 1997–2005 in Buchenwald and Weimar, Ivanji’s novel Man of Ashes (Čovek
od pepela, 2006; Der Aschenmensch von Buchenwald, 1999) deals directly with
the issues of remembering and forgetting, the importance and the contradictions
of Holocaust remembrance and education today, and the role of survivors in these
processes. The story opens in 1997, when a roof worker, repairing the roof of one
of the buildings of the memorial centre at Buchenwald, discovers a large number
of urns containing the ashes of victims killed by the Nazis. The director of the
centre decides to bury the urns, 701 in total, together in one communal tomb –
because the urns were left uncovered, identification of the individual victims was
impossible. This is done in a public ceremony in which representatives of the four
religions of victims who perished in the camp – a rabbi and a Catholic, a
Protestant, and an Orthodox priest – take part, as well as a camp survivor in whom
we can recognize Ivanji. However, in an unexpected twist of fate, the ‘souls’ of the
killed merge into one big cloud that hovers over the Ettersberg and the city of
Weimar, reminding the living of their duty to remember the victims of the
Holocaust. In the course of the novel, it becomes clear that there are different dead
inhabiting the Ettersberg, who all claim the right to be remembered.
After a few pages, it emerges that the first person-narrator is a survivor of
Buchenwald – apparently Ivanji’s alter ego – when, commenting on the
impressions a high school student wrote down after his visit to the camp, he notes:
“I was the same age as this child when I was interred here as a prisoner wearing the
number 58116.”33 The first-person narrator describes his repeated visits to
Buchenwald and Weimar on the occasion of the annual commemorations and
recalls his memories of the concentration camp. These chapters alternate at
random with chapters told by an authorial narrator who describes the birth of the
‘Man of Ashes’ – an amorphous cloud of ‘souls’ held together by a force called ‘the
principle’ (in his German version of the novel, Ivanji calls this ‘das Es’), who all tell
how they died in the camp. As Tihomir Brajović, one of the rare Serbian literary
critics who has written about Ivanji’s novel, noted, “the narrator was prompted to
the act of writing […], realizing the contradictions of that assiduous and
systematic, but at the same time to him deeply problematic and, we could say, in a
33
Ivan Ivanji, Čovek od pepela, (Belgrade: Stubovi kulture, 2006), 14. Further references to this
novel will be indicated by parenthetical page numbers following the quotes in the main text.
122
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
certain way forgetful Erinnerungsarbeit or ‘memory work.’”34 Brajović connects
Ivanji’s novel to a series of post-Yugoslav novels (by Dubravka Ugrešić, David
Albahari, Saša Ilić, and Igor Štiks) that thematize issues of forgetting and
remembering in the wake of the Yugoslav wars and whose narrators or
protagonists point to “a particular cultural phenomenon that we could call the
syndrome of ‘displaced,’ ‘transposed’ or ‘compensatory’ memory characteristic of
the self-understanding and representation of neuralgic topics of the recent past in
a significant part of the contemporary literature of the Western Balkans.”35
Brajović’s terminology somehow resonates with Freud’s ‘screen memory’ in that
it implies “the paradoxical narrative form of ‘evocative oblivion’ that ‘neutralizes,’
distances and ‘objectivizes’ the still painful traumas and frustrations of the own
community by remembering the historical experience of others.”36
I certainly agree with Brajović that the authors he mentions lay bare the
mechanisms of social oblivion at work in post-Yugoslav societies and to a large
extent follow his analysis of Man of Ashes. However, he fails to notice the
multidirectional dynamics at work in much post-Yugoslav memory fiction – in
both the novels he discusses and the works analysed here – and thus neglects the
novels’ potential to contest the social oblivion their narrators or protagonists
problematize. Bringing to the fore the multi-layered quality of the memory site(s)
they are dealing with and showing the potential of Holocaust sites to trigger
associative links with other temporally or geographically removed memories of
suffering, the works of art discussed here not only evoke (by way of certain tropes
and/or a specific narrative structures) the palimpsestic nature of cultural memory,
but also destabilize received ideas about the subject(s) of memory and the role of
culture in processes of remembering.
Already on the first page of the novel, Ivanji introduces the Ettersberg as an
ambiguous and polyvalent site of memory. It is both the place where the
concentration camp Buchenwald was located and the hill that Goethe, who lived
and worked for a large part of his life in nearby Weimar, sometimes visited at night
34
Tihomir Brajović, “Geteov hrast na Zapadnom Balkanu. Fenomen kompenzativne memorije u
savremenom srpskom, hrvatskom i bosanskohercegovačkom romanu,” Sarajevske sveske 29–30
(2010): 477–489; 478. An abridged English version is published under the title “Goethe’s Oak Tree
in the Western Balkans: Wars, Memories and Identities in Contemporary Serbian, Croatian and
Bosnian-Herzegovinian Novels,” in Balkan Memories: Media Constructions of National and
Transnational Memory, ed. Tanja Zimmermann, (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2012), 163–169.
35
Ibid., 482.
36
Ibid., 488.
123
Stijn Vervaet
and where he allegedly inscribed his famous poem Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh onto
the wall of a wooden cabin.37 Reminding the reader that the last verse of the poem,
“Warte nur, balde / ruhest du auch” (“Just wait, soon / You will rest as well”) is
actually a premonition of eternal rest, of death, the narrator ironically points out
the discrepancy between Weimar as the seat of German classicism and symbol of
German civilization (Hochkultur) and the concentration camp the Nazis
constructed in its immediate vicinity, at the symbolically loaded place on which,
as legend had it, ‘Goethe’s oak’ stood.38 The need to think through this unsettling
incongruity is most directly articulated by the director of the centre, whose
thoughts are communicated to us in free, indirect speech, resulting in a mix of
narrator’s voice and the voice of character:
He would have liked for the fact that Hitler came after Goethe and that there
exists a certain connection between the two to be taken seriously. Of course this
doesn’t mean that Goethe prepared the ground for Hitler, even though in his
role as a chief advisor [to the Grand Duke] he was a rather authoritarian
statesman; but, as far as Weimar is concerned, it simply has to be acknowledged
that supreme culture was hardly resistant to infection and moreover that
barbarism arose in the very midst of culture. (16, emphasis added)
The narrator cynically adds that, “in the mind of the Buchenwald prisoners, many
of whom were far more educated than their German guards and executioners,
Goethe played a specific, and for some, even a great role. For them, Weimar, until
the moment they arrived in the camp, was connected with Goethe’s name. And
from then on?” (16).39 Even though the narrator put it as a rhetorical question, the
answer seems to be clear: the very existence of a concentration camp near Weimar
probably shattered the prisoners’ last illusions about the potentially benevolent
influence of culture on people and should also force the reader to think.
Mentioning that Weimar had been selected as the ‘European capital of culture’ for
37
Literary history has by now accepted that ‘Wanderers Nachtlied’ (‘Wanderer’s Nightsong’) was
written on the Ettersberg, whereas ‘Ein Gleiches’ (‘A Similar Song’), both published in the same
volume in 1815, was allegedly written on the wall of a wooden lodge on the Kickelhahn mountain
near Ilmenau. Goethe, Gedichte, ed. Erich Trunz, (Munich: Beck, 1998), 555.
38
The narrator comments extensively on the beliefs surrounding the ‘Goethe-Eiche.’ Pointing out
that in Goethe in his talks with Eckermann explicitly mentions a beech tree (Buche), he concludes
that the whole story is actually a legend in which the mythic German oak merges with Goethe’s
beech. (106–110)
39
Later in the novel, the narrator will give his own answer to the question: “I can’t remember
whether as prisoner 58116 in Buchenwald I knew that the camp was located in the neighbourhood
of Weimar in which Goethe used to live. Probably I didn’t” (58).
124
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
1999, the narrator finely points out the difficulties Weimar’s citizens have in
integrating the remnants of the concentration camp into the idealized picture of
their city as they would like to present it to the world, except perhaps as a form of
memory tourism – note the switch to indirect free discourse from the second
sentence on, through which the narrator ironically distances himself from the
alleged point of view of Weimar’s inhabitants:
The inhabitants of Weimar would prefer to cut themselves off sharply
from the Ettersberg, the mound that rises above them. If the horror must
be remembered at all, let it then remain up there on the hill. It is also
perfectly convenient to set up museums and monuments up there, a
memorial centre, or whatever they call it, where wreaths can be laid down
and where you can stand with certain horror; the feeling of horror
increases the adrenalin and adrenalin is necessary for certain forms of
tourism, and for that reason there will always be enough visitors to
former concentration camps – in other words – just one more attraction!
Let the city itself, however, remain the cradle of everything beautiful,
noble, and good, in glory of the Germans and to the benefit of the whole
world. (54)
At the same time, the narrator suggests the impossibility of separating those two
pasts – the bad of the Ettersberg and the noble of Weimar – pointing out that
young neo-Nazis gather at the foot of the bronze monument to Goethe and
Schiller in the city’s Theatre Square and threaten or even beat up foreigners.
Buchenwald itself is no less multi-layered than Weimar. Recalling the fact that
after the end of the war the Soviet forces also interned their adversaries in
Buchenwald, “sometimes even in the same barracks” (17), the narrator explains
that for those people there will be a memorial centre built within the confines of
the existing centre but that this causes quite a stir in public opinion in Germany:
In one instance, the director has to defend the decision of his institution
to construct a separate building for the historical representation of the
Soviet special camp against the charges that it violates the resolution of
the European Parliament and equates these two prisons, while in another
instance he has to declare that there are revisionist tendencies in Germany
125
Stijn Vervaet
and that he does not adhere to them. (17)40
These two or even three different historical layers of the camp and their respective
victims are all (re)present(ed) in the novel, which thus echoes the palimpsestic
nature of the site.41 As Sarah Dillon writes, “the presence of texts from the past,
present (and possibly future) in the palimpsest does not elide temporality but
evidences the spectrality of any ‘present’ moment which always already contains
within it ‘past,’ ‘present’ and ‘future’ moments” and, referring to De Quincey,
“the fantasy of the palimpsest of the mind, and the disunity of the self it implies,
does […] lead […] to a post-Romantic notion of the spectralized subject.”42 United
in the figure of the Man of Ashes, the voices of Jews, communists, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, homosexuals, Gypsies – the latter three of which, as the narrator puts
it, “have no lobby” (26), meaning that after their death, nobody remembered them
or erected a monument for them – intermingle and together form a spectral
subject that haunts the present. However, the dead of Buchenwald are
unexpectedly interrupted in their conversation by two other voices they
experience as foreign elements. The first voice they discover in their midst is that
of one of Goethe’s servants who had been inhabiting the Ettersberg for centuries
– yet another way to indicate how the high culture of the age of German classicism
and the barbarism of the Nazis are inseparably connected – a rather ironic choice
because the servant is not the best representative of high culture: the only story he
keeps repeating is that he served hot chocolate to Goethe. The second one is the
hostile voice of a member of the Hitler Youth (Hitler-Jugend) who “planned to
fight for Germany” but whom the Soviet forces interned in Buchenwald in order
to re-educate him, where he died of pneumonia:
40
The director of the Memorial Centre, who is sketched by the narrator with much sympathy, can
be easily recognized as the fictional double of Volkhard Knigge – “a young historian who has had
for a long time a scholarly interest in psychoanalysis” (16) and who doesn’t hesitate to take a clear
position in the debate about historical revisionism. Debates about the question whether the corepresentation of the GDR and the Nazi eras entails an equation of both regimes continue to the
present day; for a recent case in which Volkhard Knigge has also voiced his opinion, see Philippe
Oehmke, “Zwickmülle der Vergangenheit,” Der Spiegel 21 (2008): 166-168.
41
If we include the camp’s function as memory site of antifascist struggle in the GDR, there are
actually three layers; see Sarah Farmer, “Symbols That Face Two Ways: Commemorating the
Victims of Nazism and Stalinism at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen,” Representations 49 (1995):
97–119; 102, 107. In Ivanji’s novel, this layer is echoed by the roof worker, who recalls that when he
visited the camp as a child in the GDR, the teacher told them about the death of Ernst Thälmann,
a leader of the German Communist Party who was murdered in Buchenwald by the Nazis (7).
42
Sarah Dillon, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory, (London: Continuum, 2007), 37.
126
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
I wasn’t cremated with you. But I did die and was buried immediately next to
you. I really don’t know how I got here or how I acquired the ability to speak
nearly fifty years after my death… […] They understand. Here is someone who
was not interned in the concentration camp for the enemies of Hitler’s
Germany, who was not liberated on 11 April 1945, but who found himself in the
Soviet special camp No. 2, which was set up after the war for defeated Nazis, on
the same site, partly using the same barracks. (100–101)
At first, the others are upset by his presence, but one of them, a former Jehovah’s
Witness, argues in his defence:
We should not generalize. The former Nazis weren’t the only ones interned in
those Soviet special camps, there were also those who opposed the forced
unification of the social democrats with the communists, or communists
convicted by the courts set up by the Soviet authorities, because they had butted
heads… Some of my brothers were also interned. It’s not that I have inside
knowledge of these things, but suffering is suffering... (101)
The figure of the dead ‘souls’ sticking together and acting as a living being allows
Ivanji, in a magical realist vein, to tell the stories of those killed by the Nazis in
Buchenwald without necessarily appropriating their voices. It seems, however,
that recalling their stories is not sufficient for the narrator: the figure he created
also needs a face (104). Meditating on the face the amorphous being could take on,
the narrator concludes that there actually is one face that he could give the Man of
Ashes – it is found on a sculpture made by Buchenwald survivor Bruno Apitz,
which in yet another unexpected twist connects the ‘Man of Ashes’ to Goethe.
When on 24 August 1944 the Americans bombed the camp, as a consequence of
which more than 320 prisoners died, Goethe’s oak was partly turned into ashes.
The camp authorities ordered a group of prisoners to cut down the oak and saw it
into pieces, but Apitz managed to take a piece with him, out of which he carved a
sculpture after the death masks of those who had died in the ‘medical ward’
(Pathologie) in the camp. He called it ‘The Last Face’ and told his friends that “in
this way, out of the many faces of our dead one unique face was created” (105). As
Michael Rothberg notes, “within the theory of multidirectional memory, acts of
remembrance can thus be understood as processes of articulation in the two senses
of that word given to it by Stuart Hall: they are acts of enunciation and they are
acts of connection.”43 Ivanji’s Man of Ashes tries not only to voice – to utter,
43
Michael Rothberg, “Afterword: Locating Transnational Memory,” European Review, 22/4
(2014): 652–656; 654.
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articulate or enunciate – the stories of the different victims of Buchenwald, but
also to make connections between them as well as with temporally and
geographically more remote stories of suffering. He also tries to give them a face in
a way that reminds us of Lévinas’s understanding of the face: as Judith Butler put
it, a face “makes various utterances at once: it bespeaks an agony, an injurability,
and a divine prohibition against killing.”44
The narrator makes plain that the Man of Ashes as a spectre (or embodiment of
the return of the repressed) haunting the surroundings of Weimar could be useful
not only in Germany, but also other places: “He is surely needed in the sky above
my fatherland. My former fatherland. Above Jasenovac, Banjica, Keraterm,
Ovčara, Knin, Srebrenica” (141), listing places of camps and sites of torture and
mass killings during the Second World War and during the wars of the 1990s.45 He
also mentions “the scorched medieval monasteries in Kosovo and Metohija…”
(141), where the ethnic cleansing of the Kosovar Albanians by Serb forces in 1999
took place, in the wake of the NATO bombings, followed by the ethnic cleansing
of the remaining Serb communities south of the river Ibar in 2004 by the Albanian
majority. Emerging from the site of memory (Denkmal) of Buchenwald, the Man
of Ashes hovers as a mobile memorial (Mahnmal) over places where victims of
extreme violence are not (yet) properly remembered and as a spectre from the past
that incessantly haunts the present.
44
Judith Butler, “Precarious Life,” in Radicalizing Levinas, eds. Peter Atterton and Matthew
Calarco, (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), 8.
45
Jasenovac was the largest concentration camp in the Independent State of Croatia where Serbs,
Jews, Roma, communists, as well as politically non-compliant Croats and Muslims were
systematically tortured and murdered between 1941 and 1945. The number of victims of the whole
camp complex has been subject to fierce polemics, but is currently estimated at between 122,300
and 130,100. For the debate and most up-to-date estimates see Nataša Mataušić, Jasenovac 19411945: Logor smrti i radni logor, (Jasenovac-Zagreb: Javna ustanova Spomen-područje Jasenovac,
2003), 116–123; Dragan Cvetković, “Holokaust u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj - numeričko
određenje,” Istorija 20. veka 1 (2011): 163-182. The camp Banjica (officially called ‘camp Dedinje’) in
Belgrade was established by the decision of the Gestapo and realized by the police of the Serbian
quisling government to intern communists and their sympathizers from the whole territory of
Serbia and the Balkans; out of the approximately 30,000 interned between 1941 and 1944, between
4,286 and 8,756 were killed. Keraterm was a death camp established and run by the Serb forces in
the early 1990s near Prijedor in north-west Bosnia where between 1,000 and 1,500 men of mostly
Bosniak and Croatian nationality were tortured and killed. Ovčara was a place near the Croatian
town Vukovar where in 1991 Serb paramilitary forces, backed by the Yugoslav army, killed Croatian
POWs and civilians, 200 of which were found in a mass grave while 60 are still missing. The Knin
camp was a detention camp where Serb militias mistreated, beat, and humiliated Croatian soldiers
and civilians. In Srebrenica, Serb forces shot approximately 8,000 men of Bosniak nationality.
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QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
However, even the figure of the Man of Ashes as an attempt to articulate the
untold stories of Buchenwald’s many victims leaves the narrator puzzled by certain
ethical dilemmas, leading him to consider some of the blind spots of current
Holocaust memorialization. One of the problems is related to the difference that
existed among the victims as a consequence of the power hierarchy installed by the
Nazis and brings us to the grey zone between victims, accomplices, and
executioners. A particular case in Buchenwald were the people employed in the socalled ‘Bureau of Labour Statistics’ (Arbeitsstatistik), who could replace persons
on the list for transport to Auschwitz with others, and assign them instead to work
units that had higher chances of survival. The narrator mentions that he owes his
own survival to an invisible hand in the Arbeitstatistik which, in the Winter of
1944–45 qualified him as a mason’s apprentice and sent him to the sub-camp of
Niederorschel: “If I were a believer, I would say, blessed be his name. But I never
learned his name. I only know that he wore a Buchenwald number, certainly
stitched onto a better prison uniform than the one I had, and that he had the
power to decide over life and death. Over my life. Over my death” (69). He
laconically adds: “what he did for me, historians in the German literature about
Buchenwald officially call Opfertausch – the exchange of victims. They usually
write about it in a negative context” (69). One of the prisoners employed in the
Arbeitsstatistik was the famous French-Spanish writer Jorge Semprun. The
narrator writes in very unambiguous terms about Semprun here: “As a prisoner,
Jorge Semprun was lord of life and death. That distinguishes him from me. Not
only the fact that he is six years older than me. Not only the fact that he is a much
better known writer, and that he was a minister of culture in Spain after the fall of
Franco” (69).
The uneven representation of the victims of Nazism today is another issue
addressed by Ivanji, although not of the same order because it is inherent to
contemporary (geo)politics and not a consequence of the inner logic of the
concentration camps. Ivanji mentions how former camp prisoners from Russia,
Belarus, and Ukraine who are invited to the anniversary of the liberation of the
camp are hosted in the refurbished former SS-barracks on the site of the
Buchenwald camp instead of in hotels in the city of Weimar: “I am finding out
that even today former camp prisoners are not all equal. Just as they also weren’t
at the time they wore striped prison uniforms” (133). A third issue is related to scale
and time, and indicated by the narrator when he wonders “when another ten
centuries go by, how will people look at that distant past that is our present?” (79–
80).
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Whereas Ivanji’s narrator generally takes a positive stance towards the critical
memory culture that has developed in Germany over the past decades, he
nevertheless sighs: “Let the Germans do with the concentrations camps and the
monuments on the places where they were erected whatever they want, I don’t
need them. Neither the Germans nor their museums of horror. But the German
language… In no other language can I express myself in the same way” (80). The
irreconcilability between the horrors he went through in the Nazi camps and his
love for the German language is complete, and seems, albeit on a very personal
level, somehow to echo the gap between (German) culture and (Nazi) barbarity
that runs as a red thread through the novel. In the following section, I turn to
examine whether or not, and how the ‘warning’ by Ivanji’s Man of Ashes is taken
up by Serbian authors of the second and third generation. Their work takes us
from Weimar to Belgrade, from Buchenwald to the Old Fairgrounds, and, not
unlike Ivanji’s novel, draws our attention to the palimpsestic structure of local
Holocaust sites and associatively connects Holocaust memory in Serbia to other
traumatic events.
Zoran Penevski’s Less Important Crimes: Towards a Digital ‘Constellation of SelfCritical National Memories’
Perhaps not unsurprisingly, many recent Serbian Holocaust-related novels,
artworks, and scholarly and popularizing publications focus on the Old
Fairgrounds (Staro sajmište) in Belgrade. Located on the left bank of the river Sava,
between the two bridges that connect the historic city centre with New Belgrade,
the Old Fairgrounds are the most significant Holocaust site in Serbia. Initially
built in 1937 to host the International Fair, only four years later the site was
transformed by the Gestapo into a concentration camp. At first, the camp
functioned as a Judenlager, where approximately 7,000 Jewish women, children,
and elderly people were detained. In the winter of 1941/1942, approximately 500
Jewish prisoners died of cold, disease or hunger. In spring 1942, approximately
6,300 Jews were killed in a gas van (in Serbian called ‘dušegupka,’ literally ‘soulkiller’) that was sent from Berlin for that purpose.46 At that point, German-
46
Along with Jews, approximately 500 Roma were interned in the concentration camp. Held in
horrible conditions, around 60 of them died of disease and exposure. However, most other Roma
were released between January and April 1942 after they had provided evidence that they had a
permanent address in the city. Jovan Bajford, Staro sajmište. Mesto sećanja, zaborava i sporenja,
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QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
occupied Serbia was the first country in Europe declared ‘judenrein’ and the camp
was turned into an Anhaltelager, a temporary detention camp for political
prisoners, captured partisans, and forced labourers, mostly Serbs from Bosnia and
Croatia but also Bosniaks, Albanians, Greeks, and Jews.47 Within those two years,
between May 1942 and July 1944, approximately 31,972 people passed through the
camp, out of which at least 10,636 perished.48 Despite the fact that the Old
Fairgrounds are “the largest individual Holocaust site in Serbia,” the site up until
now has not received a proper Holocaust memorial and plans for a museum have
never been realized.49 This negligent attitude is all the more significant because the
site is one of the rare concentration camps located almost in the centre of the city.
Zoran Penevski’s novel Less Important Crimes (Manje važni zločini, 2005)
connects two timelines: the first one, the frame narrative, is situated in the late
1990s to early 2000s, and starts with the student protests against the Milošević
regime and encompasses the 1999 NATO bombing of the country and the protests
that on 5 October 2000 brought an end to the Milošević era and the emergence of
democratic rule in 2003–2004. The second timeline covers the late 1930s, the
Second World War, and the Holocaust in Belgrade. These two stories are both
told by a heterodiegetic third-person narrator, but each in a different style and
rhythm, the first indicating the hasty, restless urban life of contemporary Belgrade
youth, the second evoking the calm, serene voice of an old-fashioned historian,
reminiscent of the voice-over of a documentary on a history channel. In the course
of the novel, the relevance of the two storylines to each other becomes clear and
finally they come together with a detective-story-like twist.
(Belgrade: Beogradski centar za ljudska prava, 2011), 33–44. See also Jovan Byford, “History of the
Semlin Camp,” http://www.semlin.info/.
47
The majority of the prisoners came from the German occupied zone and from the Independent
State of Croatia. Perceived as potential supporters of or participants in the partisan movement,
they were considered as a factor of instability. However, also ordinary peasants without any
connection to the resistance movement were interned. Most prisoners of the transit camp were
used as slave labour and transferred to work camps in Germany, Norway and smaller labour camps
in central Serbia; a smaller number, mostly political prisoners and partisans, were deported to
Mauthausen and Auschwitz. Large groups of prisoners died in the detention camp of hunger,
exhaustion and diseases caused by the bad sanitary conditions. Bajford, Staro sajmište, 44–53.
48
Bajford, Staro sajmište, 11; 21–53. Byford takes the figures from Milan Koljanić’s study Nemački
logor na beogradskom sajmištu, (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1992).
49
Ibid., 11–12. As the city manager of Belgrade, Goran Vesić announced several times in 2015 and
January 2016, this might finally change in the next few years: after the renovation of the central
tower in 2016, a memorial centre will be constructed including the Italian and the Czechoslovak
pavilions of the Fairgrounds. See http://www.politika.rs/sr/clanak/317202/Beograd/Starosajmiste-od-logora-do-memorijalnog-centra.
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The narrative set in the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s follows the young
and hip journalist and lover of electronic music Milоš Milić who works for an
online news portal in which we can easily recognise the TV and radio station B92,
which at the time played a crucial role as one of the only anti-regime channels in
Serbia and was one of the first to go online. At a house music party, Milоš is
approached by three guys of his age (in their twenties or thirties): Dušan Pavlović,
comic-strip artist Ivan, and the brothers Vlada and Filip. Dušan introduces the
group with the words “we’re from the RDB” – not the State Security Department
(Resor državne bezbednosti), as any Serbian citizen would have interpreted the
abbreviation at the time, but rather the Digital Belgrade Department (Resor
digitalnog Beograda), “a very serious website about Belgrade, more specifically,
about its scars of urbanity.”50 They ask him to join their network because he has
experience with web editing and because he is from New Belgrade, the part of the
city they have not covered yet. More specifically, they want him to gather
information about one of the biggest ‘scars’ of Belgrade’s cityscape: the Old
Fairgrounds.51
Miloš agrees to join the RDB, and his search for information on the Old
Fairgrounds not only teaches him a lot about the hidden past of Belgrade and the
faith of the Belgrade Jews but also helps him put the recent past in perspective,
particularly the crimes committed by the Milošević regime about which he learns
through his work as a journalist. At the end of the novel, the reader, together with
the characters of the frame story, discovers that Miloš’s and Dušan’s grandfathers
appear to have been friends. Actually, they turn out to be the main characters of
the storyline set in the 1930s and 1940s: the technician Stanimir Pavlović and the
photographer Petar Milić, who met at the second international Fair held at the
Belgrade Fairgrounds in 1938. During the Nazi Occupation, Petar Milić
documented the genocide of the Jews but was denounced to the Gestapo by a
Serbian informer, after which he was imprisoned, tortured and killed on the site
50
Zoran Penevski, Manje važni zločini, (Belgrade: Okean, 2005), 22. Henceforth, references to the
novel will be indicated by parenthetical page numbers in the main text. All translations are my
own.
51
Eight years after the publication of Less Important Crimes, Milovan Pisarri and Rena Raedle
edited a book that seemed to go a long way towards realizing the ambitious plans of Penevski’s trio
from the ‘Digital Belgrade Department’ and which brings to the fore Holocaust sites and sites of
antifascist resistance in Belgrade during the Second World War: Places of Suffering and of AntiFascist Struggle in Belgrade 1941–44, with the fitting subtitle A Guide to Read the City: (Mesta
stradanja i antifašističke borbe u Beogradu 1941–44. Priručnik za čitanje grada, (Belgrade: B92, Rosa
Luxemburg Stiftung South East Europe, 2013).
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QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
of the Old Fairgrounds. Stanomir Pavlović was employed by the Germans as a car
mechanic; one of his tasks is to clean the gas van. When he realizes that he is
becoming an accomplice in the killings of the Belgrade Jews, he sabotages the van.
After the war, the communist authorities accuse him of collaboration with the
Nazis and execute him in September 1945.
The way in which Miloš, with Dušan’s assistance, discovers the fate of his
grandfather – about which his father, who grew up as an orphan, had not told him
anything – not only highlights an interruption in the chain of intergenerational
memory but also zooms in on the role and responsibility of bystanders of
genocide. His search in the archives leads Miloš, and with him the reader, to
ponder issues of complicity and collaboration in different times – in the 1940s,
during the Second World War and the Holocaust, and in the 1990s, during the
Yugoslav wars, the Srebrenica genocide, Kosovo war crimes, and the NATO
bombing. This plot structure mirrors that of the novels and films, which
Silverman has described as examples of palimpsestic memory, in which “a
significant part of the intrigue […] derives from the fact that the investigation into
one buried memory […] turns out to be an investigation into another […]. Or
rather, the two are shown to be profoundly connected, so that what one might
have thought of as distinct moments in time and space are recomposed to create a
different spatio-temporal configuration.”52
The novel connects these issues through the trope of the past as a virtual database.
The guys from the Digital Belgrade Service define their website as ‘an interactive
map of Belgrade in which points in space [prostorne tačke] also have their
temporal wells [vremenski bunari] with interesting data […] the virtual makes it
possible for everything to come to the surface’ (34). Not accidentally, both
grandfather Petar and grandson Miloš are obsessed by the modern media of their
time and use photography and the internet respectively to document and archive
(in an attempt to save those memories from oblivion and bring them to light in
the future) cases of extreme violence or flagrant social injustice that are forgotten,
repressed, or ignored by their fellow citizens. The intertwining of different
temporal layers, switching back and forth between the 1990s and the 1940s is
echoed not only by the idea of an interactive website that by way of hyperlinks
opens up and connects the forgotten stories of sites of suffering in Belgrade, but
also by the very structure of the novel. The literary text itself consists of 156 very
short numbered chapters, which like narrative ‘flashes’ or ‘hyperlinks’ to different
52
Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, 3.
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Stijn Vervaet
webpages, texts, and images tell the stories of the two different generations and
provide the reader with historical information on the Belgrade Fairgrounds.
Finally, the idea that Belgrade’s traumatic history can be read as a palimpsest is also
evoked by the cover illustration of the book, which was created by Penevski. The
cover shows a photograph in sepia of the Terazije, one of Belgrade’s main streets
through which the gas van drove on its way from the Old Fairgrounds to Jajinci.
In this photograph, a map of the site of the Old Fairgrounds is traced out,
suggesting a layering that inverts ordinary spatio-temporal relations: rather than
being buried under the present, the past is projected upon it, suggesting the
impossibility of erasing the presence and importance of the past in the present
[Fig. 1].
Fig. 1. Book cover of Zoran Penevski’s novel Less Important Crimes (2005).
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QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
Reproduced courtesy of Zoran Penevski.
While the novel on the one hand seems to celebrate the possibilities of the Internet
to access the past and remember its dark sides, the surprising space-time
connections that resurface, the protagonist’s reflections upon collective forgetting,
and the ways in which this oblivion is carved into the cityscape are rather
pessimistic. Furthermore, the parallel between the indifference of many
contemporary Serbian citizens towards the memory of the genocide of the Jews
during the Second World War, committed in the heart of its capital, and the
negation of the genocide in Srebrenica and the war crimes in Kosovo, sheds an
entirely new light on the motto that opens the novel, a quote from Milošević who
in 1998 claimed: “our whole country will develop as New Belgrade” (7). While
New Belgrade is the most modern and urban part of Belgrade, it is also the
municipality in which the remnants of the Old Fairgrounds are located. What is
more, the use of this quote as a motto for the novel seems to suggest that the
backing of institutions and political forces is needed for the memory of a traumatic
past to enter the sphere of cultural memory. If this institutional support is lacking,
then a possible alternative, as the novel seems to suggest (even though it does so
using the form of the novel and not of a blog or website), is the space of the world
wide web, which allows us to make digital “constellation[s] of self-critical national
memories,”53 which, as the title of the book implies, do not consider the evil done
to others as less important crimes. An important role in unearthing the
connections and putting them on the (digital) map, seems to be reserved for the
young urban generation. However, Penevski’s postmodern novel with its dense
play between different temporal layers and locations as well as its complex plot
might not be the most effective medium to reach out to bigger audiences, in
particular the young. In the next section, I turn to a recent Serbian film centred on
the topic of Holocaust remembrance.
Goran Paskaljević’s Film When Day Breaks: Between the Duty to Remember and
the Pitfalls of Didacticism
Not unlike Penevski’s Less Important Crimes, the plot of Goran Paskaljević’s film
When Day Breaks (Kad svane dan, 2012) revolves around a quest, the protagonist’s
53
Assmann, “The Holocaust, a Global Memory?,” 101.
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Stijn Vervaet
search for a hidden truth.54 This quest starts in November 2011, when the
protagonist of the film, retired music teacher Miša Brankov, receives a letter from
the Jewish Museum in Belgrade. At the Museum, the curator explains to him that
workers of the municipality had found a metal box during recent renovations on
the water pipes on the site of the Old Fairgrounds. She gives him the metal box,
which contains some photographs, a letter, and an unfinished music score entitled
‘When Day Breaks,’ composed, she tells him, by his real father, Isak Weiss.
Together with his wife Sara, the composer Isak Weiss was interned at the Old
Fairgrounds where both of them were killed because they were Jews. The box
contains a note in which Weiss asks the finder – in case they do not manage to get
out of the camp – to give the box to the Brankovs, who look after their son Miša.
Miša Brankov cannot believe that he was actually adopted by the Brankovs, at
whose farm in the vicinity of Pančevo in the Banat he grew up, but he nevertheless
takes the box home.55 On his way out, the curator shows him the exhibition about
the concentration camp the Old Fairgrounds and the gas van the Nazis used to kill
the Jews, upon which Brankov utters: “It is terrible... that I hardly knew anything
about this” (13:20). A visit to Emil Najfeld, an old acquaintance of the Weisses in
Belgrade, confirms the story of the museum curator. Brankov’s brother, who still
lives on the farm where they both grew up also admits that he was asked by his
parents to accept Miša as his brother and never show or tell him that he was
adopted. Brankov visits the Old Fairgrounds, gets increasingly obsessed with the
story of his parents and starts to believe that his father actually tried to speak to
him through the unfinished music score, a kind of conversation with the dead that
will be made possible when he, his son, finishes the score. He wants the piece of
music to be performed on the Old Fairgrounds, as a last honour to his parents and
the other Jewish victims who perished there. However, this ambition proves
extremely difficult because the people whom he approaches are reluctant to help
him either because they do not see the importance of the commemorative event or
do not believe his story. The current conductor of the amateur choir Brankov
formerly conducted is practicing for the choir’s New Year’s programme, and his
son, a professional musician, is preparing his orchestra and choir for the premiere
54
When Day Breaks has received quite some international acclaim and won awards at a number of
international film festivals, amongst others the Grand Prix at the film festival in Terni (Italy, 2012),
in Merida (Spain), and in Cleveland (USA); in 2013, the film was selected as the Serbian candidate
for the Oscar competition but did not receive any awards.
55
Not accidentally, the scenario for the film was written by Serbian Jewish author Filip David, who
as a child survived the Holocaust because he and his family were hidden from the Nazis by Serbian
peasants. In 2015, Filip David was awarded the NIN prize for novel of the year 2014 for The House
of Memory and Oblivion (Kuća sećanja i zaborava).
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QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
of one of his own compositions. The son’s reaction to his father’s description of
what happened at the Old Fairgrounds is particularly telling: “Come on, dad!
That’s over now. Who cares about this today? Let the state bother about that! If
that [site] is not marked, there is a reason for it” (66:25). In the end, it is the
downtrodden and disadvantaged of contemporary society who perform the
composition: a Gypsy orchestra, the lead violinist of which is Brankov’s former
pupil Rade; Marko Popović, a previously famous classical singer who after the
death of his son – who was in the early 1990s recruited by force to serve in
Milošević’s ugly wars and killed on the front – became an alcoholic living in a
wooden cabin on Ada ciganlija.56
Brankov’s quest clearly links the memory of the Holocaust with stories of injustice
suffered by those who today live at the margins of Serbian society. The house on
Danube Street in Dorćol, where the Weisses lived, is now inhabited by a poor
family who fear that they will be thrown out of their humble abode because real
estate investors plan to tear down the building. Some of those people, including
refugees from the wars of the 1990s, even live on the site of the Old Fairgrounds, a
detail that foregrounds the palimpsestic character of the site today. However, the
multi-layered quality of the camp’s history during the Second World War is not
mentioned. Although the museum curator correctly tells Brankov the history of
the ‘Judenlager Semlin’ as a camp for Jews and Roma and also mentions Serbian
collaboration with the Nazis, her story ends in 1942, thus omitting one important
historic layer: that of the transit camp of 1942–1944, in which thousands of
prisoners died. In When Day Breaks, the Old Fairgrounds seem to be represented
as a place of Jewish and Roma suffering only. The film explicitly links current
right-wing violence against Roma in Serbia to (neo-)Nazism, showing how the
wedding party of the Roma family whose boys Brankov is giving violin classes for
free is brutally interrupted by hooligans who set the building on fire with Molotov
cocktails.
As film critic Kristina Đuković rightly remarked in her review of the film, the big
weakness of the film is its didactic tendency, which she sees reflected on a formal
level in two ways. 57 Firstly, the fact that, even though the film, by way of the slow
56
Ada ciganlija is a peninsula on the southern bank of the river Sava; it is one the city’s larger public
green areas and a popular recreational zone. Its northern edge is characterized by floating barges
used as weekend houses – hardly anyone lives here permanently, but those who nevertheless do,
are geographically, socially and symbolically situated at the margins of the city.
57
Kristina Đuković, “Kad svane dan – Goran Paskaljević: beživotno predavanje,” Popboks,
January 8, 2013, http://www.popboks.com/article/9322.
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and wide-frame shots, suggests a personal, inner drama, this drama and, as she puts
it, the protagonist’s “search for social catharsis” is not reflected by the narrative
logic of the film, which “evolves according to a list of elaborated points which, like
a checklist of daily tasks, map out in a very general and in a completely nonengaged way – and this is particularly contradictory – one of the most tragic stories
of this part of the world. For that reason, the film is made to perform a kind of
generic civilizational [sic] duty and not, as might be wished, to tell the story in an
engaged way.” Secondly, she points out that the characters, including the
protagonist, are flat, and that presenting a well-educated humanist like Brankov as
someone who had no knowledge whatsoever about the Old Fairgrounds makes
the story unconvincing: “even though the famous actor Mustafa Nadarević tries
hard to breathe some life into the gypsum mask that was given to him instead of a
character, this storyline of the film is almost mathematically restrained, as if
intending to reach a dry didactic conclusion about the negligence of our time.”
Đuković rightly singles out the fantastic ending of the film - when Miša Brankov,
carried away by the tunes of the gypsy orchestra performing the music score
composed by his father, in a kind of half-dream, half-hallucination meets his
parents and engages in a snow fight with them – as one of the aesthetically more
successful moments of the movie. Clearly born of the impetus to save Holocaust
memory from oblivion and to educate, the film straddles the line between the
aesthetic and the didactic. Whereas the film’s main thrust might be said to be in
line with the IHRA’s emphasis on education, as a work of art it is rather modest.
Apart from the message of the importance of Holocaust remembrance, the film’s
understanding of memory as a palimpsest is much simpler and ultimately far less
convincing than that put forward by the novels. Instead of complex relationships
between past and present, the film suggests simple one-to-one analogies: for
example, the position of Serbian Roma today is suggested to mirror that of the
Jews in the Holocaust in a straightforward way. The multi-layered nature of the
Fairgrounds’ history is acknowledged, but in a very selective way, omitting many
non-Jews. The film offers a clear critique of the many failures of state-organized
Holocaust remembrance in Serbia, but its own representation of Holocaust
memory is rather reductive and its understanding of transgenerational
transmission rather naïve.
Conclusion
In one of his recent essays, written on the occasion of a conference held in 2015 in
Berlin devoted to the role of commemorative centres in Holocaust education in
138
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
Germany, Ivanji recalls a remark made at the conference by Monika Grütters,
Germany’s minister for culture and media, who said that “we are still in the lucky
position of hearing the voices of the living witnesses to an era (Zeitzeugen), but
soon the authentic sites of persecution and annihilation will be only ‘stone
witnesses.’”58 Ivanji commented on the minister’s statement as follows:
I hope that those numerous memorial centres are not built for us and
because of us. They are built for the people who visit them, for those
generations who did not endure the two decades [sic] of Nazi rule, which
I in a simplified way call ‘The Time of Evil’ so that they would learn
something that was not talked about in their family, about which they
perhaps learned a little bit at school, so that they could face these
fragments of truth about the history of their nation when they visit one
of the memorial centres. […] They are built for the next generations; for
our descendants, for the descendants of perpetrators and in the first place
for the descendants of that large majority of people who watched the
crimes happen but did not dare to take any action against them.59
While some are afraid that with the death of the last survivor, the memory work
of the centres will also come to an end, Ivanji relativizes this fear, saying that the
memory of the Holocaust and its significance for the present is now left to the
coming generations. This belief is strengthened by his seeing the interested faces
of fourteen-year-olds visiting Buchenwald: “We ‘witnesses to an era (Zeitzeugen)’
said what we had to say, we’re leaving the stage, dying out, and now what matters
is the survival and function of the German memorial centres in the twenty-first
century for the second and third generations after us and our perpetrators.”60
Commenting on the use of the word Zeitzeuge and its currency in German
academy, Ivanji notes that he personally has always found the curiosity and
interest of the young more important than any court that could have asked him to
testify. He makes it clear that he does not perceive himself as “the witness of an
era;” rather that he can testify to what he experienced, adding an unusual ‘message’
for the policy makers and academics gathered in Berlin: “It’s nice of you that you
don’t want to forget us, thank you, but please devote your energy to helping those
58
Ivan Ivanji, “Konferencija o radu memorijalnih centara u XXI veku u Berlinu: Kako se sećati
zločina” (“A Conference about the Work of Memorial Centres in the 21st Century in Berlin: How
to Remember Crimes”), Vreme 1291, October 1, 2015,
http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=1331472.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid.
139
Stijn Vervaet
who are suffering today. At this very moment, refugees, for example, regardless of
where they come from, if they are in need.”61
Turning to the Serbian context, he reflects on the still unresolved status of the Old
Fairgrounds and the debates about the creation of a memorial centre on the site
(which is now again under threat by Serbia’s prime minister’s ambitious
urbanization project of the Sava banks, ‘Belgrade on the Water,’ financed with
Saudi funds). Even though Ivanji is convinced that ‘witnesses of an era’ and their
children should not necessarily have a particular right to decide what kind of
memorial centres Belgrade will build, he nevertheless states that, if it were up to
him, “they should not be graves, but places of life, of intelligent learning about
good and evil.”62
From one of his other essays, it becomes clear that this ‘learning about good and
evil’ should not be understood as turning Holocaust memory into a universalizing
message devoid of any local specifics. As one of the most impressive attempts to
transfer Holocaust memory to the next generation, Ivanji singled out the theatre
play Invisible monuments (Nevidljivi spomenici, 2015).63 Co-authored and played
by 23 pupils from the Third Gymnasium in Belgrade, the play shows how
teenagers in Serbia today question the role of their own family in war crimes in the
Second World War as perpetrators, accomplices, and bystanders. The project was
realized with the support of the Zagreb Goethe Institute, the famous Belgrade
Bitef Theatre, and the Third Gymnasium but without any financial support of
state institutions.64 In his afterword to a recent thematic issue on transnational
61
Ibid.
Ibid.
63
Ivan Ivanji, “Kultura sećanja – Jedan performans, jedna izložba i jedna predstava o Holokaustu:
Vreme
No.
1274,
June
4,
2015,
Moj
krik
iz
dečjih
usta,”
http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=1302836.
64
This project is only one of the many examples that shows that an alternative, non-competitive
culture of Holocaust remembrance in Serbia is emerging mostly thanks to initiatives by the nongovernmental sector. Due to the focus of this article, I cannot discuss these efforts in detail, but
important examples include the project A Visit to Staro Sajmište (Poseta Starom sajmištu,
http://www.starosajmiste.info/en/#), which not only created a very informative website but also
organised guided visits to the Old Fairgrounds and a series of seminars and study tours; the
educative project Days of Remembrance (Dani sećanja, http://danisecanja.rs/?lang=en), the
project Against Oblivion: Four WW II Camps in Belgrade (Protiv zaborava: četiri logora II
svetskog rata u Beogradu, http://www.protivzaborava.com/en/about/) as well as initiatives by the
Federation of Jewish Communities of Serbia, such as the fascinating digital archive Portraits and
Memories of the Jewish Community Before the Holocaust (Portreti i sećanja Jevrejske zajednice
pre Holokausta, http://www.jevrejipamte.org/).
62
140
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
memory, Rothberg noted:
The forms of dialogue, connection, and translation that take place in multidirectional encounters do not take place on an even playing field […]. It goes
without saying that powerful forces – and especially the state – will attempt to
create historical memory in its own image and to cast it in stone. But statesanctioned memory and enforced forgetting can only ever tell half the story.
[…] The dynamic of multidirectional memory comes with no guarantees, but
it does help constitute a terrain for practising a politics of location that
65
articulates local concerns with national and transnational scales.
As my analysis of Ivanji’s Man of Ashes has shown, in unearthing the multiple
layers of the Buchenwald concentration camp, the novel reveals how a carefully
balanced form of Holocaust remembrance such as that organized in Buchenwald
can bring to light and help articulate other (hi)stories of extreme violence without
necessarily leading to the appropriation of the memory of the victims of the
Holocaust. These (hi)stories can be related to the same place, as in the case of the
(often innocent) victims of Soviet repression in the immediate postwar years, or to
geographically and historically more remote events, as in the case of the war crimes
committed during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Not unimportantly, Ivanji’s
novel suggests that institutionalized forms of Holocaust memorialization should
also acknowledge “victims without a lobby” such as Jehovah’s Witnesses,
homosexuals, and Roma and treat all survivors—including those from Eastern
Europe—on equal basis. He shows that, while Holocaust memory is thus
intrinsically multidirectional (both internally, for example, the “hidden” stories of
Jehovah’s witnesses, homosexual, and Roma, and externally, that is, related to
historically or geographically different events), it indeed depends on the concrete
realization of locally embedded politics of memory whether and to what extent
certain stories can come to the surface and be brought into circulation. Finally, the
novel seems to suggest that, in places where such a memory culture does not exist,
works of fiction can at least partly compensate for the gaps and silences in statesanctioned memory. After all its protagonist, the Man of Ashes, unites the souls
of all victims in inhabiting the Ettersberg.
Moving our focus from Germany to Serbia, from a well established network of
Holocaust memorial centres and a rich culture of vivid public debate to a highly
politicized public arena, the role of critical cultural practices seems to become even
more important. Ivanji’s and Penevski’s novel, and Paskaljević’s film to a more
65
Rothberg, “Locating Transnational Memory,” 655.
141
Stijn Vervaet
limited extent, unsettle, complement and add a nuance to state-conducted
Holocaust remembrance in Serbia. In doing so, they confirm the important role
of art in transforming the communicative memory of the Holocaust in Serbia into
long-term memory. The novels and film expose the existing tensions between local
memory politics characterized by ethno-cultural compartmentalization on the one
hand and the international trend of Holocaust universalization and its implicit
promise of a cosmopolitan ethics on the other. Raising uncomfortable questions
about issues of complicity and collaboration in mass crimes committed during the
1940s and 1990s, they construct “constellation[s] of self-critical national
memories.”66 and reveal the transnational potential of Holocaust memory in
Serbia. However, Paskaljević’s film’s lays bare some of the pitfalls of the Holocaust
memorialization boom in contemporary Serbia. Certainly, the impetus to educate
broader audiences about the Holocaust in Serbia is important (and definitely in
line with the IHRA’s goals), but only if the full complexity of local history is
acknowledged. If this is not the case, then interaction between the local and global
frames of Holocaust memory might as well be framed as a story of missed
opportunities.
__________________
Stijn Vervaet is Associate Professor of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Balkan Studies at
the University of Oslo (Department of Literature, Area Studies and European
Languages). He holds a PhD in East European Languages and Cultures from Ghent
University (2007) and is the author of a book on the construction of national identities in
Bosnia and Herzegovina under Austro-Hungarian rule (Sarajevo and Zagreb, Synopsis
2013). Apart from publications related to the cultural and literary history of Habsburg
Bosnia, he published book chapters and journal articles on the representation of the
Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and of the Holocaust in (post-)Yugoslav fiction. Most recently,
he co-edited the volume Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in
Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture, (Berlin De
Gruyter, 2016, with Vlad Beronja). He is currently preparing a monograph with the
working title Holocaust, War, and Transnational Memory: Testimony from Yugoslav
and Post-Yugoslav Literature.
How to quote this article:
Stijn Vervaet, “Between Local and Global Politics of Memory: Transnational Dimensions
of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Serbian Prose Fiction and Film,” in
66
Assmann, “The Holocaust, a Global Memory?”
142
QUEST N. 10 – FOCUS
Holocaust Intersections in 21st-Century Europe, eds. Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano
Perra, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, n.
10 December 2016.
url: www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=387
143
Damiano Garofalo
Temporal Cross-References and Multidirectional Comparisons
Holocaust Remembrance Day on Italian State Television
by Damiano Garofalo
Abstract
This paper will analyze the connections between Holocaust memory and the
presence of other genocides – or crimes against humanities – narratives in Italian
TV commemorations of the Holocaust Day of Memory (Giorno della memoria)
between 2001-2015.1 The research investigates the question of whether Italian
television’s approach to the Day of Memory has been exclusively centered on the
Holocaust, or whether it has been used also as a starting point to talk about other
traumatic historical or current events such as the Iraq War, the War in
Afghanistan or Italy’s participation in Western policy against Islamic terrorism.
With this aim, the paper will examine Italy’s State-owned network RAI’s
programming in the week before and after the Day of Memory (January, 27)
from 2001 to 2015, revealing how an increasing civic and didactic awareness of the
Holocaust emerged from the TV programs here analyzed. The paper will trace
this new television discourse, where the Holocaust began to be perceived as an
unconditional warning and a constant term of comparison with other
contemporary tragedies.
Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Italian Public Sphere
Laying the Foundations of a Holocaust Televised Memory
Silvio Berlusconi’s Holocaust Public Memory
Breaking the Rules: Chile, Balkans and Rwanda
Coming to Terms with the Present: Lampedusa and Other Massacres
Conclusions
1
The themes and the outcomes of this paper have been thoroughly discussed with the editors of
this issue, Robert S.C. Gordon and Emiliano Perra, whom I really thank for involving me in this
project. I would also like to sincerely thank my friends and colleagues Dom Holdoway, Luca
Peretti and Vanessa Roghi for their kind suggestions and advices on this paper.
144
QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Italian Public Sphere
The 21st century has seen a marked acceleration in Europe in the development of
multiple forms of Holocaust memory and commemoration. This is particularly
noteworthy in the establishment across Europe of official Holocaust Memorial
Days, established along the lines traced by the Declaration of the Stockholm
International Forum on the Holocaust in 2000.2 From the outset, these new
public commemorations assumed different and often contradictory national and
supranational forms and aims.3 In order to reflect this complexity, we need to
rethink the establishment of the various national Holocaust Remembrance Days
not only as processes playing a decisive role in the articulation of memory, but
also as public vehicles of multiple, even conflicting historiographical paradigms.
Among the latter, the problem of national responsibility has certainly been one
of the most intensely debated by historians, while at the same time only rarely
discussed or acknowledged on these public occasions.4 After the end of the war,
many European countries engaged in widespread efforts to absolve themselves as
much as possible from possible charges of collaboration in the Holocaust. This
often led to a public demonization not only of the Nazis, but also of the German
people as a whole. This was the case of Italy, too.5
Visual culture, including television, provides a privileged vantage point for the
analysis of mainstream discussions and paradigms about the Holocaust and its
commemoration.6 In the Italian case, which will form the primary focus of this
2
On these changes see Larissa Allwork, Holocaust Remembrance between the National and the
Transnational. The Stockholm International Forum and the First Decade of the International
Task Force, (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), as well as her contribution in this issue of Quest.
3
See Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age,
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), in particular their reflections on the concept of
“cosmopolitan memory,” 23-38.
4
Levy and Sznaider speak in positive terms of the way in which “television, movies, literature and
newspapers have replaced historical experts as a source of information about the Holocaust.” See
Ibid.,133–4.
5
This is above all true for the Italian case. On this, see Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia
fascista: Vicende, identità, persecuzione (Torino: Einaudi, 2000); Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, Caino
a Roma: I complici romani della Shoah (Roma: Cooper, 2005); Filippo Focardi, Il cattivo tedesco
e il bravo italiano (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2013); Simon Levis Sullam, I carnefici italiani: Scene dal
genocidio degli ebrei 1943-1945 (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2015).
6
On the representations of the Holocaust on TV, see Jonathan Pearl and Judith Pearl, The
Chosen Image: Television’s Portrayal of Jewish Themes and Characters (London: McFarland,
1999) and Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999). For the Italian case, see Emiliano Perra, Conflicts of Memory: The
145
Damiano Garofalo
article, television programs have become one of the main vehicles for the
diffusion of images and public memory of the past. In this context, we should
also observe how public broadcasting service reacted to the Holocaust politics of
public memory and commemorations.7 Because of RAI’s close links with the
government of the day, which makes it more immediately responsive to the
political aspects of memory, this article will only focus on the State broadcaster
and not engage with private networks’ coverage of Holocaust commemorations.8
To do this, in this article I examine RAI broadcast programming in the week
before and after the Day of Memory [Giorno della memoria, in Italian] in Italy
(27 January), from 2001 to 20159. After a brief discussion of various kinds of
Holocaust-related programs during these years – focusing only on RAI’s
generalist channels and excluding TV-series and fictional products10 – I will offer
an analysis of a corpus of televised Holocaust Remembrance Day
Reception of Holocaust Films and TV Programmes in Italy, 1945 to the Present (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2010) and Damiano Garofalo, “La Shoah e l’esperienza dei Lager nei documentari televisivi
di Liliana Cavani,” Memoria e Ricerca, 46 (2014), 173-191. See also Andrea Minuz, La Shoah e la
cultura visuale: Cinema, memoria, spazio pubblico (Roma: Bulzoni, 2010).
7
See. Perra, Conflicts of Memory, 217-231 and id., “La rappresentazione della Shoah in
televisione,” in Storia della Shoah in Italia: Vicende, memorie, rappresentazioni, vol. II, eds.
Marina Cattaruzza, Marcello Flores, Simon Levis Sullam and Enzo Traverso, (Torino: UTET,
2010), 434-45.
8
For the relationship between Italian politics and television see Franco Monteleone, Storia della
radio e della televisione in Italia (Venezia: Marsilio, 1992); Franco Chiarenza, Il cavallo morente:
Storia della RAI, (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2002) and Giulia Guazzaloca, Una e divisibile: La Rai e
i partiti negli anni del monopolio pubblico (1954-1975) (Firenze: Le Monnier, 2011). For the recent
years, see also Christian Ruggiero, Il declino della videocrazia: Tv e politica nell’Italia del
Mediaevo (Napoli: Scriptaweb, 2011). On the relationship between television and Italian history,
see Fare storia con la televisione: L’immagine come fonte, evento, memoria, ed. Aldo Grasso
(Milano: Vita & Pensiero, 2006); Anna Bisogno, La storia in TV: Immagine e memoria collettiva
(Roma: Carocci, 2008); Televisione: Storia, immaginario, memoria, eds. Damiano Garofalo and
Vanessa Roghi (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2015), in particular 97-157, and Televisionismo:
Narrazioni televisive della storia italiana negli anni della seconda Repubblica, eds. Monica Jansen
and Maria Bonaria Urban (Venezia: Ca' Foscari University Press, 2015).
9
On the Italian Holocaust Remembrance Day, see C.G. Hassan, “Costruzione della memoria e
rappresentazioni sociali: L’immagine della Shoah nella stampa italiana (2012-2013),” in La Shoah
nel cinema italiano, eds. Andrea Minuz and Guido Vitiello, Cinema e storia, 2 (Soveria Mannelli:
Rubbettino, 2013), 143-155 and Fausto Colombo, Athos De Luca, Vittorio Pavoncello, Il
paradosso del Giorno della memoria: Dialoghi, (Milano-Udine: Mimesis, 2014).
10
It is worth mentioning the important role assumed by the historical channel Rai Storia, which
is only available on digital terrestrial television. This educational channel has dealt extensively
with the Holocaust on every Memory Day since it started broadcasting in 2003. Nevertheless, we
think that in this context it is more helpful to reconstruct the role played by RAI generalist
channels because of their greater circulation among audiences.
146
QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
commemorations broadcast by RAI. The specific angle of the analysis is twofold:
first, to enquire the extent to which RAI’s commemoration of the Day of
Memory has been exclusively centered on the Holocaust, including Italian
collaboration. Secondly, the article will explore possible intersections between
Holocaust commemoration and other historical or current events.
Given the call for a transnational lens of this topic, the analysis would probably
benefit from a brief preliminary engagement with transnational theoretical
issues. As we shall see, all the comparisons with the Holocaust, made both by
conscious and subconscious politics, seem to involve other genocides from a
transnational point of view. For this reason, we should strongly consider what is
happening elsewhere to determine whether the tendency to incorporate other
genocides in the Holocaust public memory is just a narrative one or indeed a
political one. Holocaust public memory is devoted to carry messages from the
Holocaust to society at large. As Peter Novick has already observed, “these
implications have been translated into lessons, and it is the rare Holocaust
commemoration, or Holocaust institution, or Holocaust curriculum, that is not
dedicated to promulgating the lessons of the Holocaust.”11 These lessons have a
redemptive and political aim even when applied to other genocides. Whilst it is
clear that invoking the Holocaust in a comparative way is a clear rhetorical asset,
it could also be interesting to analyze the ways in which other genocides are
talked about in public spaces primarily dedicated to the Holocaust12. In this
sense, TV programs could be certainly a good lens to analyze this phenomenon
from a transcultural and transnational point of view.13
Before entering into the analysis of the televisual material, it is necessary to refer
to law n. 211, approved by the Italian Parliament in 2000, through which the
11
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1999), 239.
12
For a comparable perspective, see Joan B. Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of
Memory in France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic
Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004) and Local History, Transnational Memory in the
Romanian Holocaust, eds. Valentina Glajar and Jeanine Teodorescu (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011).
13
For the possibility of re-thinking to media history from this hybrid mixture, and also television
as a field where cultural texts travel across countries and influence each other, see Aleida
Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012) and The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between
and Beyond Borders, eds. Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015).
147
Damiano Garofalo
‘Day of Memory’ in memory of the extermination and persecution of the Jewish
people and of Italian military and political deportees in the Nazi camps” was
instituted.14 By referring to a broad range of persecutions, the text of the short
law served to affirm a comprehensive public memory rather than that of a single
community or of private memories/commemorations. Soon afterwards,
however, even if the word “Holocaust” was never mentioned in the law, the
Jewish community soon took a decisive role in the definition of these new
commemorations. By opting for a date such as January, 27 that related to the
international memory of the Holocaust, rather than the memory of a day
connected to an event that had happened on the Italian soil, the Italian
Government seemed to lose another occasion to engage with the country’s
historical guilt.15 On the other hand, we have to note that this law anticipated all
the subsequent Remembrance days that were approved in Italy,16 working as a
sort of a national pacification vehicle.17 In the process of creating the following
Remembrance days, the Holocaust has been re-elaborated and de-historicized
with the aim of transforming it into a paradigm with a strong iconic and
14
Law n. 211 of 20 July 2000, http://www.camera.it/parlam/leggi/00211l.htm [accessed on 1st
September 2016].
15
On the debate about choosing October 16, the date of the roundup of the Jews of Rome, or
January 27, a day chosen by most European countries as well as the UN and the EU, see Giovanni
De Luna, La Repubblica del dolore: Le memorie di un’Italia divisa (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2010), 6772. For the symbolic role of October 16 in Italian Holocaust memory, see 16 ottobre 1943: La
deportazione degli ebrei romani tra storia e memoria, eds. Martin Baumeister, Amedeo Osti
Guerrazzi and Claudio Procaccia (Roma: Viella, 2016).
16
On this relationship see Valentina Pisanty, Abusi di memoria: Negare, banalizzare, sacralizzare
la Shoah (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2012) and Susanne C. Knittel, The Historical Uncanny:
Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of the Holocaust (New York: Fordham University Press,
2015), 175-281.
17
As the final accomplishment of this work of pacification, on 30 March 2004 the Italian
Parliament, with only the extreme left abstaining, instituted a “Day of Remembrance of the
Italian exodus and the Foibe” in parallel with the Day of Memory, which had been established
four years earlier. As John Foot has commented, in the decision to establish the Foibe Day at two
weeks’ distance from the Holocaust one, there was the precise political will to divide the Italians
between those who will commemorate the Holocaust, and those who will remember the Foibe.
The presence of politicians at one or the other institutional event becomes, therefore, a symbol of
political, ethnic or religious belonging. Through this division the Italian state seems therefore to
acknowledge the divided memory of the country. On this, see John Foot, Fratture d’Italia: Da
Caporetto al G8 di Genova, la memoria divisa del paese (Milano: Rizzoli, 2009), 142. On the
construction of a televised memory of the Foibe, see Damiano Garofalo, “La memorializzazione
delle Foibe il paradigma della Shoah: Storia, politica, televisione,” Media e Storia, ed. Ilenia
Imperi, Officina della Storia, 13 (2015), http://goo.gl/L62x8T [accessed on 1st September 2016].
148
QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
symbolic value for the present.18 In other words, the institution of a variety of
other commemorative dates cannot help but resulting in the at least partial dehistoricization of the Holocaust itself.
Laying the Foundations of a Holocaust Televised Memory
Italian State Television has played a leading role in these recent Holocaust
memory mutations. Indeed, during Holocaust Remembrance Day Italian TV
programs and talk-shows dedicate every year several programs of debate and
public investigation to the subject. Here it is worth examining several televised
instances of particular significance. I refer first to the political talk-show Porta a
porta, a highly popular program often reverential towards the government of the
day that has played an important role in shaping RAI’s approach to the Day of
Memory since 2005.19 Hosted by the famous journalist Bruno Vespa, the
program dedicated each January, 27 episode to the theme of the Holocaust. All
these special episodes tended to be structured along similar lines, and over the
years such structure has become a sort of televisual paradigm for a host of other
public media commemorations of the Holocaust.
Several structuring features of Porta a porta’s broadcasts are worth noting. First
of all, in most instances, the discussion is introduced using a series of platitudes
common in Holocaust memory talk, such as “so as not to forget” [per non
dimenticare], “never again” [mai più] or “so as not to repeat the mistakes of the
past” [per non ripetere gli errori del passato]. Secondly, several politicians and a
few historians propose their own viewpoints on the event and, finally, the last
word is given to survivors and the relatives of the victims, both through prerecorded interviews or with several of them actually present in the TV studio.
The political debate and the lachrymose rhetoric based on the emotional content
of the private stories of the victims, which are typical of Italian Holocaust public
memory, therefore leaves little space for historical considerations. This pattern is
18
For a discussion of this global adoption of the Holocaust as a paradigm, see Jeffrey C.
Alexander, Martin Jay, Bernhard Giesen, Michael Rothberg, Robert Manne, Nathan Glazer, and
Elihu Katz, Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
19
On the role of Bruno Vespa’s Porta a porta as a TV phenomenon, and also for its political
connotations, see Giandomenico Crapis, Televisione e politica negli anni novanta: cronaca e
storia, 1990-2000 (Roma: Meltemi, 2006), 181-182; Gianpietro Mazzoleni e Anna Sfardini, Politica
Pop: Da “Porta a porta” a “L’isola dei famosi” (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009). On the Italian talk
show genre, see Aldo Grasso, Radio e televisione: teorie, analisi, storie, esercizi (Milano: Vita e
Pensiero, 2000), 79-98.
149
Damiano Garofalo
repeated every year. To understand better the role played by Porta a porta in
shaping a Holocaust public memory paradigm, at least in recent years, we need
to analyze the program starting from a wider question: when and how did Italian
television decided to engage with the Day of Memory? The first thing that stands
out is that were in fact no episodes of Porta a porta on Holocaust-related themes
until 2005. Considering the prominence of this theme in the last ten years’ of
television programming, this absence is quite singular. However, we can note a
similar absence in other TV programs until 2004.
On the first Day of Memory in 2001, only two documentaries were broadcast,
both on the third RAI channel Raitre in an unfavorable early morning slot. The
first one was entitled La memoria e la pace [Memory and peace] and was directed
by Massimo Sani.20 Specifically, this was a televised report based on a survey
conducted in various schools in Italy on the memory of World War II and the
Holocaust. Sani investigated what historical knowledge those students had at the
end of their secondary education. The program shows several debates filmed
inside classrooms between students and Holocaust survivors. This program was
followed by another documentary directed by Sani, entitled Difesa della razza,
memoria di una legge [Defense of the race, memory of a law],21 which was an
edited version of a lecture by historian Giuseppe Barone on racism and the
Italian racial laws, with several testimonies by Holocaust witnesses.
While both programs aired during the first Day of Memory appear strongly
Jewish-centered, commemorations of the second Day of Memory in 2002 were
almost hegemonized by the mini-series Perlasca: un eroe italiano [Perlasca: an
Italian hero], directed by Alberto Negrin and broadcast on Rai1 on January, 2829. This series presented the story of a “good Italian,” Giorgio Perlasca, who
saved the lives of thousands of Jews in Budapest. The story revolves entirely
around the fate of Hungarian Jews and, though the protagonist is a fascist,
during the course of the two episodes the words “fascist,” “fascism,” or
“Mussolini” are never pronounced. The exaltation of the main character,
therefore, occurs thanks only to the fact that he is Italian, and “naturally” good,
heroic and just.22
20
La memoria e la pace, dir. by Massimo Sani, January 27, 2001, Rai3, 7:00 am.
Difesa della razza, memoria di una legge, dir. by Massimo Sani, January 27, 2001, Rai3, 8:00 am.
22
See, above all, Robert Gordon, The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2012 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2012), 152-153, and Milly Buonanno, Italian TV-Drama and Beyond:
Stories from the Soil, Stories from the Sea (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 211-222.
21
150
QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
With this in mind, we can easily affirm that in the first two years of
programming we do not encounter any references to other genocides or
historical traumas; moreover, we can also observe how, starting from the hugely
successful broadcast of Perlasca, the televised landscape on these themes totally
changed. On the one hand, in fact, we can perceive the increasing centrality of
the Holocaust within public debate; on the other hand, even the Government
began to realize the possibility of using Holocaust commemorations for political
purposes.
Silvio Berlusconi’s Holocaust Public Memory
For the abovementioned reason, the year 2003 represents a very decisive turning
point in this analysis. On the evening of the Day of Memory, in fact, a message
by the Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was simultaneously broadcast on the
three public service networks (Rai1, Rai2, Rai3). Here, I would like to quote this
message at length, in view of its strong eloquence:
Today in Italy, as much as in many other countries, Holocaust Memory Day
is celebrated. A sad and solemn occasion, which calls for everyone to reflect on
the atrocities that man is capable of, and on the aberrations whereby any
ideologies don’t recognize the dignity, but I would also say the sacredness, of
every human being. […] The twentieth century will be sadly remembered for
the horrors and suffering inflected on men by the two totalitarian regimes: the
Nazi one, and the Communist one. I appeal especially to the girls and boys of
today who live in a country that has been able to recognize their mistakes and,
thanks to the great American democracy and to the sacrifice of many of its
young lives, was able to reconstruct a democracy respectful of the dignity of
the people and the principles of equality and freedom for all citizens. Freedom
is the essence of humanity, it is the essence of our intelligence and our heart, is
the essence of our capacity to love and create. And God, from the beginning,
wanted every man [sic] in this way: he wanted him free. Even in the future
you should be aware that this freedom is not given once and for all, but it
must be defended day by day from new dangers which threaten it. The
23
defense of freedom is the highest, noblest and most exciting mission.
The vagueness of the word “freedom” assumed immediately a political role in
Berlusconi’s speech. This was intended to be inclusive: because the Nazis tried to
23
Messaggio del Presidente del Consiglio in occasione della Giornata della memoria, January 27,
2003, 8:30 pm, Teche RAI n. M03027/001.
151
Damiano Garofalo
restrict freedom of choice, speech and thought during their regime, the European
citizens of today and tomorrow must defend all these freedoms day by day.24
Then, without mentioning the Holocaust, Berlusconi continued:
This year, in celebrating Remembrance Day, we remember that the
international community is committed to fighting terrorism, and to rendering
harmless those regimes that threaten world peace. Once again, the choice
between peace and war is in the hands of those who deny the freedom of their
people and attack the peaceful coexistence among peoples. We are for peace,
but we cannot become jointly responsible for surrendering to he who
threatens our security, our freedom and our democracy. This day must be
therefore an opportunity to cultivate the memory, not to forget, to fight
against the resurgence of intolerance, racism and anti-Semitism, which still
occur in many parts of the world. This day should be, for each of us, the
chance to take on the commitment not to forget and to contribute to the
building of a fairer world based on peace, democracy and freedom for all
25
women and all men.
The fact that Berlusconi did not mention the Holocaust and the Jews – except
for a vague reference to anti-Semitism – as well as the fact that he mostly made
references to terrorism and employed the word “freedom” without qualifying it
further, is not without import. For the first time following the establishment of
the Day of Memory, Berlusconi himself participated, via a televised message, in
the public commemoration of the Day, thus transforming it into a media
event.26 Here we can see how, whilst publicly honoring the anniversary,
Berlusconi also used the commemoration with the aim of finding approval for
24
With the same purpose, the Italian Parliament, with the Law no. 61 of 15 April 2005,
established a Day of Freedom to be commemorated on November 9. This day was intentionally
set on the anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, meant as a symbolic event for the liberation
of oppressed countries and as a call for democracy for all the people still subject to totalitarianism.
On the occasion of the “Day of Freedom,” official commemorative ceremonies are annually
organized with the aim to illustrate the value of democracy and freedom against the dangerous
effects
of
past
and
present
totalitarian
regimes.
See
http://www.parlamento.it/leg/ldl/sldlelenco042005ordcron.htm.
25
Messaggio del Presidente del Consiglio in occasione della Giornata della memoria, cit.
26
As already observed by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, media events are historical facts which
have become global rituals of mass communication, in particular of television discourse.
Constituting a new television genre, the broadcasts of these rituals show us that these media
events have the potential for transforming societies as they shape audiences around the globe. See
Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events. The Live Broadcasting of History (CambridgeLondon: Harvard University Press, 1994).
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QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
his government’s foreign policy. In particular, we should recall how in 2002 the
Italian Government decided to involve the country in the military intervention
in Afghanistan against the Taliban. The strong emphasis placed by Berlusconi on
the USA as the “great American democracy,” as well as the continuous references
to ambiguous threats to freedom and security, can be easily read as a justification
for that military intervention, as well as of the impending Iraq invasion, which
began in March 2003.27 Finally, the fact that Berlusconi wanted to underline the
equal involvement of the “two totalitarian regimes,” Nazis and Communists, in
the horrors and suffering during the twentieth century, also convert the Day of
Memory into an occasion to deliver a jab at domestic leftwing opponents, still
disparagingly referred to as communists in the rightwing press.28 The ultimate
objective of this politics of memory is undeniable: a political use of Holocaust
memory and commemoration strongly connected to present events.29
The same year also saw the first TV program entirely dedicated to the Day of
Memory. This was a special episode of the TV program La storia siamo noi,
edited by Giovanni Minoli and broadcast in the morning of January 27, 2003.30
Here, we can see the germs of several elements which were then consolidated in
numerous Porta a Porta specials. Before presenting a documentary on BergenBelsen concentration camp, Minoli introduced the topic with a live recording
from the Fosse Ardeatine, alternating pre-recorded interviews with ex-deportees
with the views of in-studio guests Tullia Zevi, Alessandra Minerbi or Fiamma
Nirenstein. In this case, the discussion revolved entirely around the Holocaust,
with no particular reference to other historical or current events.
27
On Silvio Berlusconi’s foreign policy on Afghanistan and Iraq, see Giuseppe Cassini, Gli anni
del declino: La politica estera del governo Berlusconi (2001-2006), (Roma: Bruno Mondadori,
2007). On the relationship between Italy and the United States during the Berlusconi cabinet, see
Mimmo Franzinelli and Alessandro Giacone, La Provincia e l’Impero: Il giudizio americano
sull’Italia di Berlusconi (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2011).
28
Along similar lines, but without making any references to the involvement of the United States
in several Middle East wars, in his speech given in front of the Confederation of Italian exPartisans and Combatants the President of Italian Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi said that
“tmemory can create a more civilized and more just world, where the courage to change things
prevails over fear,” see “Ciampi sull’Olocausto: Ricordare è un dovere,” La Stampa, January 28,
2002.
29
On this tendency, which is not just related to the Italian case, see Rebecca Clifford,
Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in France and Italy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), and Aline Sierp, History, Memory and Trans-European Identity:
Unifying Divisions (London: Routledge, 2014).
30
La storia siamo noi – Olocausto, January 27, 2003, Rai3, 8:00 am, Teche RAI n. F390082.
153
Damiano Garofalo
Breaking the Rules: Chile, Balkans and Rwanda
The following year, an analogous scheme appears on La storia siamo noi, but in
addition we also have the first live recording from the Senate of the Memory Day
official commemoration.31 The event focused entirely on the extermination of
the Jews, and many Senators underlined the importance of the commemoration
for the development of what they championed as a united European community
around Judeo-Christian values and roots. Furthermore, 2004 saw the televised
coverage of a sporting event strongly related to the Memory Day: a testimonial
football match between singers, actors and journalists organized with the aim of
raising funds for a Holocaust Museum in Rome32 – which, after 12 years, still
does not yet exist33. Between 2003 and 2004 we can then see the beginnings of a
new public attention for the Memory Day. Since then, the event has become
more and more politicized, memorialized and also mediatized.
For all these reason, and also because of the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of
Auschwitz, it is not by chance that 2005 had the first special episode on Memory
Day of the above-cited TV talk show Porta a Porta.34 In it, anchor Bruno Vespa
interviewed Holocaust survivors Alberto Sed, Edith Bruck, Mario Limentani
and Alberto Mieli, as well as politicians Walter Veltroni (at that moment Mayor
of Rome and one of the most ambitious leader of the centre-left coalition),
Altero Matteoli (right-wing, member of the post-fascist Party Alleanza Nazionale
who, at that moment, was the Ministry of the Environment), and Senator for life
Giulio Andreotti (centrist and former leader of Christian-democrats). The guests
discussed several themes, though the main topics draw on the stories of the exdeportees’ traumatic past experiences. However, more relevant for this article is
that, whenever Vespa interviewed the politicians, they always invoked
comparisons with other atrocities or present issues.
A brief excerpt of this debate is useful to illustrate the point. Andreotti
commented on the fact that, though “tonight inspires great emotion,” “it would
not be possible to create a special episode like this on the survivors from Siberia,
31
Per non dimenticare – Il giorno della memoria dell’Olocausto, January 27, 2004, Rai1, 10 am,
Teche RAI n. M04027/001.
32
Partita della memoria, January 27, 2004, Rai3, 9:00 pm, Teche RAI n. M04027/002.
33
For the debate around the museum, see Minuz, La Shoah e la cultura visuale, and Gordon, The
Holocaust in Italian Culture, 14-24.
34
Porta a Porta, January 27, 2005, Rai1, 11:45 pm, Teche RAI n. F423958.
154
QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
because there were no survivors.” This is because, in his view, ““when a system
abandons the rule of law, we have things like the Desaparecidos, we watch what
happened in Chile.” For this reason, Andreotti continues, “the real message that
all the people who died in the camps give to us, and also the message that
survivors give to us today, is precisely that we have to be inflexible preserving this
system of values.” Vespa followed suit by recalling that “even if on a smaller scale,
something similar has happened in some areas of the world: we have witnessed
episodes of ethnic cleansing and, unfortunately, such facts will come to be
again.” Then, Walter Veltroni intervened, intending to clarify his position with
regards to the possibility of comparing other historical events to the Holocaust:
So, we have to distinguish the matter into two parts. First of all, nothing is
comparable to the Holocaust, nothing is comparable to the systematic
organization of a death machine that was specifically intended to destroy the
Jews, those who do not think like the Nazis, homosexuals, gypsies, etc. But, if
we look at this problem from another perspective, that of the ferocity of the
human being, we can see in the present similar examples. [...] In recent years,
for example, we have seen many of them, and we know well only few of them.
I am thinking only of the ethnic wars that take place in parts of the world that
are not under the spotlights. Even the brutality of the war in Rwanda was
chilling! What happened in the Balkans, the mass graves... there are words that
we have started to hear again, like beheadings, tortures... I mean there are
times in history... like Beslan! Beslan was one of the most terrible massacres of
the recent history!
At this precise moment, Veltroni was interrupted by Vespa, who added, among
other examples, “the persecution of the Kurds by Saddam Hussein!” Once again,
then, the question was brought back to current international politics, with an
indirect reference to the USA invasion of Iraq supported by the right-wing
Italian government. Veltroni carried on, ignoring Vespa’s clarification:
So, with the premise that we made, because in the Memory Day nothing is
comparable to the Holocaust, we must say that when those elementary
principles of respect for pluralism, freedom, and also the value of democracy
unfortunately fail, then the risk to be familiar with the depths of insanity
could easily return.
155
Damiano Garofalo
This discourse is entirely based on the usual rhetoric of slogans like “never
again,” “so as not to forget,” or “so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past”35.
But behind these linguistic constructions, we see public uses of the Holocaust
founded on well-defined political visions of the past. If in Berlusconi’s message
and partially also in Vespa’s statement we have an attempt to use the Holocaust
to legitimize the political line of the Government Veltroni’s purpose seems much
more oriented towards commemorating the Holocaust by connecting it to the
present as a civic duty. This means that we should read the comparisons that
Veltroni made – Balkans, Rwanda, Beslan – in the context of a general
educational vision that also includes school trips to Auschwitz, the project of a
National Holocaust Museum, and other initiatives encouraged by him with the
aim of shaping the young generations to develop awareness of the past in order
to act in the present. But the obvious risk of this didactic mission is to generate
an anxiety of remembering, without specifying exactly what is to be
remembered.
Coming to Terms with the Present: Lampedusa and Other Massacres
The final accomplishment of the Veltronian political project is clearly presented
in a Porta a porta episode, broadcast on January 27, 2009, on the immigration
problems in Lampedusa.36 Having debated on the demonstrations of the
inhabitants of Lampedusa, who opposed the creation of a Centre for
Identification and Expulsion (CIE) of immigrants, Vespa interviewed Veltroni
again, commenting negatively on the situation of the island of Lampedusa and
presenting, at the same time, the 2009 Memory Day. This passage appears very
unnatural, but it is nonetheless full of a clear ideological undertones. After a
televised report on an exhibition in Rome on Italy’s Racial Laws, Vespa
continued his interview with Veltroni. The politician argued that the tragedy of
the Holocaust explains how, in times of crisis, there is a real risk of a new wave of
racism and violence, and also stressed the need to educate the new generations on
the Holocaust so that they will not commit the same mistakes (in terms of their
approach to immigration).
35
As Peter Novick has observed, many of these “invocations of the Holocaust” found particular
resonance in the American context. In particular, these are usually exhortations Jews directed at
themselves, “to spur them to greater efforts on Israel's behalf, to see that new generations drew
the correct lessons from the catastrophe.” Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 159.
36
Porta a porta, January 27, 2009, Rai1, 11:00 pm, Teche RAI n. F536562. On this, see also Derek
Duncan’s article in this issue of Quest.
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QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
But we are not only in front of hazardous comparisons with the present, but also
with allusions and cross references with other genocides which happened in the
past. For example, once again on Porta a Porta, on occasion of the 2012 Memory
Day, we have the first televised reference to the Armenian genocide.37 The
episode followed the familiar structure (Holocaust testimonies, a few historians,
and some delegates from Jewish communities, this time without any politicians).
However, at the end of the episode Vespa presented a report with archival images
on the deportation and killing of Armenians at the hand of the Young Turks in
1915-1916. The program presented the Armenian genocide as the first genocide in
modern history. It claimed that the so-called “death marches” were used for the
first time, and that around 1,200,000 people died of starvation, disease or
exhaustion. These marches, the program continued, were directly organized
under the supervision of the German army officers in connection with the
Turkish army, and can be considered as a dress rehearsal for the most wellknown marches that deported Jews were forced to endure towards the end of the
Second World War.38 It was then the turn of the President of the Roman Jewish
community Riccardo Pacifici to compare the historical revisionism of this event
made by the Turkish Government with the, in this view, fast-rising phenomenon
of Holocaust denial.39 Pacifici was followed by Catholic historian Andrea
Riccardi, who at that time was also the Minister for International Cooperation in
the Monti Cabinet. Commenting the report on the Armenian genocide, Riccardi
stated that “because we have assisted to the massacres in the Balkans, in Rwanda,
we should be accustomed to these images; however, every time we listen to these
voices or we see these clips, it's always the first time, because this horror is really
too much for us; this is the abyss of horror we can’t get used to.” Here, for the
first time, it is worth noting how another genocide takes part in the
37
Porta a porta, January 26, 2012, Rai1, 11:00 pm, Teche RAI n. F627167.
Actually, there is no historical evidence that the Armenian genocide where organized under the
control of the German army. See Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and
the Question of Turkish Responsibility. trans. Paul Bessemer (London: Constable, 2007).
39
This is a quite strange connection because, at that moment, political and economic relations
between Mario Monti and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then Prime Minister of Turkey, were really
favourable. On this, see “Monti: L'Italia vuole che la Turchia entri nell'Ue,” Lettera 43, May 8,
2012. The position of Andrea Riccardi also seemed to be clearly philo-Turkish, see Andrea
Riccardi, “Perché serve che la Turchia sia europea,” Famiglia Cristiana, n. 46, November 12, 2015.
Probably, this new interest on the Armenian genocide followed the news of the approval in
France of a law that makes it a criminal offence to deny that genocide. On this, see Kim Willsher,
“Armenian genocide denial to be banned in France as senators approve new law,” The Guardian,
January 23, 2012.
38
157
Damiano Garofalo
commemoration in an otherwise exclusively Holocaust-oriented Memory Day.
Moreover, the fact that TV guests who usually deal with the Holocaust are
consulted on other themes – in this case the Armenian genocide – means that it
is not what to remember that is important (be it the Holocaust, the Armenian
genocide, or the massacres in Balkans or Rwanda), but rather how to borrow the
same public memory paradigm and adopt the same structure for TV
commemorations.
It is by no means a coincidence that an identical scheme is staged in the televised
coverage of all the institutional commemorations organized by the Chamber of
Deputies from 2010 until the present. With reference to the 2010 ceremony, we
see how all the speeches by politicians and institutional delegates introducing Elie
Wiesel’s own speech are full of pompous rhetoric and vague banalities.40
Moreover, these occasions provide an opportunity for reiterating publicly the
supposed rightness and goodness of all Italians vis-à-vis the Holocaust. In his
intervention, Wiesel thanked the Italian country for its commitment to
preserving Holocaust memory; he then accused Pope Pius XII for his silence
during the Nazis’ mass killing of European Jews. Wiesel also renewed his appeal
for the arrest of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had denied the
Holocaust and called for the destruction of Israel. “He should be hauled off to
the International Court of Justice to face charges of incitement of crimes against
humanity,” Wiesel said, taking also the opportunity to plea for the liberation of
the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, while also invoking peace between Israel and
Palestine. Finally, he ended his speech with the hope to assist to the approval of
an international bill declaring suicide terrorist attacks as “crimes against all of
humanity.”
This speech is particularly interesting for its strong multidirectional aim. Wiesel,
in fact, did not mention any possible comparison of the Holocaust with other
historical genocides, but his intention is to use a historical trauma in the
discussion of present issues. All references to the Ahmadinejad denial, the Shalit
kidnapping, and also to the Road map for peace between Israel and Palestine
stem from a Holocaust testimony and, as a consequence, are publicly legitimized
by it.
40
Discorso di Elie Wiesel alla Camera dei deputati, January 27, 2010, Rai3, 12:10 am, Teche Rai n.
F574549.
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QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
From then on, Italian TV began to cover all yearly institutional Memory Day
commemorations with a special episode of Rai3 news. In these programs, we can
also note the slow emergence of references to the Porajmos, the genocide of
Roma and Sinti people during the Second World War, which has started to be
publicly considered as part of the Holocaust41. Nevertheless, the space given to
the Porajmos remains minimal, and the prominence of the Jewish component
still orients all public commemorations, with the above-cited political instances,
up to the present.
Conclusions
The discontinuity of the last years, in regards to the narratives that dominated
the public sphere until the middle of the 1990s, coincides with a general crisis of
the idea of militancy, which, as is widely known, has involved the crisis of
ideologies.42 In terms of the politics of memory, this represented a shift of
attention from the centrality of the political deportation, and, as a consequence,
of the figure of the partisan fighter, to the much more innocent positions of the
witness and the victim. Following on from this cultural and political shift, the
first archetype seems to have almost completely disappeared from television’s
public discourse on history. Therefore, an increasing top-heavy civic and didactic
awareness of the Holocaust emerged from the general decline of the anti-Fascist
narrative. This strong shift, thanks also to a new television discourse in political
terms, has certainly favored initiatives frequently based on a vague duty to
remember.43 Ultimately, this clear change of position allowed the Holocaust to
occupy an empty space, not only in terms of the past – and consequently in
public memory – but also in the present. It becomes an unconditional warning, a
41
Here I refer, above all, to Celebrazione del giorno della memoria alla presenza del Presidente
della Repubblica Giorgio Napolitano, TG3 Special Episode, Rai3, January 27, 2011, 11:00 am,
Teche RAI n. F618225; Celebrazione del giorno della memoria alla presenza del Presidente della
Repubblica Giorgio Napolitano, TG3 Special Episode, Rai3, January 27, 2012, 11:00 am, Teche
RAI n. F618225; Celebrazione del giorno della memoria alla presenza del Presidente della
Repubblica Giorgio Napolitano, TG3 Special Episode, Rai3, January 27, 2014, 11:00 am, Teche
RAI n. F615859.
42
On this crisis, see above all Sergio Luzzatto, La crisi dell'antifascismo, (Torino: Einaudi, 2004)
and Guri Schwarz, “Crisi del discorso antifascista e memoria della persecuzione razziale nell'Italia
degli anni Ottanta,” in Dopo i testimoni: memorie, storiografie e narrazioni della deportazione
razziale, ed. Marta Baiardi and Alberto Cavaglion (Roma: Viella, 2014), 171-184.
43
A propos of this, Emiliano Perra talks about a “Post-Antifascist Holocaust Memory,” see Perra,
Conflicts of Memory, 224-231.
159
Damiano Garofalo
constant term of comparison with other contemporary tragedies – Palestine,
Balkans, Rwanda, Beslan, or the immigrants’ issue, as we have seen.
Television forces the public memory to question itself with the absoluteness of
the paradigm of the Holocaust, which is increasingly mentioned and used as a
metaphysical and decontextualized entity. On the one hand, it is enshrined as the
“absolute evil” in history. At the same time, however, behind the litanies and
linguistic rhetoric of the “never again” and “so as not to forget” mottos lies some
precise political visions of the present (as in the case of Silvio Berlusconi’s and
Walter Veltroni’s ideas). With this in mind, fifteen years later it seems therefore
necessary for us to rethink the Holocaust Remembrance Day in virtue of the
televised representations, even if in this context uniquely related to RAI
generalist channels and to non-fiction programs. We ought to adopt a new
approach on the multidirectional implications of Holocaust public memory, as
analyzed from a transnational point of view. It is quite obvious, in fact, how all
these processes have involved, in various problematic ways, the building and the
evolution of a post-war Italian identity increasingly linked to Holocaust public
memory segueing into an era of multidirectional memory where the Holocaust
enables the articulation of other local and national histories of victimization
precisely in virtue of its uniqueness44. In the shape of these new public memories
proliferating under the contemporary media regime in modern societies, the
Holocaust seems no longer to be the only historical trauma to be remembered,
even if its uniqueness probably means that it continues to assume a leading role
in all the above-mentioned comparisons.
_________________
Damiano Garofalo received his Ph.D. in Cultural History at the University of Padova in
2015. His main research focuses on Italian television history and memory and on the
relationships between Italian history and visual culture, with particular reference to
Holocaust memory in films and TV programs. He is currently Post-doctoral Research
Fellow at the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome and Adjunct Lecturer in Film &
Television Studies at the Universities of Padova, Udine and Sapienza (Rome). His latest
book is Political Audiences. A Reception History of Early Italian Television (Mimesis
International, 2016).
44
The theorization of the so-called multi-directional memories could help us define a sort of
“memory archive,” which could set the new rules for the media representations of traumatic
pasts. For this methodology, see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the
Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 229.
160
QUEST N. 10 - FOCUS
How to quote this article:
Damiano Garofalo, "Temporal Cross-References and Multidirectional Comparisons
Holocaust Remembrance Day on Italian State Television,” in Holocaust Intersections
in 21st-Century Europe, eds. Robert S. C. Gordon, Emiliano Perra, Quest. Issues in
Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, n.10 December 2016
url: www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=385
161
QUEST N. 10 - DISCUSSION
Maud S. Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France. History of a conflict (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 272
by Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun
This is a book whose publication was preceded by unanimous praise, both in the
United States and in France. Although in France the book has not yet been
translated, the author has been invited by prestigious institutions (for example
the CNRS and the Collège de France), where each time there was a large and
attentive audience, already swayed by the author’s work. The book is about a
very topical issue: in the past decade, relations between Jews and Muslims in
France and not only, have become increasingly tense. This was further showed
by recent acts of terrorism by Islamic extremists, also committed specifically
against Jews. Both observers of current events and researchers point to the
development of a new and mainly Muslim anti-Semitism in France and the rest
of Europe.
Can Mandel, in a book of only 156 pages, sufficiently explain the situation
through a historical analysis of the relations between these two groups in France?
As the author rightly argues, the essence of the conflict between Jews and
Muslims cannot be attributed solely to the effects of the Arab-Israeli conflict in
the Héxagone, as French journalists hastily do. The thesis that the author
develops is based on the idea that as early as the colonial period in Algeria, but
even more so since decolonisation, France has highlighted and exacerbated the
inequalities between Muslims and Jews. In Algeria, the Crémieux decree allowed
the mass naturalisation of Jews, who as early as 1870 became French citizens with
all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship; from 1962 onwards the granting
of citizenship took place on French soil. Oddly, the author notes that “the
French government [decided] to allow Jews to keep the French citizenship” but
did not grant it to Muslims. According to Mandel, the series of inequalities that
followed the settlement of the Jews of Algeria in France and after that the arrival
of Muslim immigrants, were manifested in education, employment, in
diversified highly-skilled jobs. In short, what took place was the successful
integration, if not assimilation, of the Jews and the transformation of Muslims
into “immigrants” who benefited from a “much weaker social and government
support.” Here, Mandel seems to forget that the Jews who arrived in France
during this period were first and foremost French citizens – since at least four
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Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun
generations. So, as French citizens and not as Jews, they benefited from the rights
of citizenship, including access to schools, social care and jobs.
Has the author examined the legal procedures through which the then
government could “decide [or not] to allow Jews to keep French nationality?” In
addition to historical errors behind these assertions (for example, the debates
within the Gaullist governments concerning the future of the Jews of Algeria
never emerged in the public sphere and could not have done so without
appearing as a repetition of the repeal of the Pétain decree), is it possible that
Mandel deplores the fact that De Gaulle in 1960-1962 did not have another go on
what Pétain had done in 1940, when he abolished the Crémieux decree and
granted the Jews of Algeria once again the status of indigenous people, so that
there would be “fewer inequalities” and injustices between Jews and Muslims?1
Does the author really think, as she said during an interview with Jean-Philippe
Dedieu,2 that the benefit of citizenship to individuals who were French citizens
for nearly 100 years, and which was subsequently not extended to the Muslims, is
the source of the current problems? Does Mandel think that the contract of
citizenship between an individual and a nation is something that can be taken
and thrown away at some point or another? In 1962, the Jews of Algeria who
arrived in France were not an organised group but individual French nationals,
who, like the other French citizens of the colony, came to the “motherland.”
We were surprised to see that under the pen of a distinguished American
historian (the author is Professor of History and Jewish Studies, and Head of the
Department of Jewish Studies at Brown University), the conflict between these
two populations seems to have begun during the period of colonisation and been
initiated in some way by the colonial power that divided them (through the
Crémieux decree) in order to better exercise its authority. Even though this
motivation cannot not be completely ruled out, to reduce the conflict between
Jews and Muslims to the ulterior motives of the colonial power reveals a total
lack of understanding of the broad historical context. Without sinking to the
1
This is a persistent argument that has been used by all anti-Jewish groups in Algeria since 1871.
See the articles published in Les Juifs d’Algérie. Une histoire de ruptures, eds. Joëlle AlloucheBenayoun and Genèvieve Dermenjian, (Paris: PUP, 2015). This view was supported by General
Giraud, who did not repeal the withdrawal of the decree under the pretext that we should not
perpetuate inequalities between Jews and Muslims, and that we should “let the Jew in his shop
and the Muslim in his field.”
2
Jean-Philippe Dedieu, “Juifs et musulmans de France, histoire d’une relation. Entretien avec
Maud Mandel,” La Vie des idées, September 18, 2014, http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Juifs-etmusulmans-de-France.html.
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QUEST N. 10 - DISCUSSION
level of the current historical discourses that focus only on the violent episodes
that have marked the life of Jews in Muslim countries, let us not forget that both
the observers and travellers who, between the 16th and the 18th centuries, were
not accepting of the Jews in the country and those that were quietly anti-Jewish,
were outraged by the deplorable condition of the Jews in this Ottoman province
(at the time not yet known as Algeria) who were subject to the dhimma, as were
all Jews in Muslim lands. For example, the American consul William Shaler in
1816 wrote: “The Jews of Algiers are perhaps the remnants of Israel’s most
destitute.” Let us not forget, to mention only the 19th century, the pogrom in
Algiers in 1805, which claimed the lives of many Jews, the decapitation of the
Chief Rabbi of Algiers Isaac Aboulker during a riot in 1815, and finally the case of
the Jews of Mascara – including men, women, the elderly, and children – who
were massacred indiscriminately by Arabs in 1835 while they were fleeing the city
as they were about to be taken by the French.3
As Philippe Portier writes in his foreword to a recent book: “In 1956, the
National Liberation Front (FLN), in the Declaration of the Soummam, brings to
mind the atmosphere of a ‘millennium entente’ between these two religious
components of Algerian society [Jews and Muslims]. But is this the reality? We
note that Jews and Muslims are, on more than one level, part of the same
civilizational fabric: they speak (almost) the same language, they share similar
culinary traditions, they move together to the rhythm of Arab-Andalusian
music, and under the cover of a denominational differentiation of activities, they
exchange goods and services in the economic sphere. It would be wrong,
however, to dwell on these similarities. There are abundant testimonies clearly
showing that Jews have been collectively viewed with general contempt which
can sometimes feed acts of extreme violence.”4 Moreover, when the author raves
about the cordial relations between the Jewish traders of Marseille and their
Muslim clients in the period 1960-19805, we can only be surprised that from this
she draws the conclusion that all is well in all eternity between the two groups,
that their proximity from being neighbours and that their good relations on a
daily basis are proof that French policy has spoiled the relations between the two.
3
Valérie Assan “L’exode des Juifs de Mascara, un épisode de la guerre entre Abd el-Kader et la
France,” Archives Juives, 2/38 (2005): 7-27.
4
Philippe Portier, “Avant-propos,” in Les Juifs d’Algérie, eds. Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun and
Genèvieve Dermenjian, 6.
5
See, Mandel, Muslims and Jews, 155 – according to which ninety percent of Jewish trading
merchants were located in areas with a Muslim majority: a sign of cultural proximity that,
however, says nothing about the previous history of Jews in Muslim lands.
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Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun
But what actually happened? The status of dhimma, backed by Koranic rules but
also by customary practices, can explain the situation of exclusion that the Jewish
minority – less than 15,000 people in 1830 – experienced before the French
arrived in Algeria. “Ottoman Algeria worked well for the Jews with a dual
modality of subjugation which made them subject to both rabbinical law in their
internal affairs and Islamic law in their external relations. This was the general
pattern that the French presence came to break. The French administration had
barely settled when the government repudiated Muslim legislation. None of the
great and small humiliations of the past were to be continued: the Muslims and
the Jews were each ‘indigenous’ but they were granted a new form of equal status
before the occupying power.”6 Between July 1830, when the French landed near
Algiers, and July 1962, when more than 90% of the French Jews of Algeria
permanently left Algeria for France, the Jews of Algeria progressively let go of
their Arab-Berber identity, a humiliated identity made even more inferior, in
order to adopt a French identity (which for them symbolised the free and
liberated man) that coexisted, until their departure for France, with their
religious identity which became increasingly confined to the private sphere.
The memory of the Jews of Algeria, or that of their descendants that is expressed
today in France, brings back to life these plural identities: as French citizens, they
cultivate their Jewishness, which is Sephardic and steeped in the Arab-Berber
culture; they also share with other repatriates of Algeria their feelings for the
Algeria of the past which is today largely idealised.
The increasingly desired and claimed transformation of indigenous Jews into
French citizens was the culmination of a process originated in the beginning of
the French colonial rule. It was the result of the intersection of multiple political,
legal, ideological and cultural issues raised by both the successive French
governments and the Jewish elites of France and Algeria. This is something that
the author seems to forget or strongly minimise. The internalisation of French
identity among the Jews of Algeria took place thanks to two institutions that
they were all subject to and that became the foundations of the Republic: the
school, which assimilated young people in a cultural sense, and the army, which
fulfilled the school’s mission for the men. But these institutions did not fully
achieve their objectives because they were effectively replaced by three entities:
Jewish notables and rabbis (a few exceptional individuals from the local
rabbinate and others who had come to France as early as the first decade of the
6
Portier, “Avant-propos,” 8.
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QUEST N. 10 - DISCUSSION
Conquest); the Consistories that were created based on the French model after
the rulings of November 1845 and put in place as early as 1847; and, finally, the
women, mothers and sisters from popular milieus, who were most often in daily
contact with the French settlers’ families and who adopted in their family
environment the language, the cuisine and the ways of dressing of the colonial
power.
The Jews of Algeria, most of whom were spectators of their own future, had
been repeatedly studied by successive French governments (first the monarchy,
then the Empire and the Republic) and identified and officially registered until
1870, essentially as regards birth and death certificates. They also became
gradually more secular and they have been in (more or less difficult) close contact
(depending on the period) with French society – of which they will quickly
become key partakers, mindful of their own cultural integration.
It is to be noted that in 1870 the Jews amounted to a small population of less
than 40,000 people who thanks to its elites were attached very early on to the
French values of Emancipation, the Revolution and the Rights of Man. We must
also remember that the project of Jewish mass naturalisation was in the pipeline
as early as 1836 thanks not only to the support of the Jews of Algeria and of the
Jewish community in France, but also to the then Leftist parties. Emile Ollivier,
head of the last government during the Empire, was preparing to have this draft
law voted in Parliament just before the defeat of the Empire in Sedan. The
Government of National Defence, whose Minister of Justice was Adolphe
Crémieux, picked up and acted on the draft law that had been under discussion
for 40 years. As for the Muslims, they were two million and almost unanimously
hostile to the French conquerors whom they viewed as Christians and occupiers,
thus rejecting any idea of Francisation. Whereas Jews were predominantly urban
dwellers, Muslims were for more than 80% rural dwellers. The granting of
citizenship to Jews, more than as an anti-Muslim measure (in fact, Muslims did
not want it at that time) should be viewed as something that meant to counteract
the influence of foreigners (Italians, Spaniards, and Maltese) – who lived in the
cities in equally great numbers as French nationals – and thus broaden the
French electoral body during elections, but also to increase the number of
military personnel in place, since France had been defeated in Sedan and was too
drained to be able to afford to repatriate them.
Mandel seems surprised by the emergence of the category of “North African
Jews,” which comprised the Jews of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, during the
period of decolonisation: she wonders why no one “during this period [i.e. the
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Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun
colonial period] identified as a Jew from North Africa.” However, one could
argue that people begin to examine their identity when they feel it is under
threat. So, the Jews of North Africa discovered themselves as such, but also as
pieds-noirs and as Sephardim, only when they settled in France. Not before.
Finally, we must note that in France, French citizens with a Jewish identity are
not all of Sephardic origin. For this reason, the author’s pattern of analysis
cannot be easily applied to French citizens with a Jewish identity from AlsaceLorraine, Poland, Russia or Romania.
It is regrettable that the book does not include a final bibliography on a subject
matter that covers 200 years of history of states, ideologies, religions and
individuals. Secondly, the fact that notes – 81 pages, that is almost a third of the
volume – are located at the very end of the book, makes the reading rather
difficult.
Overall, the book is full of historical approximations and simple, not to say
simplistic, ideas: that the situation between Jews and Muslims in France today is
so bad because of the period of colonisation, followed by decolonisation; that
France has been consistently unfair to Muslims and has favoured Jews.7 At the
end of the book, readers will continue to wonder how Mandel cannot be aware
of the strong bursts of Muslim anti-Judaism that characterised the Maghreb
already before the period of colonisation and the outbreaks of the same antiJudaism during the colonial period.8 Does the author view the violent antiSemitic acts committed all over Europe by Muslims – not only from the
Maghreb but also from Pakistan, Turkey and elsewhere – as merely a result of
the Crémieux decree?9 Are the “Jews of Algeria” a compact and homogeneous
block that can be tossed around one way or another, and that after granting them
French citizenship and stripping them of it at some point or another and then
giving it back to them, the people who make up this block would not react,
letting themselves be carried away by the events in complete passiveness?
7
This idea, dominant and commonplace among young North American historians, also is at the
core of another much-praised American new book, Ethan Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).
8
Consider the Constantine pogrom of 5 August 1934. See, Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun,
“Antijudaïsme dans l’Algérie coloniale: le pogrom du 5 août 1934 à Constantine comme
e
e
révélateur de ‘deux hostilités,’” in L’Antisémitisme en France XIX -XXI siècle, eds. Dominique
Schnapper, Perrine Simon-Nahum and Paul Salmona, forthcoming.
9
Perceptions of the Holocaust in Europe and in Muslim Communities. Sources, Comparisons
and Educational Challenges eds. Günther Jikeli and Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun,
(Dordrecht/Heidelberg/New York/London: Springer Science, 2013).
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QUEST N. 10 - DISCUSSION
In short, the book is more ideological than scientific, pointing in petto and in
fine the responsibility of the current violence to France and to the Jews, who
since 1830 have not rebuffed what they believed was a blessing for them, for their
future and that of their offsprings.
Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun, CNRS (Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités), Paris
How to quote this article:
Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun, Discussion of “Muslims and Jews in France. History of a
conflict,” by Maud S. Mandel in Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, n. 10
December 2016
url: www.quest-cdecjournal.it/discussion.php?id=86
168
QUEST N. 10 - DISCUSSION
Maud S. Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France. History of a Conflict, (Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014) pp. 253.
by Bryan S. Turner
Before World War II Muslims were generally well integrated into European
societies. In Weimar Germany they were a well off and socially accepted
community, but this middle-class cohort of Muslims largely disappeared in the
aftermath of the War.1 It was not until 1977 that the concept of ‘Islamophobia’
was first defined in Britain by the Runnymede Trust to describe the nature and
scope of prejudice against Muslims and to recommend that the 1976 Race
Relation Act be amended to make discrimination on religious grounds unlawful.
This amendment was rejected by the government that argued that the Human
Rights Act of 1998 would provide sufficient protection of minorities.2 Perhaps
unsurprisingly after 9/11 there has been a growing literature on Islamophobia
indicating widespread hostility to and fear of Muslim communities in western
societies. There is even a view that the anti-Muslim discourse is rampant, in fact
constituting an ‘industry’ and that Islamophobia is simply an illustration of old
Orientalist myths.3 While Europe appears to be struggling with diversity as such,
Islam is thought to be a special challenge. In Can Islam be French? John Bowen
claims that Islam touches raw nerves in French culture.4 The entry of Islam into
public culture has changed the topography of France and raised old anxieties
about’ colonial repression, modern anti-Semitism, and the struggles between
Catholics and Republicans.’5 It is claimed that European hostility to Jews has
been replaced by the growing fear of Muslims.6
The mood of European scholarship with respect to the recognition and
integration of Islam is typically pessimistic. The rise of anti-immigrant and antiIslam political parties – Golden Dawn in Greece, the Northern League in Italy,
1
E. Ozyurek, Being German Becoming. Race, Religion and Conversion in the New Europe,
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015).
2
J. S. Fetzer, J. C. Soper, Muslims and the State in Britain, France and Germany, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 32.
3
D. Kumer, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books,
2012).
4
J. R. Bowen, Can Islam be French? Pluralism and Pragmatism in a Secularist State, (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2010).
5
Ibid, 15.
6
P. Weller, Paul, P. Kingsley, N. Ghanea-Hercock, S. Cheruvallil-Contractor, Religion or Belief,
Discrimination and Equality, (London: Bloomsbury, 2013),197.
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Bryan S. Turner
Marine Le Penn and the National Front in France, and the English defense
league in Britain – have exposed a hitherto hidden or ignored under-current of
resentment against foreigners. In the context of these developments, Maud
Mandel’s study of Muslims and Jews in France is a welcome corrective to the
dominant focus on anti-Islam in the academic literature and in the popular
media. The historical picture is far more complex and contradictory, because,
despite religious conflicts around the world, Jews and Muslims often have shared
interests as a consequence of having a common experience as outsiders and
minorities. Her study is also somewhat unusual in that the dominant
comparison in the academic literature is between Christians as the majority and
Muslims as a minority.
There have been dramatic but mainly isolated attacks on Jews in France in the
1980s and in the 1990s, but anti-Jewish violence increased dramatically after 2000,
primarily fuelled by the resentment of Muslim youth from the most
disadvantaged sectors of French society. Tragic attacks on Jewish citizens in 2006
and 2012 caused further alarm for the authorities. Explanations of increasing antiSemitism or Judeophobia are diverse and often contradictory, but they have in
common the belief that Muslim and Jewish communities are on a collision
course that is inevitable and unavoidable. The purpose behind Mandel’s
historical study is to challenge such assumptions. She opens her discussion by
recording that she was originally drawn to the topic by observing the deep
cultural and historical connections that link these two communities rather than
dividing them. As a matter of fact, France has the largest Jewish and Muslim
communities – around four to six million Muslims and over half a million
Muslims – outside Israel. The pressures on these two communities, which share
certain linguistic and cultural traditions and a common experience of
displacement, to assimilate combined with feelings of rejection, are the same.
Mandel consequently wants to reject the dominant narrative that describes the
mutual hostility between Jew and Muslim, while also asking how far these
narratives engender the very violence they claim to describe. While there is no
deep and intractable enmity between actual Jews and Muslims, ‘Jew’ and
‘Muslim’ have become political symbols of conflict.
Thus her main thesis is that ‘binary constructions of Muslim-Jewish interaction
have worked to erase the more complex social terrain in which Muslims and Jews
have interacted in late twentieth century France’ (p.155). Writing about ‘Jews’
and ‘Muslims’ from an historical or sociological perspective raises considerable
difficulties, because these labels hide significant cultural, social and religious
170
QUEST N. 10 - DISCUSSION
differences within the two categories. A further difficulty in defining and
contrasting religious identities is that, especially among youth, believing,
belonging and behaving ae no longer systematically connected.7 Perhaps one
criticism of the book is that, while she recognizes significant differences within
these communities, she does not describe these in any detail. So for example she
offers no analysis of the Shia –Sunni divide that intensified after the Iranian
Revolution into a global struggle for dominance. In the last decade the ShiaSunni conflict has largely defined not just the Islamic world but global politics in
general.8 Nevertheless, Mandel shows considerable sophistication in recognizing
that, while the labels obscure historical differences, what Jew and Muslims have
in common is their lived experience of both exclusion and successful efforts to
integrate. One further parallel between Jews and Muslims perhaps requires more
attention from Mandel, namely that Islam and Judaism, in contrast to Roman
Catholicism, have no transnational institutions of authority that are recognized
globally. In both communities, authority is very much devolved and at least in
the case of Islam local fatwas give expression to religious ‘de-territorialization’
and promote greater heterodoxy of belief.9
The historical unfolding of this narrative of a ‘clash of civilizations’ – a phrase
which she does not use – is closely connected with domestic political events such
as the 1968 student revolts, the 1980s experiments with multiculturalism and the
general economic decline of France by the end of the last century. However,
these domestic or national issues cannot be separated from the international and
global context, and above all by the complicated history of French Algeria. This
attention to the postcolonial is clearly not incidental or trivial and ‘From the
standpoint of demography alone, decolonization was monumental in the
historical trajectories of France’s Muslim and Jewish populations’ (p. 3). At least
one million French citizens were ‘repatriated’ as a consequence of the violence,
the number of Algerian Muslims grew from 130,000 in 1930 to over 600,000 by
1963. Between 1944 and 1979 there were 240,000 new Jewish arrivals. While the
increase in numbers was important, immigration also brought greater
community diversity between the new arrivals and those Jews that had roots in
7
G. Davie, Grace, Religion in Britain since 1945.Believing without Belonging, (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994).
8
V. Nasr, The Shia Revival. How conflicts within Islam will shape the future, (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1996).
9
O. Roy, Olivier, Holy Ignorance. When Religion and Culture Part Ways, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010).
171
Bryan S. Turner
France stretching back before the French Revolution and those Jews who had
migrated from war-ravaged Eastern Europe.
These developments also began to differentiate Jews from Muslims on the
grounds that Jews were regarded as better educated, intelligent and more
‘assimilable’ than Muslims. The social differentiation was also juridical and the
sense that the 1870 Cremieux Decree had granted French citizenship to all
Algerian Jews thereby cutting them off decisively from most Algerian Muslims.
The Decree had been reinforced by various informal administrative practices and
schools of the Alliance Israelite universelle by which Jews came to enjoy better
life-chances than the Muslim population. Although after World War II
citizenship was granted to Muslims in the belief that it would dilute support for
the independence struggle, Muslims in France continued to experience
discrimination especially after 1954 when the struggle with the Front de
liberation nationale transformed Muslims into ‘the enemy within.’ Jews fleeing
from the Algerian conflict enjoyed the benefit of subsidies and aid that were
made available to repatriating citizens. These historical conditions of structural
discrimination had long term consequences in distinguishing between Muslims
who were socially and economically marginalized and immigrant Jews who
joined a French Jewish community with historical ties. Although Jews had been
profoundly traumatized by Vichy legislation during Nazi occupation of France,
by the 1950s, as a consequence of a determined rebuilding process, Jews had
access to a highly developed infrastructure. In addition to this institutional
support, there was a communal leadership committed to their integration and to
the defense of Jewish interests. As a result, the Jewish community had many
more opportunities to shape public opinion and to access the locus of political
power. Jews are unsurprisingly better educated, more economically successful,
and socially mobile than French Muslims. However, in one important respect
they have been unsuccessful in shaping French foreign policy with respect to
Israel and in discrediting public opinion about the plight of Palestinians.
These general observations about the modern history of Jewish-Muslims
relations set the scene for the six main chapters each of which considers a
moment in which Muslim-Jewish conflicts became a matter of official concern
for the French police, the media and the wide array of communal spokespersons.
Beginning in 1948 with minor unrest in Marseille, chapter 1 examines the ways in
which disagreements over Israel provided a channel for debates about
inequalities in French minority policies at home and in North Africa. Jews, who
were traditionally reluctant to express a visible ethnic politics in France, kept
172
QUEST N. 10 - DISCUSSION
quiet about any Zionist sympathies they may have embraced. Chapter 2 explores
the link between French colonial policies and Muslim-Jewish relations in the
metropole and how decolonization changed the ways in which different actors
understood the character of Jewish belonging throughout the region. In
particular she considers how the invention of ‘the North African Jew’ united
Tunisian, Moroccan and Algerian Jews into a collective that was in conflict with
‘North Africans,’ ‘Arabs’ and ‘Muslims.’ In chapter 3 she examines how these
new ways of conceptualizing Muslim-Jewish interactions conditioned
integration into the metropole in the late 1950s and 1960s, and how these
possibilities for integration were compromised by the structural inequalities
between Muslim and Jew. In the context of considerable civil disturbance and
international instability around the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, chapter 4 shows that,
while conflict between Muslims and Jews was rare, the narrative of two
communities in conflict gained momentum and credibility. In chapter 5 the
notion of two polarized communities was underlined by a growing student
movement that connected radical left politics at home with the plight of the
Palestinians abroad. However, it was not until the 1980s that the idea of
polarization developed as the central motif for understanding relations between
Jews and Muslims. In chapter 6 (‘Particularism versus Pluriculturalism’) she
describes how the head-scarf controversy in October 1989, the desecration of the
Jewish cemetery in Carpentras in May 1990 and the outbreak of the first Gulf
War in January 1991put an end to joint activism and intensified identity politics.
France has as a result been deeply divided by the head-scarf controversy and the
presence of religious symbols in public schools. With the growth of Jean-Marie
Le Pen’s anti-immigration and nationalist agenda and increasing fear of terrorist
attacks, the policy of ‘the right to be different’ was replaced by a firmer emphasis
on ‘integration’. Public concern was directed towards the ‘second generation’ of
Muslim migrants who were identified with general delinquency and occasionally
with civil disturbance such as the burning of 250 cars and the wounding of seven
police men in Lyon in July and August 1981.These fears were intensified by the
Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the fear of a global jihad movement. It is worth
noting in passing that Muslims and Jews in France was published before the
Charlie Hebdo affair in 2015 and the growing threat of ISIS as an inspiration for
domestic terrorism.
Perhaps the principal intellectual lesson of this research is that understanding
domestic or national conflicts cannot be undertaken without a detailed and close
understanding of international politics. The national relationships between Jews
and Muslims since 1945 have been deeply influenced, but not wholly determined,
173
Bryan S. Turner
by France’s relationship to Israel during the various wars that have erupted in the
region especially in 1948 and 1967. The depressing lesson of this excellent history
of social and religious pluralism in modern France is that these external conflicts
in the Middle East have contributed to the erosion of the official commitment to
‘pluriculturalism’ and, while French politics is deeply divided between left and
right, both agree that ‘immigration’ is a ‘problem ‘that needs an urgent solution.
The growing crisis of African refugees in the Mediterranean and millions of
displaced people from Syria has only served to strengthen opposition to
immigration across European societies. Given the economic and political crisis in
Greece, some Greek islands, most notably Lesbos, could be quickly
overwhelmed. The prospect of an international deal over Iran’s nuclear program
in 2015 further complicates the international environment and may in fact
provoke further conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia on the one hand and
divide opinion in the West with respect to the security of Israel in the next
decade. While Jews and Muslims may not be on a collision course, it will require
considerable statecraft on the part of French leaders to create an environment in
which both communities feel safe and secure at home and abroad.
Brian S. Turner, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York and
the Australian Catholic University Melbourne.
How to quote this article:
Bryan S. Turner, Discussion of "Muslims and Jews in France. History of a conflict ", by
Maud S. Mandel in Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, n.10 December 2016
url: www.quest-cdecjournal.it/discussion.php?id=87
174
QUEST N. 10 - REVIEWS
Anna Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), pp. 205.
by Dario Miccoli
Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration and Israel/Palestine by Anna Bernard
is an original study on the representation and transmission of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict as they emerge from literary texts that circulate in
metropolitan arenas – by which the author primarily means the Anglo-American
world, given its global relevance and the usage of English as a modern lingua
franca. Bernard bases herself on studies on Israeli and Palestinian literary history
and, most of all, on postcolonial and world literature. In doing so, she proposes a
comparative and relational reading of texts by Israeli and Palestinian writers:
from the memoirs of Edward Said and Mourid Barghouti to the postmodernist
novels of Orly Castel-Bloom and those of the world-acclaimed author Amos Oz.
The first chapter, “Reading for the nation”, discusses how the idea of national
narration has been increasingly marginalized in the field of postcolonial literary
studies, also because of scarce attention to a context such as Israel and Palestine.
Focusing on this context would allow reappraising the centrality of the national
narration and the circulation of its literary representations in metropolitan
spaces. Bernard calls for a rethinking of the notion of national allegory – derived
from Fredric Jameson’s influential scholarship – and elaborates upon the
demographic imaginary as a crucial component of Israeli and Palestinian national
narrations. This category helps her to “present a framework for thinking the
ways in which narrative literature might serve as a laboratory for testing different
ways of organizing and defining a polity” (p. 40).
“Exile and liberation: Edward Said’s Out of Place” is a thorough discussion of
Said’s 1999 memoir. In the chapter, the author argues that this widely circulated
text offers an interesting contextualization of the Palestinian demographic
imaginary. Following a structure similar to that of the traditional
Bildungsroman, Said problematizes the exile and liberation of himself as a
member of the Palestinian collective and as an individual. Thanks to a close
textual reading of Out of Place, Bernard demonstrates that Said develops “a
model of Palestinian identity and belonging that is based on political belief
rather than geographical or biological origin” (p. 66). Reading the memoir
against the background of seminal studies by Franco Moretti and Frantz Fanon,
the author explains that Said conceives Out of Place as an exilic exercise in both
personal and national liberation and political awakening.
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Dario Miccoli
The third chapter, “‘Who Would Dare to Make It into an Abstraction:’ Mourid
Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah” is instead dedicated to the Palestinian poet and
writer Mourid Barghouti. At its core is his memoir I Saw Ramallah (1997), that
recounts not the childhood and youth of the author – as Said’s Out of Place did
– but the first return trip to Palestine since 1967, after thirty years of absence. In
contrast to Said’s exilic reading of Palestinian identity, Barghouti juxtaposes the
experience of the Palestinians who live in the West Bank and those who are in
exile. This permits him to build an innovative vision of the Palestinian collective
as a set of fragments that highlights how – Bernard notes – the writer’s goal is “to
acknowledge and explore the historical events and contemporary material
realities that divide Palestinians from one another” (p. 87). By narrating the
spatial and physical changes occurred to his village and family after the Six-Day
War, Barghouti points to the need of establishing a viable solidarity among
Palestinians living in different, yet interrelated, contexts.
“‘Israel is not South Africa’: Amos Oz’s Living Utopias” takes quite a critical
stance vis-à-vis Oz and his literary and essayist production. In the chapter,
Bernard reads Oz as the quintessential representative of the Israeli liberal and
progressive left in metropolitan circles and particularly in the Anglo-American
world. She analyses many of his works, from My Michael (1968) to A Perfect
Peace (1982) and A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002), arguing that they all map
conflicts between individuals and the political rifts of Israeli society. Bernard also
contends that Oz’s fiction explicitly excludes Palestinians in order to defend “the
Zionist ‘living utopia’” (p. 114).
Two women writers, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, are at the centre of
Chapter Five. “Intersectional Allegories: Orly Castel-Bloom and Sahar Khalifeh”
reads texts by Castel-Bloom and Khalifeh as “trenchant critiques of the gendernationalist nexus in Israeli and Palestinian society” (p. 16). While acknowledging
the different poetics of the two – postmodernist and satirical in the case of
Castel-Bloom, realist and historical in that of Khalifeh – Bernard interestingly
explains that in both cases the nation, and intersectionality as a literary strategy,
are a central form of narrative thanks to which discussing issues related to the
marginalized position of women. Considering the world literary approach that
Bernard follows in Rhetorics of Belonging, it is however not entirely clear how
can someone like Castel-Bloom – and, to a lesser degree, Khalifeh – be viewed as
a world writer, considering the limited circulation of her texts and the fact that
only three of them, Dolly City (1992), Human Parts (2002) and Textile (2006),
are translated into English.
The sixth chapter, “‘An Act of Defiance Against Them All’: Anton Shammas’
Arabesques” is probably the most convincing one. The author introduces the
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Palestinian Israeli writer and scholar Shammas, who in 1988 published his only
yet much-celebrated and discussed novel Arabesques. Written in Hebrew and
preceded by harsh discussions on the meanings of Israeli identity between
Shammas and Abraham B. Yehoshua, Arabesques portrays an imaginary
Palestinian – constructed by Shammas in a semi-autobiographical manner – that
recalls the history of his village and his present life as a writer. According to
Bernard, that of Shammas is the only text among those analyzed to suggest a
truly post-Zionist idea of the nation that includes all the inhabitants of the
region and which resembles what in political circles is known as one-state
solution. Only Arabesques “seeks to imagine a different kind of
Israeli/Palestinian polity” and paradoxically becomes “a nationalist novel though
the nation it champions does not yet exist” (p. 159).
As mentioned at the beginning, Rhetorics of Belonging inscribes itself within a
field of research that, in the last two decades, utilised postcolonial approaches in
order to analyse in novel ways Israeli and Palestinian literature: think especially
of works by Hannan Hever, Ammiel Alcalay, Gil Z. Hochberg and Lital Levy.
Bernard combines this line of inquiry with, on the one hand, a world literary
interpretation that is indebted to the scholarship of David Damrosch and
particularly of Fredric Jameson and, on the other, with the idea of Zionism as a
form of settler colonialism. With reference to this last point, I must admit that
this reading of Zionism – and, even more so, of Israeli and Palestinian literature
as the by-product of a settler-colonial reality – does not seem entirely convincing.
Furthermore, whereas it is true that the relational reading of Israeli and
Palestinian literature is a welcome and salutary approach, I am less inclined to
believe that this necessarily implies telling “the region’s history […] as a story of
‘settler-native relation’” (p 12).
Surely, Zionism borrowed practices and strategies that are (also) related to those
of modern European colonialism. But it should be contextualized in a longer and
more nuanced past, in which both real and imaginative ties between the Land of
Israel and the Jewish People always existed. The problematicity of following a
settler-colonial interpretation comes out very evidently if one thinks of the
Sephardic and mizrahi writers. Bernard justifies their absence in the book by the
fact that none of them sufficiently circulates in metropolitan literary arenas or
does so by virtually erasing their ethnicity, as in the case of Castel-Bloom. But
then, does someone like Castel-Bloom have that “high degree of visibility in
English” (p. 6), which Bernard attributes her, as opposed to authors that more
explicitly deal with mizrahi issues like Shimon Ballas or Ronit Matalon – whose
number of translated novels is more or less the same of Castel-Bloom? My
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Dario Miccoli
impression is that the inclusion of mizrahi authors – among other issues – would
have revealed how the literary relations between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and
Palestinians are often more complex than the settler-colonial framework
presupposes.
With this, I do not intend to minimize the relevance of Bernard’s volume, which
is indeed an important contribution to the field of postcolonial literature and
Israel/Palestine Studies. Mine is however an invitation to handle more cautiously
theoretical frameworks and categories – such as settler-colonialism or the notion
of demographic imaginary – that risk imposing very specific interpretations on
literary texts that should perhaps be allowed to speak more for themselves.
Dario Miccoli, Ca’ Foscari University Venice
How to quote this article:
Dario Miccoli, Review of Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and
Israel/Palestine, by Anna Bernard in Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History,
n.10 December 2016
url: www.quest-cdecjournal.it/reviews.php?id=106
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Marco Clementi, Eirini Toliou, Gli ultimi ebrei di Rodi. Leggi razziali e
deportazioni nel Dodecaneso italiano (1938-1948), (Roma: DeriveApprodi, 2015),
pp. 307.
by Michele Sarfatti
Authored by an Italian historian and by the director of the Rhodes State
Archives, this book deals with the Jews of Rhodes and with those who passed
through this area during the Shoah. Rhodes and the other Dodecanese islands
had been annexed by Italy in 1912, at the end of the Italo-Turkish War; their
inhabitants were granted the so-called “small Italian citizenship.” The two
authors have carried out accurate research in numerous archives in various
countries, most particularly in Italian military archives and in the Rhodes State
Archives. In the latter they have availed themselves (and it is the first time anyone
has done so) of the documents of the Italian Governorate and of those of the
Italian Carabinieri, who then acted as a police force. Bibliographical sources, on
the other hand, have not been sufficiently taken into account.
One section of the book is dedicated to the ships that crossed the Dodecanese sea
(and sometimes were shipwrecked there), while carrying Jewish migrants who
were trying to reach Palestine illegally. It is the first time that scholars have made
use of local documentary sources, containing information on the supply and
support activities. One of those ships was the “Pentcho,” carrying approximately
five hundred passengers. The vessel had previously been used only for river
navigation. The “Pentcho” left Bratislava on 18 May 1940, sailed down the
Danube, entered the Aegean Sea and eventually, after a voyage of almost five
months, was shipwrecked near the small island of Kamilonisi, under Italian
control. The refugees were aided by authorities in Rhodes. In February-March
1942, because of problems with food supplies on the island, they were transferred
to the internment camp for foreign Jews at Ferramonti, in Southern Italy. On the
basis of documentary evidence, the book disproves the testimony rendered in
1944 by one of the shipwrecked Jews (Heinz Wisla, a German) who claimed that
the former passengers of the Pentcho had been helped by Pope Pius XII (pp. 7277).
The authors tell the history of the Jewish community in Rhodes basing their
description almost exclusively on archival sources, without incorporating other
researches and memoirs. For the first time, they shed light on many specific
events, such as the discord that arose in the 1930s between the Jews who adhered
to Revisionist Zionism and Fascism and the other Jews, a conflict unwelcome to
Italian authorities, who wished the community to remain united. In recounting
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Michele Sarfatti
the Fascist anti-Jewish persecution, enacted by Rome in 1938 and extended also
to the Dodecanese, the authors have used almost exclusively archival documents
found in Rhodes. As a result, the book lacks a systematic general depiction, but
on the other hand contains a description of important specific aspects, such as
the revocation of Italian citizenship and the question of military service (which
was a complex issue, as the “small citizenship” – as opposed to the Italian full
citizenship – did not include military service).
The two chapters dealing with the consequences of the September 1943 armistice
between the Kingdom of Italy and the Allies (which led to the Third Reich
assuming military power on the island and to the deportation, on July 23 1944, of
the Jews from Rhodes and Kos) are written by Clementi. The author describes
the reorganization of the Italian police, now made up of Carabinieri who swore
alliance to the new government of Mussolini’s Repubblica Sociale Italiana. On
April 17 1944 the Italian police asked the municipal authorities of Rhodes for a
list of resident Jews, in duplicate copy. They received it on May 13. Four days
later German authorities requested Italian police to verify the identity of all
residents. According to an Italian note of July 21, one of the two copies of the list
had been handed over “at the time” (a phrase that may, although not necessarily,
refer to a period of two months) to the “German secret police” (pp. 182-183). By
mid-July the police and the other Italian authorities sent out the German order
that Jews must all report at a specified gathering point, and outlawed the transfer
of real and personal property between Jews and non-Jews. Basically, they
provided administrative assistance that was of the essence in identifying the
people that were to be arrested, and that supported the entire deportation
procedure. For the first time, this book documents events that were unknown
until now and attempts a first reconstruction. It is to be hoped that there will be
further research on this subject.
Michele Sarfatti, Fondazione
Contemporanea CDEC
Centro
di
Documentazione
Ebraica
How to quote this article:
Michele Sarfatti, Review of Gli ultimi ebrei di Rodi. Leggi razziali e deportazioni nel
Dodecaneso italiano (1938-1948), Marco Clementi and Eirini Toliou in Quest. Issues in
Contemporary Jewish History, n. 10 December 2016.
url: www.quest-cdecjournal.it/reviews.php?id=107
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David Malkiel, Stones Speak – Hebrew Tombstones from Padua, 1529- 1862,
(Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 404.
by Andrea Morpurgo
Before Emancipation the history of Jewish burials is a history of discrimination:
the municipal authorities authorized the Jewish communities to bury their dead
only in extra muros cemeteries, outside the city walls. After the Unification of
Italy the situation changes: the emergence of the public cemetery in the
nineteenth century gradually erased the discrepancy between the sepulchral
practices of European Jews and Christians that existed during the medieval and
early modern periods. In fact, the end of the Jewish interdictions allowed the
Jews to be buried in large and modern cemeteries constructed outside the walls –
as a new monumental “City of the Dead”. In several cases, Jewish communities
were allowed to open a “Riparto Israelitico” annexed to the Catholic cemetery
(Turin, Milan, Genoa, Bologna, Rome), whereas
in others, they were allowed to renovate old autonomous cemeteries (Venice,
Ferrara) or to build new ones (Livorno, Florence). Then, as a result of the
Emancipation, the graveyard became a site for the expression of modern values.
Epitaphs expressed new aesthetic tastes, cultural values, and social conditions,
while tombstones adhered to the Neoclassical trends of the day. Yet these
epitaphs and tombstones, for all their radical change, were carefully designed to
express a Jewish voice and to depict the Jewish identity of the deceased.
David Malkiel’s latest book Stones Speak – Hebrew Tombstones from Padua,
1529-1862 faces these complex issues. Firstly, the author explains in the
introduction that «Padua is a representative community. Northern Italy was
dotted with small to medium-sized Jewish communities with similar
socioeconomic structures, and Padua was a variation on the general pattern. Its
social and cultural norms can be reasonably projected on dozens of similar
communities across the north of Italy, granting this study historical significance
that is regional rather than local». In 1384 the Lord of Padua, Francesco da
Carrara, allowed the Jews to buy land at the former contrada San Leonardo,
nearby an existing cemetery. But the oldest existing Jewish cemetery is situated in
via Isidoro Wiel, where the tomb of Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen can be found.
The tomb still today is a pilgrimage destination for Jews from Israel and the
United States. It was built in the sixteenth century, after the original one located
outside Porta Codalunga was destroyed (in 1509) during the siege of Padua by
the troops of Maximilian Habsburg. Three other cemeteries are located in what
was called borgo Zodio: the two cemeteries in via Campagnola, where Isaac
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Andrea Morpurgo
Abravanel, Minister of Ferdinand II King of Spain was buried, and the cemetery
of via Orti, now via Pietro Canal, in use since 1820. Finally, one still in use is
located in via Sorio, outside Porta San Giovanni; it was inaugurated in 1861.
Malkiel focuses his attention on the study of the tombstones, considered “as a
lens through which to examine the historical development of Jewish culture in
Padua. Tombstones generally range from those of modest proportions, with
minimal biographical information crudely incised, to towering monuments with
elaborate architecture, finely carved with artistic motifs and flowery inscriptions.
This breadth of possibilities is rooted in the freedom of client and craftsman to
design the tombstone as they pleased, for this activity was never regulated by civil
or religious authorities. Consequently, tombstones as cultural artifacts are
snapshots of a society's social and cultural proclivities at particular moments in
time.”
The author claims that there is another reason why the study of Jewish burial
inscriptions of Padua is so interesting and unique: “The survival of tombstones
from the ancient world and middle ages is serendipitous, making systematic
study of a prolonged period impractical. Padua is different because its series
spans over three centuries and is almost unbroken. Hence, in addition to the
scrutiny of individual inscriptions and tombstones, the study of them globally,
through quantitative analysis over time, be it of metrical schemes, dimensions or
longevity. The numbers supply the broad contours of cultural flow, while
individual cases focus attention on particular features and variations, granting
greater depth to our analysis.” Malkiel argues that while graves are a well-plowed
field in the study of European art history for the Middle Ages and the Modern
period, Jewish cemeteries instead have been the subject of numerous studies that
have however overlooked the value of tombstones for cultural history. With this
goal in mind, the author approaches the sources from the perspectives of
literature (“Words”), art (“Stones”) and society (“Lives”). So, the book is
characterized by a multi-level analysis of the subject that, based on several
documentary sources of different nature and on a long-term study, constitutes
an original interdisciplinary approach. The 1,224 surviving Jewish tombstone
inscriptions of Padua express the cultural currents of their age, shedding light on
the society of Padua's Jews and the social and cultural changes they underwent
during the 330 years covered by this study.
In conclusion, the book Stones Speak – Hebrew Tombstones from Padua, 15291862 is an important contribution to our historical knowledge of the Jewish
cemeteries in Italy. It is our hope it will also contribute to the development of
future conservation projects of the important and rich architectural and
sculptural heritage of Italian Jewry.
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Andrea Morpurgo (PhD in History of Architecture and Urban Planning,
Professor IED Master - Istituto Europeo di Design Madrid, Board Member
“Fondazione per i Beni Culturali Ebraici in Italia”).
How to quote this article:
Andrea Morpurgo, Review of Stones Speak – Hebrew Tombstones from Padua, 15291862, by David Malkiel in Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, n.10
December 2016
url: www.quest-cdecjournal.it/reviews.php?id=109
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Inna Shtakser, The Making of Jewish Revolutionaries in the Pale of
Settlement: Community and Identity during the Russian Revolution and its
Immediate Aftermath, 1905-07 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp.
205.
by Polly Zavadivker
In this first brief monograph, Inna Shtakser explores how young, workingclass Jews subjectively experienced the 1905 Russian Revolution. The study’s
innovative approach and topic contribute to the historiography of Russia’s
working class and its Jewish minority in particular, and the sociology of social
movements more broadly. Its reflections on the internal dynamics of
radicalization are also particularly timely. It raises the questions: how did
those young, working-class Jews in late imperial Russia feel about revolution?
What compelled them, as workers, to adopt revolutionary identities,
sometimes at the expense of becoming isolated from their families and
communities? And how did their feelings about revolutionary socialism lead
them to undertake actions in collective groups, such as strikes, protests and
self-defense of fellow Jews during pogroms in 1905-06?
The protagonists of this study are poor and largely uneducated Jews born in
the Pale of Settlement during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
During those years, the processes of economic industrialization in Russia and
increasingly severe legal restrictions on Jews’ residential and educational
options produced a mass of impoverished Jewish workers. They bore
grievances on two counts. As Jews, they faced discrimination as a national
minority within the Russian Empire; and as poor and working-class Jews,
they occupied the lowest rungs of the social ladder in the Jewish community.
While scholars such as Jonathan Frankel, Yoav Peled, and Ezra Mendelsohn
have focused on educated revolutionary leaders among Russian Jews,
Shtakser is interested in uneducated Jewish workers. She discusses both those
who joined Jewish revolutionary parties, including the Bund and Poalei Zion,
as well as those who joined non-Jewish Social Democratic and Socialist
Revolutionary parties.
Chapters 1 and 2 describe the backgrounds of young, poor Jews who adopted
revolutionary identities. Because they lacked the financial means and social
connections that wealthier Jews possessed and were necessary to obtain
higher education, they often resorted to taking apprenticeships to learn
crafts. In autobiographies and letters, young Jewish apprentices recounted
experiences of physical abuse and exploitation at the hands of older co-
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Polly Zavadivker
workers or employers. Then came a moment—perhaps a revolutionary idea
gathered from reading, conversations, or observing others—when it was no
longer possible or necessary to accept one’s lot. They realized they could run
away, or fight back, pursue education on their own, and take steps to acquire
dignity, security and legitimacy as workers. From that point, individual
youth transformed their erstwhile passive feelings of despair and humiliation
into active expressions of struggle and rebellion. They rebelled not only
against their employers, but also against religion and community, including
the social structure of their communities and the notion of what it meant to
be Jewish. Their adoption of anarchist or socialist values compelled them to
adopt a self-image as active, militant people.
A crucial point for Shtakser is that young Jewish workers did not aspire to
earn a higher wage or obtain education as ends in themselves. Rather, they
sought an entirely new status and image as respected and self-reliant
individuals. Socialism appealed not only, and perhaps for them, not primarily
to the intellect, but to the emotions. Related to this key idea, Shtakser
discusses how poor young Jews’ emotional attachments to revolutionary
ideals led them to create social circles where they found “an ideological and
social framework that could provide them with emotional support”(5).
Forming groups with like-minded youth buffered the isolation they might
have otherwise experienced as they challenged traditional norms of behavior
in their respective communities, such as early marriage, observing the
Sabbath, and kashrut.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine how Jewish revolutionary youth acted on their
feelings: they instigated strikes in the workplaces, organized self-defense units
in their neighborhoods, produced revolutionary literature in Yiddish, and
formed study circles. Shtakser argues that the impact of young Jewish
workers’ radicalization can be gauged in their reaction to outbreak of
pogroms following the 1905 Revolution. Compelled by feelings of moral
outrage and pride, and the desire to demonstrate their identities as militant
people and as Jews, the young revolutionaries raised money for weapons,
learned to shoot, and went into the streets to fight pogromists. They did this
despite having previously rejected and become estranged from the Jewish
community’s established norms and authorities. Yet they achieved a
modicum of respect from the community, for the pogroms of 1905-06 caught
Jewish leaders unprepared. Young Jewish radicals earned reputations as
protectors of Jews, and Shtakser suggests this is because as revolutionaries,
they understood the language of violence. Self-defense units varied in their
effectiveness: in Odessa, 5 of 13 members of a group were killed, the rest
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wounded. In Bialystok, a self-defense group successfully stopped violence in
one neighborhood. Regardless of the outcomes, self-defense members earned
respect for their activism, and in this manner, fulfilled their goals of acquiring
legitimacy in the Jewish community as workers and revolutionaries.
One of the most interesting aspects of this study is its sources. Shtakser
closely read and cited from 105 autobiographies and 165 letters from two
collections at the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow. The
autobiographies were written between 1924 and 1934, and submitted as part
of membership applications to the Society of Former Political Prisoners and
Exiles. From 1921 to 1935 this organization provided health and employment
benefits to aging revolutionaries who could prove they had spent time in
exile or prison for their revolutionary activities, and demonstrated loyalty to
the Soviet regime. Although the autobiographies were written with the
intent to provide evidence of the applicants’ revolutionary credentials,
Shtakser insists they are reliable, not necessarily with regard to facts, but
because the descriptions of subjective experience would have been authentic:
“the autobiography writers knew that the readers and evaluators were their
contemporaries who were also activists…[and] would be quick to sense a false
note in self-presentation and point it out” (154).
Despite this study’s original approach and subject matter, a number of
weaknesses might be noted. The most problematic aspect of the book is the
lack of basic demographic information, such as numbers of working-class
young Jews at the turn of the twentieth century, how many of them became
revolutionaries, and how many joined self-defense units in 1905. Although
these data may not have been available in the autobiographies and letters, a
more systematic or quantitative approach to the source base might have
yielded tentative estimates or other significant categories. Stories drawn from
autobiographies and letters are anecdotally strong, but they are frequently
generalized to otherwise unsupported statements about significant social
trends, such as the following: “most Jewish radicals married relatively late in
life. Some, particularly women, did not marry at all” (50). In another
instance, a very interesting table is given listing numbers and sizes of selfdefense units in 1905. This is a valuable source of data and could have been
explored in detail, but it receives little attention in the text. Similarly, I read
the book eagerly anticipating to learn more about the history of the selfdefense units, but the story is confined to the last 18 pages of the book. Given
the centrality of self-defense for the author’s argument about radicalization,
one would have expected greater attention to this topic. These shortcomings,
together with the rich source base that informs this study, suggest the need
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Polly Zavadivker
for, and possibility of, additional research into this important, and timely
subject.
Polly Zavadivker, University of Delaware
How to quote this article:
Polly Zavadivker, Review of The Making of Jewish Revolutionaries in the Pale of
Settlement: Community and Identity during the Russian Revolution and its Immediate
Aftermath, 1905-07, by Inna Shtakser in Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History,
n. 10 December 2016
url: www.quest-cdecjournal.it/reviews.php?id=108
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