David Rieff
The historian Tony Judt once recalled that during a visit to Berlin’s
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, he saw “bored schoolchildren on
an obligatory outing [playing] hide-and-seek among the stones.” He
argued, “When we ransack the past for political profit — selecting the
bits that can serve our purposes and recruiting history to teach
opportunistic moral lessons — we get bad morality and bad history.” To which one should add: We also get kitsch.
Even when done well, commemoration almost always skates precariously
close to kitsch. One might wish that the Holocaust were an exception in
this regard, and that it will always, in Leon Wieseltier’s phrase,
“press upon the souls of all who learn of it.” But it is not, much as we
might wish otherwise.
This is a distinct problem, not to be confused with the fact that
since 1945 the Shoah has regularly been employed to serve political
agendas, the most obvious, as Judt emphasized, being to justify more or
less any policy of the State of Israel with regard to its neighbors or
to its Arab minority. But even when the remembrance of the Shoah is
innocent of such subtexts, it has still been smothered in kitsch as
Milan Kundera once defined it: all answers being “given in advance and
[precluding] any questions.” Again, it is understandable to hope that
people will be moved by an act of collective remembrance. And it is
often, though not always, right to insist that they have a moral duty to
remember. Where such acts become kitsch is when people take the fact
that they are moved as a reason to think better of themselves.
It is unfortunate that a prime example of the instauration of this
kind of kitsch remembrance is the U.S. National Holocaust Museum itself —
the largest and best-known memorial to the Shoah in the world other
than the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum and Center in Israel. To be sure,
much of what is in the museum is as heartbreakingly far from kitsch as
it is possible to get — above all, what Wieseltier called “the objects,
the stuff, the things of the persecutions and the murders,” when he
rightly described the Holocaust Museum as “a kind of reliquary.”
But these exhibits and films, photographs, and documents are bracketed by two extraordinarily kitschy pieces of set dressing.
As one first enters the museum and before one has seen a single image
or artifact of either Nazi atrocity or Jewish martyrdom, one must first
walk by the serried battle flags of the U.S. Army divisions that
liberated some of the concentration camps (there are no British or
Russian standards, even though a great many of the museum’s exhibits
concern Bergen-Belsen, liberated by the British, and Auschwitz,
liberated by the Soviets). And as one leaves the last room of the
museum, the final exhibit one sees contains a series of images of David
Ben-Gurion proclaiming the independence of the State of Israel, and,
beyond them at the exit, a column of tan sandstone that is simply
identified as having come from Jerusalem.
One can only hope that in addition to the American triumphalism and
what even by the most generous of interpretations is a highly partisan
pro-Israeli view of the creation of the state as the existential
remediation of the Nazis’ war of extermination against the Jews, the
intention here was to palliate what, apart from the part of the exhibit
devoted to the Danes’ rescue of most of their country’s Jewish
population, is the pure horror of what the museum contains by beginning
and ending on an uplifting note.
The impulse is an understandable one. But it is also both a
historical and a moral solecism that perfectly illustrates Judt’s
admonition that the result is both bad history and bad morality.
The current emphasis both in Israel and in the Jewish diaspora that
is exemplified by the museum’s last exhibit and that presents the Jewish
state’s moral legitimacy as inextricably bound up with the Shoah seems
to me an indefensible justification of the Zionist project in Zionist terms, at
least in the long run. It is both ahistorical, since obviously
Zionist-inspired Jewish immigration to Palestine far predates the Shoah,
and morally dubious, since the Palestinians bear no responsibility for
what the Nazis did.
As a matter of history, though not of morality, what a Zionist would
be on firmer ground claiming is that at the heart of the Zionist project
itself, secular and religious alike, is the conviction that the land of
Israel with Jerusalem as its capital is not just the historic but the
spiritual home of the Jewish people, who in all their wanderings never
relinquished what the Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk once called their
mystical deed to it. In this sense, at least, it is surely fair to say
that whatever the justice or injustice of this claim, without the
preservation of Jewish collective memory over the centuries the
establishment of the modern State of Israel would have been far more
difficult. As he did so often, Yosef Yerushalmi got to the heart of the
matter when he wrote, “Jewish historiography can never substitute for
Jewish memory.”
To say this is not to imply that Zionism is concerned only with
historical continuity, whether (to the extent that the two are
distinguishable) real or “invented.” But it does not augur well for what
the remembrance of the Shoah will become after its survivors are no
longer alive — and has thus passed into what the Gemrna historian
Norbert Frei categorized as “‘plain’ history” — that the first exhibit
of the museum dedicated to commemorating it is in reality little more
than an ostentatious display of American nationalism and that the last
is kitsch Zionist theodicy pure and simple.
But unsettling and unseemly as they are, neither such American
narcissism nor Jewish communitarianism tells the whole story. To the
contrary, Holocaust memorials and museums are attempts to keep faith
with two moral imperatives: honoring and remembering those who died and,
by reminding as many people as possible of the murder of European
Jewry, helping individuals and societies alike become more resistant to
such evils, and perhaps even to prevent them from recurring in the
present or in the future.
These matters are delicate, as they should be, and if we take such
questions on we have a moral obligation to proceed with great caution.
But about the argument that the memory of the Shoah is likely to have a
deterrent effect — the view encapsulated in the injunction “Never Again”
— there simply is no way of avoiding the conclusion that this is
magical thinking, and of a fairly extreme kind. I am reminded again of
Sir Nicholas Winton’s remark that no one ever truly learned anything
from the past.
Yes, “Never Again” is a noble sentiment. But unless one subscribes to
one of the cruder forms of progress narratives, be they religious or
secular, there is no reason to suppose that an increase in the amount of
remembrance will so transform the world that genocide will be consigned
to humanity’s barbarous past. This is where the contemporary heirs and
assigns of the American philosopher George Santayana go wrong: We never
repeat the past, at least not in the way he was suggesting we did. To
imagine otherwise is to leach both the past and the present of their
specific gravity. Auschwitz did not inoculate us against East Pakistan
in 1971, or East Pakistan against Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, or
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge against Hutu Power in Rwanda in 1994.
Yerushalmi was doubtless correct to emphasize the greater importance
of memory over historiography in the Jewish tradition. But in
investigating occluded truths from the past, surely it is history that
must be the senior partner and memory the junior one, at least if the
goal is, as it should be, to amass the facts necessary to establish an
unimpeachable historical record — something that collective memory,
which, as even most of its staunchest advocates concede, involves
“editing” the past to further the needs of the present, rarely if ever
does well.
Establishing the historical truth about a great crime while those who
committed it and those who were or at least knew its victims are alive
often not only should but also can be done (as opposed to cases where
doing so ought but, contra Kant, often can’t be done). But such
efforts require the investigators to think like historians,
investigating the facts and letting the chips fall where they may.
The reality, however unpalatable, is that collective remembrance, in
the form evident at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, has not always been a
salutary goad to peace and reconciliation, nor has the failure to
remember an injustice that a particular group has suffered been toxic to
their societies. To the contrary, at numerous times and in numerous
places, remembrance has provided the toxic adhesive that was needed to
cement old grudges and conflicting martyrologies, as it did in Northern
Ireland and in the Balkans for generations, if not for centuries.
The question arises: Despite the overwhelming consensus to the
contrary, does not the historical record in the world as it is, and not
the world as philosophers have claimed it should be and might one day
become, justify asking whether in some places and at some moments in
history what has ensured the health of societies and individuals alike
has been not their capacity for remembering but their ability to forget?
What I propose is not replacing a bien–pensant fairy tale about memory with a mal–pensant
cautionary tale about forgetting. Nor do I suggest that, even if I am
right about the uses of such forgetting, it should take place in the
immediate aftermath of a great crime or while its perpetrators are still
at large. Leaving the needs of history aside, these are moments when
common sense morality and the minimal requirements of justice weigh
strongly in favor of remembrance. There are certainly also times when
relations between states can be improved and much bitterness removed
when a state that has committed a crime against another state
acknowledges its culpability. And the same is also the case when the
crimes being committed are by a state against its own people.
Eventually, however, there comes a time when the need to get to the
truth should no longer be assumed to trump all other considerations.
Kant thought that no right action could ever have a wrongful element.
Perhaps it is because I spent 15 years observing and writing about what
for lack of a better term we call humanitarian emergencies, which are
almost invariably situations in which (and this is very much a best-case
scenario) even when relief groups are overwhelmingly doing good they
are also doing some harm, but I confess I do not see how this could ever
be true.
I would add that collective memory often also functions as an escape
and an idyll, providing a moral warrant for nostalgia — an extremely
problematic emotion ethically, not least because, to reverse Freud’s
conclusion about mourning, deference to reality never gains the
day. The Cuban-American writer Orlando Ricardo Menes was making a
related point when he wrote, “Idyllic memories are a jeweled noose.” He
knew what he was talking about: the Cuban exile community in the United
States to which Menes belongs provides a textbook case of the way
nostalgia and self-absorption (the other cardinal vice of the exiled and
the scorned), however understandable a community’s resorting to them
may be, also often serve as a prophylactic against common sense,
political or otherwise.
But Cuban Americans are hardly alone in their self- imposed
predicament; at various points in their history, the Irish, the
Armenians, and the Tamils have been equally trapped in their own
particular versions of what the writer Svetlana Boym has called “the
dictatorship of nostalgia.” And Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum
testifies that American Jews are no less immune to nostalgia’s
temptations.
"Foreign Policy" (foreignpolicy.com), April 14, 2016
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