Last night I was watching the musical ‘The History Boys’. Set in a grammar school in the north of England in the early 1980s a group of pupils prepare for their Oxford entrance exams in history under three teachers. What is interesting is the difference in the conception of history of the three teachers. The following excerpt from the dialogue is from a class discussion on the Holocaust in which one of the teachers, Hector is considering if one can actually teach the Holocaust as a part of a history course.
H: How can you teach the Holocaust?Why can't we simply just condemn the camps outright as an unprecedented horror?
I: "The camp's an event unlike any other. The evil unprecedented."Et cetera, et cetera.
H: No! Can't you see that even to say "et cetera" is... monstrous? "Et cetera" is what the Nazis would have said. The dead reduced to mere verbal abbreviation.
I: Wouldn’t another approach be to show precedents? Put them in context.
H: But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and explained. And if it can be explained, then it can be explained away.
The crackling intensity of the above discussion has always got me thinking as to what purpose collective memory of past wrongs have on our understanding of and our reaction to the gaping wounds in our history. I have always been suspicious of history, particularly when it is merely an act of memorialization of past events. Memory is of course emotionally of immense power but it does not have the ability to explain, nor is it often correct or even factual. Our memories are a fluid landscape, and subject to a series of constructions and reconstructions. What we think we remember of an event today, is not what we will remember of it a year from now, nor is it the same as what we remembered of it a year ago. Our emotions inform and mold our memories to such an extent that it would not be wrong to say that our very minds change and with it our recollection of the past. As Eric Hobsbawm says, “For all of us there is a twilight zone between history and memory; between the past which is a generalized record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection, and the past as a part of and background to one’s own life”. The holocaust seems to be at the edge of this twilight, poised between the realms of public memory and actual history, and I would like to look at what I consider the three major stages in the recounting of the holocaust.
During the war actual information on the holocaust was hard to come by. Isaiah Berlin, the great political philosopher, was a part of the British Information Services in New York in the 1940s and he says that he had no idea of the existence of concentration camps during the war. Of course it was assumed that the European Jews were arrested and tortured but no one definitely knew of what was happening to them. During the war and more so immediately after the war, immediate first hand records of the concentration camps began to appear. People began to put down what they had experienced, what they had witnessed and what they had done. For example Primo Levi’s book, ‘If This Is a Man’ published in 1947, was one of the first personal accounts of the holocaust centered on the eleven months he spent in the camp at Auschwitz. On its first publication in 1947 the book sold a mere 1500 copies. This was the fate of almost all such firsthand accounts. People were just not interested in this sort of thing. Largely responsible for this was the creation of official (victors’) accounts of the war. The versions of the events approved by the victors were subject to a lot of political considerations, and of course people chose to voluntarily forget a large part of their roles in the events of the war. A collective blanketing out of the too fresh memories of blood and shame is but to be expected.
By the late 1950s and ‘60s a new trend appears. The memories of the holocaust are revived by third parties and recreated, possibly in a different way. Those originally disregarded first-hand accounts which had survived from the ‘40s are once again dug out, read and reread as the holocaust begins to seize the collective imagination. Public consciousness is more aware of the events and more interested. For example, Primo Levi’s book was republished again in 1958 and almost immediately became a bestseller all over the world.
This brings us to the ‘80s and the ‘90s, an era of historical revisions – the holocaust is so far back in the past that it actually becomes possible to look back at those official accounts of the ‘40s and consider revising them, to put them back as it were into the fabric of history. It becomes possible to discuss Nazism relatively dispassionately, in a historical perspective, rather thanmerely thinking of it as an abomination that is to be totally rejected. And it is now, when the immediacy and the power of the narrative has been dulled and contextualized, that there arises the grave danger of memorialization. The last thirty years have specifically been the era of the creation of historical museums and monuments which try to recreate an experience of the holocaust which is by its very nature artificial.
Auschwitz is now a museum. You can get a guided tour for about $80. There are busloads of tourists. I have never been to Auschwitz, but I cannot help but wonder where do the visitors have their lunch? Where do they eat their sandwiches and drink their coffees? Do they take photographs? In the photographs do they smile, are they holding hands? Do they buy Auschwitz memorabilia?
Our perspective on the past alters. And with it alters the depth of our feeling. When an event is so far in the past that it has left our immediate memory and gone on to be memorialized in shrines and public squares, we can be quite sure that we are walking on dead ground. The pain is long past; the wounds are old and dry scars – and memory has let go of that, which we had vowed that we would never forget.
- AB
