Icebergs and other hazards: An epilogue

The articles in this Special Issue of Time & Society provide a fascinating panorama of the range of factors responsible for the acknowledgement and remembrance of historical wrongs. The authors explore some of the means by which historical injustices are addressed, including apologies and reparations, and discuss how memories of ‘unquiet pasts’ (Torpey, 2003) are kept alive or revived – for example, in museums or through commemorative ceremonies. In what follows I do not revisit these issues in any detail. Instead, I draw attention to questions that could arise out of the conclusions drawn in the six articles and in the introduction, and query some of the implicit assumptions that underlie arguments made in this Special Issue. In other words, rather than concluding a discussion, I am trying to open it up by pointing towards potentially productive avenues for further research.

The focus on why and when a historical wrong is addressed, acknowledged and/or remembered, which is common to most of the articles in this Special Issue – and indeed to much of the recent scholarship on issues of public memory and historical justice – has tended to entail close critical attention to the modalities and performance of redress and remembrance. The question of what qualifies a past to be considered a historical wrong in the first place has informed comparatively few scholarly analyses. There are two parts to an answer: the first has to do with the nature of the past, and the second with its relative distance. I do not intend to engage in any detail with the former, except by noting that wrongs are considered historical because of their symbolic purchase: an historical wrong is one of proportions that are either significant in themselves or considered exemplary, standing in for something bigger. The case study presented by Rommel Curaming and Syed Khairudin Aljunied provides a good example. The execution of Muslim recruits by their instructors on Corregidor Island in 1968, an event that became known as the Jabidah Massacre, has become a symbol for the suffering of Moro at the hands of the Philippines government, even though the number of victims was comparatively small. There is no objective scale that determines the effects a particular atrocity may have.

The second part of the answer to the question posed above is not clear-cut either. In her article, Gilda Waldman tells the story of a 100-ton iceberg that was brought to Spain to provide the raw material for a sculpture, the central exhibit in Chile’s pavilion at the 1992 Universal Exposition. As Waldman and others have pointed out, the exhibition of the iceberg was a ‘spectacular gesture [which] revealed a desire not only to “de-narrate” Chile’s historical past, but also to purge the nation’s image of any Third World “detritus” likely to impede the flow of deregulated global capital’ (O’Bryen, 2011: 480). Notwithstanding the accuracy of such observations, I suggest the iceberg may help us to shed light on some of the issues arising out of the articles in this Special Issue. We might think of historical wrongs as icebergs that are prone to lose shape and volume the further they are removed from their natural environment. In order to guarantee the integrity of the sculpture carved from the iceberg, the curators protected it by means of an ‘intricate refrigeration system. Six columns surrounding the ice provided a 10° F “air curtain” while internal ducts filled with water and glycol kept the core of the berg at a cool 5^o F’ (Korowin, 2010: 48). It seems the further removed a historical wrong is from the present, the more effort is required to address and remember it. Like an iceberg far from its natural environment, it is prone to disappear from view.

The above analogy is helpful only to some extent, for there is no objectively measurable correlation between the purchase of a particular past, and its distance from the present. If any one person could be held responsible for setting a trend by apologizing for a plethora of historical wrongs, it would have to be Pope John Paul II. He is said to have issued 94 public apologies during his pontificate (1978–2005) (Vallely, 2006). In 2004, he apologized for the sacking of Constantinople by Christian crusaders 800 years earlier. ‘How can we not share, at a distance of eight centuries, the anger and the pain?’, he asked (BBC News, 2004). It is tempting to dismiss the Pope’s rhetorical question as an attempt to divert attention from the role this and other papal apologies were assigned in his diplomatic overtures to other religious leaders. But the propositions underlying the question, namely that anger and pain can be felt in relation to an event that happened hundreds of years ago and that such emotions are understandable, are by no means absurd. Anger and pain do not have clearly defined expiry dates. During the Balkan wars, for example, vivid ‘memories’ of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo reminded Serbians of their supposedly centuries-old suffering at the hands of Muslims (Bieber, 2002; Boose, 2002).

Could it in fact be that the opposite is the case: that in order for us to be able to address and remember historical wrongs, a certain amount of time needs to have lapsed? The case of post-war West Germany used to be cited as evidence for such a claim. It was argued that in the first 15 years after the fall of the Nazi regime Germans were preoccupied with rebuilding their country, that public debate was monopolized by the generations who had been complicit in the Holocaust, and that it was therefore not possible for Germans to address the injustice committed by them or in their name and to honour the victims through remembrance and memorialization (for example, Lübbe, 1983; Meier, 2010: 49–70). In the past 15 years, the argument about the pervasive ‘silence’ of post-war West Germany has been successfully challenged (for example, Frei, 1996). It has been shown that throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s, the Jewish genocide was never publicly forgotten; it was in fact in the immediate post-war years that the first memorials were erected and the first commemorative ceremonies held. I suggest that many of those who embraced the argument about the amnesia of West Germany’s Trümmer (rubble) and Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) era sought to establish their own moral superiority and condemn earlier generations for their complicity and for their failures to acknowledge that very complicity.

Regime change itself is not a sufficient trigger for effective justice-seeking: in Spain, the historical wrongs of the 1930s were not addressed during the so-called transición – the transition to democracy that followed the death of General Franco in November 1975 and lasted at least three years – until the passing of the new constitution in a referendum in December 1978 (if not until the election of a government led by the Socialists in October 1982). During that period of transition, the Spanish civil war was referred to as la guerra de los locos – the war of the insane (Aguilar, 2002: 209). It was only in the last 15 years that the historical wrongs of the civil war and its immediate aftermath have been, quite literally, unearthed (see, for example, Ferrándiz, 2008; Keene, 2009), and that insanity is no longer a viable excuse of those accused of wrongs perpetrated in the war or during Franco’s reign.

Neither is it possible, however, to discount the possibility that effective justice-seeking is the immediate consequence of regime change. In Peru, a truth and reconciliation commission went to work within months of the fall of Alberto Fujimori, which brought the 20-year-long civil war to an end (see, for example, González Cueva, 2004). Similarly, the truth commission set up in 1992 in El Salvador in accordance with the Chapultepec Peace Accords went to work almost immediately after the end of the civil war (see, for example, Popkin and Roht-Arriaza, 1995).

Do historical wrongs perhaps need to be located firmly in the historical past to make it possible to address them comprehensively? Gilda Waldman’s essay in this Special Issue could provide evidence for an answer in the affirmative; she suggests that the persecution of Mapuche under Pinochet has not been properly addressed because the marginalization and discrimination suffered by Mapuche, which has its roots in the nineteenth century, if not earlier, is continuing. But there are other cases that suggest that the opposite is true: precisely because an injustice is evidently ongoing, its historical origins are being recognized and addressed. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Maori grievances resulting from violations of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi have been publicly aired and addressed since the mid-1980s, not least because in the past 30 years it seemed to be increasingly difficult to ignore the ongoing marginalization of a large proportion of Maori New Zealanders (cf. Belich, 2001: 475–487). While a wrong that persists in the present may either prevent or encourage redress, the cases of both New Zealand and Chile suggest that the acknowledgement of historical wrongs and the amelioration of present injustice are closely connected, and that those suffering from continuing injustice are prone to inserting ‘current protest within longer arcs of memory’, as Steve Stern found in the case of Mapuche in twenty-first century Chile (Stern, 2010: 346).

The fact that there are no hard and fast rules – no set of objective criteria to explain why some historical wrongs are dealt with at a particular point in time, and others aren’t – suggests that detailed case studies such as those assembled in this Special Issue remain a key means of understanding particular attempts at attaining historical justice. Historical justice is not least the outcome of circumstances that are locally or nationally specific. It is not least the result of efforts by individual actors, be they victims of historical injustice demanding recognition of their suffering, political leaders searching for effective nation-building gestures or advocates using historical wrongs to draw attention to present injustice.

As Katharine McGregor emphasizes in the Introduction, however, we need to be cognisant of the global context. There seems to be unanimous agreement in the recent literature on historical justice that constellations in the past 20 years, in particular, have been conducive to attempts to address, acknowledge and/or publicly remember historical wrongs (see, for example, Olick and Coughlin, 2003). ‘Justice-seeking’, Michael Marrus (2007: 75) writes, ‘seems to be one of the hallmarks of our time’. At the same time, as Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2001) have shown, the discourse about the Holocaust has become a universal mould for discourses about other historical wrongs.

We also need to take into account specific transnational connections. As Gilda Waldman suggests in her article, the fight for an acknowledgement of injustices perpetrated against the Mapuche in Chile has been influenced by links between advocates and activists in Chile, on the one hand, and in Spain and in several Latin American countries, particularly Mexico, on the other. Karie Morgan draws attention to the relationship between German discourses about the Holocaust and Namibian discourses about the genocide of 1904–1907. In her speech at the 2004 Ohamakari commemoration, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul in fact transposed a vocabulary that was developed for domestic purposes and in response to the Holocaust. When she said, ‘remembrance is the key to reconciliation’, she was paraphrasing a key line from German President Richard von Weizsäcker’s famous 1985 speech in the German parliament (Weizsäcker, 1985), in which he had drawn on Hasidic philosophy to suggest that if only Germans remembered duly, they would be entitled to reconciliation, if not redemption (see Jureit and Schneider, 2010: 39–42).

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All articles in this Issue appear informed by the assumption that historical wrongs ought to be remembered and appropriately addressed in the present. Four of the contributions are part of an already vast and rapidly growing body of scholarship that identifies failures to address and remember historical wrongs (as the articles of Waldman, and Ireton and Kovras do in this Issue) and/or highlights inadequacies and instrumentalizations of attempts to address and remember historical wrongs (as both Nettelbeck’s and Kozen’s articles do). By asking the question, ‘Why ought we to appropriately address wrongs perpetrated against minorities in the past?’, I do not wish to argue against historical justice. Rather, I would like to draw attention to three broad rationales that are sometimes alluded to but which are rarely laid out in rigorous detail, at least not in case studies such as those assembled in this Special Issue. These reasons are, however, often invoked in the public discourse on historical justice and memory – that is, in order to support demands for the erection of memorials, the issue of apologies, the prosecution of perpetrators or the appointment of truth commissions.

Each of the three rationales has a distinct temporal focus. According to the first, perpetrators and their descendants are morally obliged to address past wrongs as a result of their or their antecedents’ actions in the past. According to the second, a comprehensive engagement with our collective past is therapeutic. Arguments along those lines are informed by the idea that societies are much like individuals: they need to fully understand, and engage with, their own past in order fully to function in the present. According to the third rationale, by addressing the past we learn a lesson and prevent a recurrence of the wrong in the future.

There is barely a public event to commemorate historical wrongs that does not feature a speaker enunciating variations of the didactic rationale. For example, in his 1985 speech referred to above, the German president claimed: ‘Those who don’t want to remember the inhumanity become prone to new infections’ (Weizsäcker, 1985). There is no evidence, however, to suggest that any of the much-publicized instances of justice-seeking since the Nuremberg trials has served to inoculate individuals or societies against committing other crimes against humanity.

There is no conclusive evidence either to support the assumption underlying the second rationale, namely that societies have a collective consciousness that could be likened to that of individuals, and that the conclusions Sigmund Freud drew from treating individual patients are easily transferable to collectives. That is not to say that a collective working-through of the past has no benefits. Survivors and the descendants of victims may feel the need for such a working-through to come to terms with their personal trauma and to reimagine themselves as members of a group whose very identity was targeted by the perpetrators. The notion that entire nations remember, however, often obscures the fact that the ‘nation’ excludes survivors and the descendants of victims, or that the ‘national’ consciousness privileges very particular memories. By naturalizing the nation (as if it were an individual summoning their repressed past on the analyst’s couch), it suggests the very same kind of cohesiveness that was often the ideological backdrop to the persecution of political, ethnic or religious minorities.

Moral philosophers have argued convincingly that historical wrongs result in obligations and responsibilities not only of the perpetrators but also of their descendants (for example, Blustein, 2008; Booth, 2006; Thompson, 2002). But the subtleness and nuances of their arguments tend to be missing from public debates about specific pasts. There, the moral duty to remember, to acknowledge and to redress is contrasted with a failure to do so, as if the only alternatives to remembering and to truth- and justice-seeking are a negligent amnesia and a malicious silencing.

After it had drawn one million visitors to Chile’s pavilion in Sevilla, the sculpture made from an iceberg could have been exposed to the elements. It would have melted quickly, and would have left no trace. Instead, the organizers returned the ice to Antarctica, presumably being as careful not to lose any of it as they had been when they shipped the iceberg to Spain. We could think of forgetting in a similar vein – not an act of oblivion in which memories of the past are lost for good, but as careful, deliberate and public attempts to detach ourselves from the past. While memory studies scholars and historians have tended to agree on the pitfalls of an excess of memory and to concede some ground in response to Nietzsche’s observations about an unhealthy obsession with the past (particularly those he made in the second part of his Untimely Meditations [Nietzsche, 1874]), most have been reluctant to countenance the idea that a public forgetting of historical wrongs could be beneficial. There is scope, however, to extend the analyses of those few who have tried to imagine an ars oblivionis equivalent to an ars memoria (Weinrich, 1997; see also Ricoeur, 2004: 412–456) or to explore the benefits of a public forgetting of pasts that have successfully been given a second lease of life by having been drawn into the present (for example, Huyssen, 2005; Rieff, 2011; Vivian, 2010).

Rather than tackle the question, ‘Why should it be desirable to acknowledge past wrongs?’, case studies such as the ones assembled in this Issue tend to analyse the factors that were responsible for such acknowledgements. Curaming and Aljunied suggest in their article that a public acknowledgement and memorialization of the Jabidah massacre was a precondition for peace in the Philippines as much as the peace process created conditions where public memories of the massacre could flourish. But does that mean that in this and similar cases, the remembrance of historical wrongs is a prerequisite of peace between the minority who suffered injustices in the past, and the majority who perpetrated or condoned such injustices? Couldn’t Curaming and Aljunied’s case study also be read as evidence of the desire by those trying to reconcile with one another to settle on a mutually agreeable narrative – one that could in fact require public forgetting as much as public remembrance?

Cathleen Kozen shows that in the United States an acknowledgement of the injustice of World War Two internment was possible, if not necessary, because of the economic relationship between the USA and Japan, and was convenient because it promoted a particular narrative about the character of the nation. Her critical analysis suggests that the acknowledgement was insincere because it commemorated the magnanimity of a nation capable of saying sorry rather than the injustice of internment, and was deficient in that it did not extend to all former internees. In fact, it may be impossible to identify a public apology that was not motivated also by considerations unrelated to the historical wrongs it purports to address. But that does not imply that the survivors and descendants of victims who were covered by the 1988 Civil Liberties Act were short-changed. The factors that made apologies and other forms of redress possible must not detract from the benefits they have for those who suffered an injustice.

But Kozen’s article draws our attention to the possibility that attempts to address and remember historical wrongs could engender new historical wrongs: for example, by making an arbitrary distinction between those whose suffering deserves to be addressed, and those whose suffering goes unacknowledged for supposedly good reasons, or by effectively preventing others from seeking redress in future.

The critique of attempts to address and remember historical wrongs often seems informed not just by the normative idea that in the last instance such wrongs ought to be addressed and remembered, but also by the expectation that it is possible to neutralize the negative effects that historical wrongs can have on the present, as if there were appropriate and effective ways of addressing and remembering such wrongs, and as if the ‘tipping points’, which the authors of the foregoing articles identify, were eventually followed by a resolution. Much of the literature on historical justice and memory is teleological, almost willing the protagonists that are subject to the scholars’ critical gaze to right the wrong, to let them perform the work that Walter Benjamin’s angel of history wanted to accomplish but couldn’t: to ‘awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’ (Benjamin, 1969: 257). Leaving aside the impossibility of retrospectively correcting the past, this idea is flawed because there is no obvious endpoint to attempts at addressing the past. What was considered a successful working-through of historical wrongs one day was often considered deficient the next. For example, as Karie Morgan points out in her article, in 2004 Wieczorek-Zeul’s admission of German wrongdoing was widely applauded by Herero. Seven years later, a delegation of Namibian government representatives and Herero and Nama leaders, who travelled to Germany to repatriate 20 skulls from a collection housed in a Berlin hospital, are said to have left Germany disappointed because the official apology they expected wasn’t forthcoming (Boeckmann, 2011). What had been interpreted as an official apology in 2004 was seven years later yet another attempt by the German government to avoid the term ‘apology’ and to shirk their responsibility to pay reparations for the genocide of 1904–1907.

Historical justice is a process rather than an outcome. So is the remembrance of historical wrongs. In the discussion about the relationship between social and public memories, on the one hand, and historical justice, on the other, the former tends to be confused with very specific manifestations of the latter, such as commemorations, memorials, or official histories. Not only may museums or memorials say very little about how and what societies – as the sum total of the individuals who comprise them – remember, they may also be ‘conspicuously inconspicuous’, as Robert Musil (1987: 61) said of monuments in a much-quoted essay.

Icebergs can be hazards even when they are inconspicuous; what makes an iceberg so dangerous is the fact that most of it is submerged and therefore not visible to the naked eye. When a ship collides with an iceberg, the iceberg strikes the ship as much as the other way round, at least from the perspective of the helmsman. When analysing why particular pasts are addressed in the present, scholars have tended to focus on individuals and groups who commemorate wrongs, acknowledge injustices, pay reparations to victims, apologize to survivors or prosecute perpetrators. Far less attention has been paid to these pasts themselves, as they are supposedly entirely subject to our remembering and history-making. For good reason, we privilege the role of human agency when explaining why, how and when some pasts become alive and others don’t. In doing so, we assume that the pasts in question are known quantities – irrespective of whether or not they feature in histories or in social memory. We may want to think of pasts as icebergs also in the sense that they are partly submerged and therefore invisible. In her research on the recovery of memories of the Francoist repression in Aragon, Ángela Cenarro (2002) has drawn attention to the existence of latent memories, which are only articulated once an appropriate trigger is found. The past that resurfaces by means of such memories is not already known, even though it may have been possible to know of its contours through inference (in the same way in which radar allows for the detection of submerged icebergs). Much like icebergs, pasts that suddenly become alive are perhaps not as inert and malleable as we, as all-knowing researchers, would like them to be: sometimes they do strike us or, to switch metaphors, they haunt us, when least expected (see, for example, Gordon, 2008; Labanyi, 2000).