Abstract
Ulrike Jureit and Christian Schneider, Gefühlte Opfer – Illusionen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2010. ISBN 9783608946499
The history of nationalism in Germany, e.g. the founding of the German nation state in the nineteenth century, is deeply entangled with institutional anti-Semitism. That was the case before the extreme populist governmental turn to National Socialism in 1933, and remained at the margins of the post-1945 West German society as the silenced witness of an ethno-nationally framed idea of a homogenous nationhood. The ethnic definition of the German nation was also the subtext to German unification in 1989. 1 More than 20 years later, in June 2011, a public attack 2 denouncing anti-Semitism as an element of left-wing politics, and said to be cherished within the German Socialist party DIE LINKE/Bündnis 90, does not come as a surprise.
A study by Samuel Salzborn and Sebastian Voigt (2011) 3 ‘proves’ that there are persistent anti-Jewish stereotypes at the centre of socialist/left-wing politics and underneath a largely anti-Zionist arguing criticism of the occupation and, as some say, ‘apartheid’ politics of the state of Israel. In response to this attack, Gregor Gysi, 4 political celebrity and leader of DIE LINKE, pushed ahead a statement all party members had to subscribe to: asking them to distance themselves from any pro-Palestinian support activities (e.g. ‘Gaza support Flotilla’). 5 What is worrying about this recent move is a ‘totalitarian-light’ version defining the limits around critique of a twenty-first-century hegemonic nation state (not that different from, let’s say, criticism of the US, Germany, China or France). Further, a general suspicion (Generalverdacht) is conveyed that even non-violent resistance to the politics of Israel, for example, asking for an international consumer boycott, is led by anti-Semitism (although the term used by the researcher is ‘anti-Zionist anti-Semitism’).
We might ask whether this very serious blaming and publicly orchestrated bashing of the socialist Left as ant-Semitic could happen elsewhere. Blaming, yes, we might say, but stopping solidarity actions and radical statements? No, probably, not; few – at least internationally speaking – would doubt that a rising number of people feel they belong to a twenty-first-century global society and claim a right to speak out against economic, social as well as legal injustice and crimes that are going on elsewhere. No region should be exempt from this critique, whether it is the Middle East, Africa or Europe.
These introductory comments bring me to the book Gefühlte Opfer – Illusionen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung by Ulrike Jureit and Christian Schneider (2010). The authors put an uncomfortable finger into the open wound of an ongoing cultural struggle in Germany: the memory of the Shoa and the difficult pathways of the German society as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983) looking for a moral positioning towards European Jewish victims and German-Goy perpetrator subjectivity beyond the twentienth century. Let’s begin with the title, difficult to translate into English as it is; we could say ‘Sensed Victims – Illusions of a Coming to Terms with the Past’ (or possibly ‘Perceived Victims’). Either way the combination of an emotion (feeling/sensing) and a lost subject/object (victims) gives us a clue to the argument of Jureit and Schneider. Various post-Holocaust generations in Germany have to face up to the deeds of Nazi German great-grandfathers and -grandmothers as predominantly willing supporters of the Holocaust while engaging at different generational levels with the lessons to be learned from this past. The starting point of the authors’ argument aims to unwrap the status quo of increasingly meaningless memorial rituals, which are orchestrated publicly and demanded politically. The timeline they are addressing spans the 1960 until the recent decade.
According to Jureit and Schneider, some historical key events prepared the contemporary ‘Olympioniken der Betroffenhei’ (‘Olympics of Dismay’), p. 19. For instance, they argue that on 8th May 1985 the then German Bundespräsident, Richard von Weizsäcker, in his parliamentary speech addressing the nation, demanded to keep the memory of the Holocaust for future generations in order to gain redemption. 6 What is lacking in Jureit’s take (p. 38), however, is a broader contextualizing of this historical moment as happening soon after Helmut Kohl’s 7 and US president Ronald Reagan’s visit to the cemetery Bitburg. 8 In Bitburg, US soldiers were buried, but SS soldiers, too. The public international outcry following this official state visit made it necessary for the West German political elite to position themselves with respect to the Nazi war, as well as to the West bloc and, in particular, towards the future Gemeinschaft’s position of Germany in Europe. 9 Importantly, the conservative chancellor Kohl had started office in 1982 while regarding himself as a ‘Nachgeborener’ (someone ‘born after’), wishing to establish an international politics of ‘normalization’, even though he was born in 1930.
In Jureit and Schneider’s view, Weizsäcker’s speech and its moral message functioned as a trigger for the contemporary understanding and ongoing claim of the 68s generation
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to define the correct way to cope with the legacy of the Holocaust. Despite my impression that some of the considerations in their book miss a deeper understanding of significant political periods that shaped the dominant public discourse of the memory of European Jews, however, the point Jureit and Schneider are making is worthwhile and goes to the heart of the misery: the German memory ritual is embedded in a secular Christian society that can’t escape its underlying norms; as Jureit and Schneider highlight (p. 11):
Das jüdische Erinnerungsgebot wird nicht nur als Aufforderung zur gemeinschaftlichen Vergegenwärtigung der verbrecherischen Vergangenheit aufgefasst, es wird vielmehr als Vorschrift missverstanden und zudem mit dem christlichen Erlösungsversprechen verbunden. [The Jewish commandment to remember is not understood as a call to envision collectively the criminal past and its rough state, but misread as an instruction combined with the Christian promise to be put out of (worldly) misery.] (translation by the author)
The structure of the book follows the joint trajectory of the two authors; in the first part Jureit focuses on the meaning of memory as well as on the rituals of remembering and commemoration, with a discussion in what ways the memory of the Holocaust is going global. She links the pre-Shoa intellectual contributions of Maurice Halbwachs 11 (1925; 1950) regarding the social construction and interdependence of individual and collective memory to the later on, indeed, at the end of the 1980s, emerging systematic sociological research of memory. 12
In the second, conclusive, part Schneider discusses the notion of grief/mourning as a metaphor of a misled identification with the dead Jewish victims (gefühlte Opferidentifikation). While critically reviewing the ‘moral’ impact of re-migrated German Jewish exiles on the 1968 student revolution generation, 13 e.g. Adorno and the Frankfurt School, but also digging deeper into Freud’s psychoanalytical contribution to the theme of mourning, an attempt is made to anchor the sacred Trauer subject in German society as a matter of misguided identifications. Schneider states, for example, that the Critical Theory upheld the perspective of the victims (p. 120). Having said that, the paradoxical situation is engendered through the double position of the exile intellectuals: Horkheimer and Adorno were speaking from the perspective of collective Jewish victimhood, whereas the 68s students and their children largely were and are not. The 68s generation’s lack of identification with their perpetrator parents meant a collective yearning for alternative role models. And yes – they made a morally relevant choice. Through the 1970s, by and large, a cultural-political revolt evolved that shook West Germany, creating among others the Red Army Fraction and violent political extremism, but transformed its society into a more individualizing social-liberal direction, too. While rightly asking what to do with the emotional tabooing of perpetrator parents and the need to feel sorrow for other victims that were spreading at the end, and in the aftermath of the defeat of the Nazi regime (e.g. German refugees from the East European countries, victims of the bombing of Dresden), Schneider does not stretch his argument further. The central question might not be to ask what was ‘good about the daily life during the Nazi period’ (p. 202). Tempting, as it is, to follow temporarily downsized testimonies of other dead shadows, the nostalgic and selective memory of ‘a good life’ under oppressive regimes does not do away with the authoritative reflex of its hegemonic identities. Reflection could instead mean to include, emotionally, the lingering potential authoritarian structure and the institutional logic of other-ing difference in our collective memory; it might mean shifting the moral discourse to a more radical political discourse.
Schneider touches briefly on an inside/outside positioning and thus, contradictory and paradoxical belonging of Jews to Germany. He writes on about Adorno’s return to Germany as a moment of a double reconciliation (‘doppelte Versöhnung’) – the wish to reconcile the German and the Jewish heritage (Kultur), p. 122. It is this twin existence that shapes contemporary debates still struggling with the paradox of belonging, and for that reason complicating a process of leaving past death behind: the shadow (in a second modernity fashion some might call it ‘Zombie nationalism’) of the ethno-nationalist founding of European nation states travelled across the globe and is travelling still. Some of the tragic dialectics of a historical European Jewish German fate and cultural community underscore an ongoing traumatising that happens in the Middle East but is linked to its European roots.
It is the psychoanalytical argument in the second part of the book that is most problematic in my view. Whereas the interrogation of a fixed collective memory, which is enshrined as sacrosanct and used as a taboo-token against present day political debates, is the right and necessary step into any critical reflection, the attempt to deliver a diagnosis of what trauma, grief and coming to terms with loss should mean is less convincing. Unfortunately, the book’s perspective and the authors’ trajectory to encircle, to name and to analyse significant speeches and events is very much drawn from a West German knowledge lens. It rather ignores efforts (though unsatisfying and restrictive as they were, too) of the communist East German state and society to tackle the German Nazi past. This is another missed opportunity to reconcile more differing recent memories of the German past.
Despite these critical spotlights, the book delivers useful insights about the current German debate on the memory of the Shoa, not only regarding its arguments and dilemmas, but also as echoed in the approach and writing of its authors.