The Memory of the Holocaust: A Psychological or Political Issue?

Quite recently, the Council of French Bishops issued a “declaration of repentance” regarding its “failings” during the Nazi Holocaust. “The Catholic Church knows full well that conscience is formed in remembering, and that, just as no individual person can live in peace with himself, neither can society live in peace with a repressed or untruthful memory.” In Germany, Wolfgang Thierse, the Speaker of the Bundestag [Parliament], in responding to the contentiousness surrounding the Memorial to the Jews in Berlin, stated, “We are building it for ourselves. It will help us confront a chapter of our history.”

The memory of the Holocaust is in the general public awareness and in the news, as well it should be: the World War II generation is now getting older and facing the prospect of death. Its chances for expression and for dialogue become more limited as time goes on; its need for integrating the war experience becomes more urgent. We all know about the groups of survivors and of children of survivors which have mushroomed in recent years; about their writing autobiographies, fiction, and films; about their returning to places of hiding and saying “thank you” to rescuers—all are trying to give flesh to the years of the Holocaust. We also know about groups of the second generation of Germans—the children of the German war generation—and we have heard about German “fatigue” with the Holocaust. And, of course, we

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know about Holocaust museums in America and Holocaust awareness in general.

It was not always this way. Soon after the war ended, most people wished to forget about it. The survivors needed to start new lives rather than to dwell on the past. The perpetrators did not wish to be reminded of their deeds; they, too, wanted to resume normal lives and keep what spoils of war they could. There were issues of shame on survivors at being seen as “victims” as well as of avoidance of a sense of guilt by individual and nation bystanders. The factual memories of the past were silenced, to be replaced by myths or a sense of void.

Often a single event or a person served as a catalyst to break the silence—demonstrating that the past was still alive and could not be buried again. In Israel there was the Eichmann Trial and later in Germany, the case of Anja Rasmus. This young girl from Passau chose to research how people in her town had resisted the Nazis, which was what she had been taught in school. To her dismay, everyone blocked her research. She finally discovered they had not resisted at all. Because she exposed the lies and myths, there were death threats against her and she eventually left Germany, but after she had raised the consciousness of the people. Anja was part of the second and third generations of young Germans who grew up with “silent” parents and/or grandparents. In terms of denial of memory, theirs was a similar experience to that of the children and grandchildren of survivors. We know how these different groups eventually gathered, spoke up, and searched for the “stories” of their families in the war.

Memory, myth, and silence have also struggled in France for center stage after the infamous French collaboration with Germany, orchestrated by Vichy Premier Henri Philippe Pétain. France had lost its glorious image. After the immediate post-war “reglements de comptes” [settling of accounts], myths quickly took over. For example, the number of those French who claimed to have resisted Nazi Germany swelled. Soon the Catholic Right (according to Henri Rousso in his book, Le syndrome de Vichy, 1987, translated as The Vichy Syndrome, 1991) led an effort to rehabilitate Pétain and once again make him the “hero” of France—claiming that Pétain was trying to “save” France from Germany. They thought he deserved to be treated more as a “martyr” than a quisling. (As I witnessed a few years ago while traveling in France, the picture of Pétain framed in a French flag still hangs in some homes.) French Fifth Republic President Charles DeGaulle, in his memorial to war deportees, never mentioned the Jews, only “racial” deportees. Rousso sees in the “nostalgic” right wing not only the collaborators of the war but also those who pursued the Algerian war of the 1960s as they sought to hold on to part of the North African patrimony of France as its glorious past.

An indictment of the role of France during World War II was soon incorporated into the 1968 student unrest in the streets of Paris against the inglorious war in Algeria. Filmmaker Marcel Ophüls described the average French reaction during World War II in highly unflattering terms in The Sorrow and the Pity (1971). This hugely successful film was banned immediately from French national television. The struggle for remembrance had begun. The struggle to restore the memory of the Holocaust included not only survivors but much better known people such as Ophüls, Serge Klarsfeld, and Claude Lanzmann. Historians joined the search for memory with PhD theses; survivors formed groups and wrote, as did children of survivors. The 1980s trial of Klaus Barbie, a collaborator responsible for numerous deportations and the torture of the leader of the French Resistance, Jean Moulin, reflected the struggles with memory through the judicial system: Barbie’s “lawyers” attempted to retain the myths of pure France and reject the “myth” of the good resistance. (Barbie was first defended by a priest-lawyer until the Church put a stop to it.)

Scandals shatter myths but defenders of myths fight back. Thus, although French President Jacques Chirac admitted three years ago to the role of France in the deportation of Jews, a struggle for indemnification of the victims is still being fought as different forces in the French system confront the issue of responsibility for wartime actions.

The war eventually had a large impact on the Catholic Church and European Christianity in general. There were clashes: Paul Touvier, one of the French collaborators, was hidden by the Church for years after the war. “Saving” Jewish souls also produced battles after the war between the Church and the Jewish community, as demonstrated in the Finaly Children Affair in which a convent and Catholic adoptive mother for a long time refused to give back her converted “Catholic children” to their Israeli relatives. However, the guilt produced by the knowledge of the death camps and of the Christian silence during the war

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impelled Christians into an examination of conscience, though they often had to be prodded by Jews. The French historian Jules Isaac, whose entire family was murdered in concentration camps, wrote about the Christian teaching of contempt for Jews (L’enseignement du mépris, 1962) and was quite instrumental through his dialogues with Pope John XXIII in forging the text of Vatican II in the l960s in which an expression of equality of all religions was first articulated.

The dogmas of the Church and its triumphalism [the belief that a particular doctrine is superior to all others] were later questioned. In The Crucifixion of the Jews (1975), Franklin Littell wrote that two myths were propagated by Christianity: first, God is finished with the Jews and, second, the new Israel (Christian Church) took the place of the Jewish people as carriers of history. As these myths were questioned, Judeo-Christian movements developed with ongoing dialogues, conferences, and publications. Recently New York Cardinal John O’Connor wrote about “his abject sorrow” in The New York Times. However, the struggle for acknowledgment of wartime responsibility still goes on in the Catholic Church. For example, Pope Pius XII is to be canonized despite increasing evidence that his conduct during the war was mostly motivated by insuring the survival of his “company,” the Church.

This struggle with memory thus involves all protagonists of the war: victims, perpetrators, bystanders, rescuers, the Church, and nations—all of which impact upon each other. The victims were first afraid of being devastated by “memory” of their suffering but also of imposing knowledge of their suffering. The perpetrators strove for the “banality of evil,” engaging in dissociation. The bystanders were afraid to hear horror stories because they didn’t want to feel responsible and thus feel guilty—they then tended to feel victimized themselves. Such splitting and dissociation created a serious curtailment of identity and of a sense of authenticity, perhaps even of the ability to feel. Yet, an event as monstrous as the Holocaust cannot just be cast away. The return of memory and an effort at integration, as shown above, is impelled by a sense of guilt and incompleteness—often in the next generations—and the need for authenticity. With the restoration of memory comes an integration of the events and feelings which transform the separate group identities—amidst the struggles along the way.

Many questions remain. Are we hearing too much about the Holocaust? Does focusing on it perpetuate a Jew-as-victim status and a self-image as an oppressed people? My initial response is that memory is essential to the ability to mourn, with the resultant integration of suffering and loss into a complete sense of identity: some healing for the victim only comes with acknowledgment of the suffering. Perhaps Heinz Kohut’s idea of mirroring the injured self provides an appropriate concept here. In this case, because Jews, Germans, the Church, and various nations are involved, the mourning becomes a communal enterprise. Jews, as the primary advocates for this historical recognition, are helped to transcend the despair following from their loss by the public acknowledgment. In doing this, they feel less like victims and more like parts of the human community.

What about the present widespread interest in the Holocaust? For some, the event becomes a myth, a survival archetype: there has been an evolution from fear of the victim to an admiration for the survivor who now has a complete story to tell and thus becomes a hero worth emulating. But have bystanders been replaced by voyeurs? Do Jews need this “mirroring?” Do they enjoy it? Is it bad? Are they too steeped in the past? Or is it the only way for them to feel that the past is finally integrated? Does it have consequences for the “voyeurs” who might become too identified with the suffering hero and perhaps distort that suffering? There have been fears of “trivialization” of the Holocaust. Whatever the answers, society does need to accept some of the ramifications of this flawed and delayed explosion of information.

Others are bored with the Holocaust and argue that it’s not today’s problem or even yesterday’s; they say it is time to forget. They note that there is much competition for suffering in the world. They think we are stuck on the Jew as victim. Sometimes such criticism becomes anti-Semitic since it is tempting to keep on hating the victim. This perpetuates victim status because one cannot mourn in the middle of hate. And the victims know that the haters don’t forget—witness swastikas periodically painted on Jewish homes or synagogues. Our world must deal with people who have such a need to hate.

So where is the political issue? Earlier this year, Peter Novick, at a presentation on his book, The Holocaust in American Life (1999), at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, asserted that the “memory” of the Holocaust is so much in the forefront in the U.S. today basi-

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cally for political purposes: American Jews need to protect Israel. It is in the interest of the American government to reinforce this focus because of its pro-Israeli policies. In the process, the Holocaust is “sacralized,” treated as unique, and the Jew remains a victim. Novick reported this to be in marked contrast to the years after the war, until the 1960s, when no one spoke about the Holocaust. He scoffed at the idea of “repressed memories” of trauma, arguing that other concerns were prevalent at the time. At this meeting I stood up in protest, describing the experience of Holocaust survivors including the travails of memory culminating in the Conference of Hidden Children in l991 and their impact on American Jews. Novick’s rejoinder was that Holocaust survivors constitute a miniscule number and thus don’t count. Besides, he asserted, memories of survivors cannot be trusted for accuracy. When I spoke further with him about the objectivity of historians on the Holocaust, he referred to his award-winning book, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (1988), in which he alleged that historians are totally nonobjective. Nor do I consider Novick to be objective.

Why do I object to Novick’s presentation? After all, I certainly don’t advance the idea of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust beyond that it was unique in the sense that each genocide is different in its own way. Nor do I quarrel with his assertion that anything can be used for political purposes. I object because his presentation created a distorted picture of the tortuous vagaries of “memory” of a traumatic historical occurrence—he “flattened” this memory into a purely “political” event, dismissing the issue of identity and trauma integration. As we have seen, not remembering as well as remembering can become a political issue. It would make more sense to understand the struggle for integration of group suffering rather than to put it down. This is what I have attempted to illustrate in this short piece, using the European experience. However, I would think that as all Germans must include Nazism in their history, so all Jews must include the Holocaust in theirs, and so must Novick. Unfortunately, there is no way around it.

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