Die Stimme des Intellekts ist leise,
aber sie ruht nicht, ehe sie sich Gehör
geschafft hat. Am Ende, nach unzäh-
lig oft wiederholten Abweisungen,
findet sie es doch. Dies ist einer der
wenigen Punkte, in denen man für
die Zukunft der Menschheit optimis-
tisch sein darf.
The voice of the intellect is a soft one,
but it does not rest till it has gained
a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly
repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is
one of the few points in which one
may be optimistic about the future
of mankind.
Sigmund Freud
Justice and Memory.indb 9 02.11.2009 13:38:44
Justice and Memory.indb 10 02.11.2009 13:38:53
Table of contents
Introduction 15
Ruth Wodak, Gertraud Auer Borea
A Look at Vienna, 1938 21
Gitta Sereny
SECTION I: 29
The Politics of Memory
From Collective Violence to a Common Future: 31
Four Models for Dealing with a Traumatic Past
Aleida Assmann
Justice, Truth, and Peace 49
Three Dimension of Consequences
Anton Pelinka
Transforming the Holocaust 67
Remarks after the Beginning of the 21st Century
Dirk Rupnow
Historical Scholarship, Politics of the Public Past 79
and (Semi-) Private Memory
Mitchell G. Ash
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SECTION II: 95
Coping with Traumatic Past(s):
Case Studies
Considering the Violence of Voicelessness: 97
Censorship and Self-censorship Related to the
South African TRC Process
Christine Anthonissen
Dealing with the Past in Spain 123
Between Amnesia and Collective Memory
Walther L. Bernecker
The Polish Debate Around Fear by Jan Tomasz Gross 147
from the Perspective of the Intermediary Discourse Analysis
Marek Czyzewski
Resolving Antagonistic Tensions 169
Some Discourse Analytic Reflections on
Verbal Commemorative Practices
Titus Ensink
Restitution: Yes, but . . . 195
Rudolf de Cillia and Ruth Wodak
Spoken Silences – Bridging Breaks. 213
The Discursive Construction of
Historical Continuities and Turning.
Points in Austrian Commemorative Speeches
by Employing Rhetorical Tropes
Martin Reisigl
Images of the “Other” and Danish Politics of the Past: 241
Antisemitism, Xenophobia and the Dream of Homogeneity
Thorsten Wagner
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SECTION III: 263
Remembering and Forgetting:
Brief Reflections
The Legacies of the Holocaust in 265
Scandinavian Small State Foreign Policy
Cecilie Felicia Stokholm Banke
Two Sides of the Coin: 277
Clean Break and Usable History
The Case of Hungary
András Kovács
Confronting War Crimes of the Wehrmacht 291
Walter Manoschek
Israel’s Prenatal Memory: 309
Born 1948 – Traumatized 1938
Moshe Zimmermann
Contributors 317
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Justice and Memory.indb 14 02.11.2009 13:38:53
Introduction
Ruth Wodak, Gertraud Auer Borea
The 2008 program at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International
Dialogue was framed by the discussion of the range of functions
which serve to commemorate the past, more specifically in this case,
the “Anschluss” of Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938, and the wide
range of expectations concerning memorial events. In a series of
lectures and discussions curated by Ruth Wodak we focussed on “the
Why?”, “the When?”, “the How?” of past traumatic experiences in
many societies, and on the consequences of commemorative events.
International experts, scholars, and public intellectuals discussed how
European and non-European nation states did (not) come to terms
with their traumatic pasts. Several salient past and present key dates
1918 – 1938 – 1948 – 1968 – 2008 were addressed while reflecting on
the many often ritualised commemorative events and public fora from
an interdisciplinary perspective.
All societies have to come to terms with traumatic pasts, since all
attempts at repressing / forgetting / tabooing them are bound to fail.
Past events inevitably influence the present and the future – or our
visions of them: People may deliberately distance themselves from
certain events or actors or identify with them. They may try to find
culprits and/or to name victims after the event.
The way we deal with the past is part of “Vergangenheitspolitik” (pol-
itics of dealing with the past1): Different groups, political parties or
politicians prefer different interpretations with a view to aligning
their own positions (as advantageously as possible) with the official
version of history. Hence, history written with hindsight and in-
stilled with meaning like a “narrative” must be invariably perceived
as a construction. Historical context needs to be understood as the
outcome of a social process whereby past events that are regarded as
worthy vehicles for moral concepts are selected and made the objects
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Justice and Memory.indb 15 02.11.2009 13:38:53
of remembrance and commemoration. This process is wrought with
opposition and controversy over the selection of the hegemonic nar-
rative. “Representations of history” (Geschichtsbilder) consist of nor-
matively established relationships, of interpretations of interrelations
between actual events and thus of narratives.
It is not the facts per se that are called into question, but the inter-
pretations of facts – the contexts they are embedded in, the causes
attributed to them and who is named as being responsible for which
events. Moreover, the modes of coming to terms with the past with
hindsight need to be subjected to critical scrutiny: they range from tri-
als (for example Nuremberg) via tribunals (for example The Hague) to
“reconciliation commissions” (for example Truth and Reconciliation
Commission); from the erection of monuments to building museums
or setting up exhibitions; from documentary films via interviews,
textbooks and excursions to oral history reports; from restitution to
“compensation payments”; from memorial days via commemorative
speeches, and commemorative events to minutes of silence; etc. What
is the impact of such modes of commemoration and confrontation?
Which mode is opted for and why?
It is not by coincidence that every historical representation com-
municates a specific version of the past: The fact that individuals do
not remember on their own but with the help of the memories of
others, that they grow up surrounded by objects and gestures, phrases,
texts and pictures, architecture and landscapes, all of them brimful
of unfamiliar pasts predating the individual, caused Maurice Hal-
bwachs to come up with the concept of „collective memory“. He held
that every individual memory is a “vantage point” on the collective
memory.2 The moment the group looks back on its past, it feels that
it has remained the same and becomes aware of the identity it has
preserved at all times.3 According to Reinhart Koselleck (1979), this
historical consciousness consists of the polarity between the “space
of experience” and the “horizon of expectation”. Space of experience
stands for the total heritage of the past available to an individual or
a group, while horizon of expectation denotes the anticipation of the
future and comprises the whole array of wishes and fears, plans and
visions. The polarity of these two states of being unfolds in the living
presence of a culture, present time being perceived as the mediator
between the past and the immediate future.
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Justice and Memory.indb 16 02.11.2009 13:38:54
How are specific periods of the past – 1918 (end of World War I),
1938 (“Anschluss”, November pogrom in the German Reich), 1948
(Marshall Plan, foundation of the State of Israel, emergence of the
Apartheid regime), 1968 (May 68, Prague 68) – constructed in the
collective memory by European politicians at both the national and
transnational level in 2008; how are these and many other, diverse
events commemorated; which links are established to events in the
present, and what are the goals and consequences? Does it make
sense to commemorate? Which sense? All these and many more
questions were discussed at the Kreisky Forum in a series of events,
culminating in a conference whose contributions are collected in
this volume.
On March 12, the date of the “Anschluss” 1938, an opening event
was staged at the Vienna Burgtheater with keynotes by the Spanish
writer and politician Jorge Semprun and the Bulgarian writer Dimi-
tre Dinev. Actors of the famous “House on the Ring” read texts from
1933–1945 found in archives of the theatre which were presented for
the first time to the audience and public.
The international conference mentioned above, in June 2008,
brought together leading academics in the field of memory research
and contemporary history to discuss three overarching themes:
“Silence/Silencing and Censorship: Memory and Media”, ”The
Politics of a ‘Clean’ Break”, and “Collective and Individual Trauma;
Confronting War Crimes”. Gitta Sereny, the Austrian born Ameri-
can author, delivered the keynote “On Breaking Silence”, and David
Sugarman,professor of Law and Human Rights at Lancaster Uni-
versity, the plenary “A Battleground of Memory and Justice; Chile
since the 1973 Coup”.
“Fascist Past – Democratic Present: Italy and Spain today”, “Com-
memoration: Staging the Past or Critical Debate?” and “Coming to
Terms with Europe’s Traumatic Past(s). An International Compari-
son” were the themes of three further panel discussions staged at the
Kreisky Forum in 2008. All of them included a broad participation
of the Austrian public and media.
Laura Balbo (University of Milan), Fernando Vallespín Oña (Univer-
sity of Madrid) and Werner Perger (German weekly Die Zeit) discussed
and compared Italy and Spain in their historical and contemporary
context.
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Justice and Memory.indb 17 02.11.2009 13:38:54
Elazar Barkan (Columbia University), Beate Klarsfeld (Klarsfeld
Foundation, Paris), Oliver Rathkolb (University of Vienna) and Ruth
Wodak debated the “Functions of Commemoration”.
Slavenka Drakulic (Croatian author and publicist), Nina Khrush-
cheva (Russian American professor at New School, New York), Avi
Primor (Center for European Studies, Herzlia), Jan Erik Vold (Nor-
wegian poet), Ruth Wodak, and Helene Maimann (Austrian historian
and filmmaker) unfolded the different perspectives of European
traumatic past(s).
Helene Maimann’s remarks as discussed in the latter panel deserve
to be quoted briefly as one of many themes and leitmotifs which
became explicit during this entire series:
After a human catastrophe with such terrible mental, material and moral losses
there is a distinctive tendency of people to turn away from the scenery and to try
to get back to normal life as soon as they can. This is the reason why there is always
a time of silence, on all sides of the conflict, not only on the side of the losers, but
also on the side of the winners. We know that the Doers after the breakdown of the
Nazi Reich kept this silence as well as their victims. Both sides, winners and losers,
had their skeletons in their cupboard. To ignore, to deny and to keep silence is a
technique of survival of the mind . . . This is a very understandable human attitude
. . . Necessary for mental survival [however] is also the historical memory, the historic
mind. This is a contradiction, which cannot be solved . . .
In all our debates and contributions, some of these questions and
salient contradictory tendencies were addressed. The relevance of the
context has to be considered and accounted for. Whereas forgetting
may be a necessary strategy of survival in some families, states bear a
responsibility towards victims of traumatic events in many ways. Thus,
we necessarily need to pose the question of who was a victim, where,
when, why, and with what consequences? There are also other issues
which necessarily need to be confronted: guilt, trauma, restitution,
and the future of young generations.
In his book Strategies of Remembrance, M. Lane Bruner (2002) es-
tablishes that rhetorical and discourse-analytical investigations of
national identity constructions and politics of the past are more
important than mere academic enquiry:
The contextual analysis of controversial speech related to national identity, and the
isolation of strategies of remembrance that it enables, is a productive move in the
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Justice and Memory.indb 18 02.11.2009 13:38:54
eventual production of more humane systems of human governance, and the develop-
ment of more humane guidelines for the public negotiation of national identity.4
Commemorations may be viewed as empty rituals. They allow the
(positive) self-presentation of the governing parties at the time, or
are politically instrumentalised in manifold ways.5 Of course, as our
conference contributions illustrate, there are also other functions
and patterns as well.
The politics of commemoration therefore faces substantial chal-
lenges: it must ensure that enough importance is placed on present
wrongs, to counteract processes of “banalisation and normalisation”.
They must also ensure that distinctions between our various pasts are
maintained, and that various narratives are not used principally for
politically opportune ends.
To our knowledge, the Bruno Kreisky Forum was one of the few
Austrian institutions to address European historic consciousness in
this way in 2008.
Notes
1 Cf. SANDNER 2003; HEER, MANOSCHEK, POLLAK, WODAK 2003, 2008;
DE CILLIA, WODAK 2009.
2 HALBWACHS 1967: p. 31.
3 Ibid. p. 74.
4 BRUNNER 2002, p. 101.
5 WODAK et al. 2009.
Bibliography
L. M. BRUNER, Strategies of Remembrance, New York: Academic Press,
2002.
R. DE CILLIA, R. WODAK (eds.), Gedenken im ‘Gedankenjahr’, Inns-
bruck: Studienverlag, 2009.
M. HALBWACHS, Das kollektive Gedächtnis, Stuttgart: Enke, 1967.
H. HEER, W. MANOSCHEK, A. POLLAK, R. WODAK (eds.), The
Discursive Construction of History. Remembering the Wehrmacht’s War
of Annihilation, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
19
Justice and Memory.indb 19 02.11.2009 13:38:54
W. MANOSCHEK, G. SANDNER, Defining the Victims of Nazism, in
H. HEER, W. MANOSCHEK, A. POLLAK, R. WODAK (eds.), The
Discursive Construction of History. Remembering the Wehrmacht’s War of
Annihilation, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 99–131.
20
Justice and Memory.indb 20 02.11.2009 13:38:54
A Look at Vienna, 1938
Gitta Sereny
I was sixteen years old and a drama student at the “Reinhardt Semi-
nar”, Max Reinhardt’s school of drama in Vienna, when on March
13, 1938, Hitler, fulfilling the dream of his life, made Austria into a
province of his great German Reich, the “Ostmark”.
It is easy to forget the effect political events can have on individuals,
so allow me to recall for you some things that happened in one place
in those days in 1938.
My school, which I had attended starting in 1936, was, like all Vien-
nese institutions of learning, closed when the Nazis took over and
reopened about ten days later as one of several “Viennese Academies
of Art“, with that now unacceptable name – Max Reinhardt – removed.
The administrator of the seminar who was appointed by Reinhardt
himself in 1933, whose name I will not cite here so as not to risk
upsetting any remaining members of his family, sported a Swastika
pin in his lapel when he addressed us upon our return. He did not
mention the economic benefits of the “Anschluss” – the union with
Germany. In this Austria where the always dormant anti-Semitism
had then reached the boiling point, he only spoke about the Jews.
He told us that the new wind that was blowing through the country
would cleanse – säubern in German, a particularly unpleasant use of
the term in that context – Vienna’s theatres, films and music world.
No Jews would any longer direct or act in German-speaking films or
plays and they were excluded, too, from working in any shape or form
in the music world which they had dominated for so long. The use
of plays written by Jews was prohibited, not only for performances in
theatres or adaptations for the screen, but also for auditions or school
performances. Three teachers, famous actors and directors in Vien-
na’s theatres, who were Jews, would no longer be seen on any stage
or teach us. And any theatre which tried to present a play written by
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Justice and Memory.indb 21 02.11.2009 13:38:54
a Jew, and anyone who produced, directed, or acted in any such play
or film, would make themselves liable to prosecution.
Wisely, I suppose, he made no comment when eight students who
we knew to be particularly political were joined immediately by twelve
others and pointedly left the room in the middle of his remarks.
There were seventy students, nine of them Jewish, in what had
been the “Reinhardt Seminar”. About a third of them courageously
declared themselves “apolitical”; twenty were Nazis, though over the
next months a few more would be infected by the others’ enthusiasm
or, some no doubt urged by parents, accommodated themselves to
the situation. Remarkably however, none of them gave away their
nine Jewish colleagues. Researching later, I found that five of them
had soon emigrated with their families to America. One, a highly
talented member of a famous acting clan, got a contract to the re-
nowned Schauspielhaus in Zurich, and two stayed in Vienna. One of
these managed to change his identity and with the help of friends
muddle through till the Nazis collapsed in 1945; the other, a clever
young girl who had been born in Prague, was caught by the Nazis as
a member of the particularly effective Czech resistance, and died in
a concentration camp.
I, to my sorrow, was no longer in Vienna that summer of 1938: my
mother was getting married in Geneva and, considered too young to
remain in Vienna on my own, I had to leave with her.
But even before then, the atmosphere at the “Seminar” had changed,
in some extraordinary way reflecting the new order. The school had
always been friendly, with help given readily by second year students
to those in the first. Now, totally new for us happy-go-lucky Viennese,
our futures, meaning who would get parts in the school performances
which, depending largely on the ever more powerful administrator’s
agreement, were put on in the beautiful baroque Schönbrunn Palace
Theatre and attended by newspaper critics whose reports had con-
siderable importance, were constantly in question.
I recall one occasion, in February 1938 – just a month before Aus-
tria’s annexation to Germany, which was already openly discussed –,
when the administrator forbade one girl, one of the most talented
in the school, to accept a part she was offered in the “Josefstadt”,
formerly Reinhardt’s theatre, in Vienna. Astonished, for it was an
honour for the school too when its students were chosen to act outside,
22
Justice and Memory.indb 22 02.11.2009 13:38:55
she asked for the reason. When she told us afterwards about this con-
versation, she said the administrator seemed surprised she had even
bothered to ask. “You are a Jewess, aren’t you?” he said, apparently
without any particular animosity, just mentioning an obvious fact.
Like many descendants of Jews, she was a practicing Christian, or at
least, as “practicing” as many young people of any religion were then
and as a matter of fact are now. This was when she realised, she told
us, that he was familiar not only with HER background, but probably
with that of all of the students, and began to wonder what effect her
great-grandmother’s religion would have on her future – for it was
as far back as that, that anyone in her family had been Jewish. (The
administrator would, incidentally, retain his job even after the Nazi
rule was over. “Why was he allowed to keep it?” I asked years later
Helene Thimig, one of Austria’s greatest actresses and Max Rein-
hardt’s widow, to whom I had become close. She shrugged: “I suppose
because nobody wanted to be openly against him – it was difficult to
forget the Nazi time.”)
I was very young and personally not affected, but came to under-
stand very quickly what was happening, and understood that Austria,
which I loved, had ceased to exist as an independent nation free to
make her own decisions. And when people who I knew could not
be guilty of any crime were arrested and others – some of them my
mother’s friends – committed suicide, I understood for the first time
that there was such a thing as right and wrong, even evil in political
and public life. We grew up in that year.
Politics and the adoption or rejection of them were reflected in
everybody’s life – those on the top commanded, those in the middle
schemed to get to the top, and those on the bottom obeyed. Now, sud-
denly, after years of harmony, there was a distinct separation between
the students, not based on anything to do with theatre, but almost
entirely on their reaction to the administrator’s turning out to be
pro-Nazi. Even so, there was no reason for us to be suspicious early
on when, a few days after our return to school, he handed out a form.
It wasn’t considered extraordinary – in Austria there had always been
forms to fill out. The first questions were the normal ones: names,
addresses, our and our parents’ ages, father’s and (“if applicable” it
said) mother’s profession. We didn’t even see any special significance
in the column headed “Creed” (Bekenntnis in German) nor the next
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Justice and Memory.indb 23 02.11.2009 13:38:55
column: “Mother’s and Father’s Creed”. None of us thought that
filling out those columns truthfully could have consequences. All of
us, the Jewish students included, dutifully filled them in – one boy
replaced “Jewish” with “Hebrew”. I remember clearly the silence that
followed his attempt at black humour. Two Jewish students disap-
peared next day. I still don’t know what happened to them. There
are many varieties of guilt in many of us: not having tried then to
find out where they were is one of mine.
Soon though, students no longer joked in class with those of the
teachers who had been easygoing, because no one was any longer
easygoing. There was no more horseplay in the little canteen with
the theatre-mad middle-aged lady with roller-curled platinum dyed
hair who had actually shaken hands with Reinhardt – an almost
unimaginable honour to us. Like all of us, she was unaware that au-
thorities constantly had their eyes on us, and often criticised, in her
thick Viennese, the Austrian Nazis for being “too German”, and the
Germans for understanding nothing about the Viennese. Personalis-
ing – as many Viennese are apt to do – whatever she babbled about
the great art of theatre which, of course, she knew nothing about,
and the incomparable importance of the Catholic religion, “the only
faith of good Christians” she said. A Swiss student who, as a foreigner
had nothing to fear from the authorities, once tried to provoke her:
“So what do you think about there being so many Jews in Vienna?”
he asked.
“That they’ll take our money and drive us into our graves one day,”
she answered promptly, but quickly corrected herself with hypocriti-
cal piety: “We must remember that they are sent by God to try us.”
The worst was that, perfectly aware of the extent politics had begun
to affect everybody’s life, we became self-conscious in our awareness,
not only of our own but our families’ political attitudes and feelings.
No longer were all our conversations focused on theatre and our
concentration on studying roles. As everybody’s career depended
on getting good “engagements” once they finished their training, it
suddenly became essential to know where every theatre manager in
the country and every director stood politically. Having been pretty
optimistic about our professional chances after graduating from this
famous school, we became anxious now that we knew that other things
would count and went to great lengths to find out everything we
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Justice and Memory.indb 24 02.11.2009 13:38:55
could about these men who could become so important in our lives.
Moreover, our personal relationships also suffered when, realising
that our reputations would play a part, too, in where we would end
up, we wondered about each other’s politics and began to look at one
another with suspicion.
It would be several years before the Nazis advanced to the genocide
of what was probably the most creative group in Germany, but it
would be a long time before the pervasive effects this caused became
evident. One can still see this very clearly now in some older people
in the countries Nazi Germany occupied after 1939, in whom their
acceptance and collaboration with the occupiers would later create
a retroactive defensive guilt, to which a number – and I know quite
a few of them for I lived two years under that occupation – are still
prone today.
What is it about that Nazi past that drives us to write books and
make films about it and – let us face it – to bore our children by re-
calling events from it which have no relevance to their lives? I, who
am certainly guilty on all these counts, think about this often.
We all know what puzzles us about just the Germans committing
such dreadful things when Germany, after all, was for more than a
hundred years amongst the most civilised countries in the world. I
know you may now think that I am speaking too much of the past
as people of my generation are apt to do; that we now live in differ-
ent times when nothing infamous can happen in one place without
– thanks to our modern communication facilities – it being known
at once in others. And that, as a consequence, the world has become
interdependent and thus safer.
I wish I could feel that. A few years ago, I was in Stockholm where I
was to speak at an international conference on violence. A 35-minute
Swedish documentary shown before the opening statement by Swe-
den’s Prime Minister, set the tone which the Swedes were determined
would demonstrate that their official neutrality during World War
II had not prevented violence in Sweden either.
The photography for the documentary I saw there had been taken
almost accidentally. “We had been warned that something was going
to occur in that area and came upon the scene when it was already
happening,” a Swedish journalist told me. It showed men in black
uniforms battling civilians, shouting slogans familiar from the
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Justice and Memory.indb 25 02.11.2009 13:38:55
1930’s and 1940’s while police tried to disperse them. The second
tape, obviously made a bit later, showed a perhaps eight to ten year
old lightly coloured boy lying dead in a deserted Stockholm street,
paraphernalia around him (some posters, some sticks, some torn
flags, and a truncheon) pointing to the violence just past, while the
emptiness of the streets and the closed windows of the surrounding
houses communicated the silence that can follow savage events. Of
course I asked how the cameraman and probably an assistant could
have been there and no one next to the dead child. But all this had
taken place years before I came to Stockholm that time and no one
knew the answers to my questions.
“Breaking the Silence”, the title Ruth Wodak suggested for this
weekend of reflection of which this meeting tonight is the start, can
mean many things. Silence about wrongs done by oneself or oth-
ers can stem from ignorance, unavowable knowledge and quarrels
with partners at work or in life. In national or international affairs
countries frequently react with silence to objectionable subjects or
unpleasant events. One example was when the Austrians after 1945
avoided answering questions or to accept discussion of their past as
willing partners of Nazi Germany.
That particular “silence” can be said to have prevailed for forty years
until the prospect in 1986 of Kurt Waldheim becoming President of
Austria provoked a furious controversy, first in the western democ-
racies, then in Austria which had come to think of itself as Hitler’s
first victim, rather than an ally of the Nazis. Waldheim had held top
government posts and served his country honourably in a number
of diplomatic posts for thirty years when he was selected to become
Secretary General of the United Nations, a post he then held for nine
years.
The question why, of all the horrors which have been committed
around the world in the 20th century, it is this “Nazi past” which
continues to lie heaviest on the public mind, can be answered: it
is because they turned killing into an industry. Without justifying
anything at all about the Nazis who were led by an abominable man
and did abominable things, the question we are surely left with is
whether we ever learn anything from the deeds of yesterday’s Hitlers
and Stalins or have to doubt it when we see the Mugabes torturing
and killing in Africa today.
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Justice and Memory.indb 26 02.11.2009 13:38:55
I believe that death needs to be followed by the privacy and emotion
of mourning and that the Nazis robbed us of this privilege when they
turned their death camps into killing factories where the death of
individual human beings, their names, their identities were not even
noted on a piece of paper: where millions were not even acknowledged
to exist.
These fundamentals can too easily be forgotten. But perhaps the
Prime Minister of Sweden’s fairly recent words can help to lead us
into the right direction.
“The greatest danger to freedom” he said, “lies not in the wicked
deeds committed by those who are evil, but in the silence of those
who are good.”
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Justice and Memory.indb 28 02.11.2009 13:38:56
The Politics of Memory
Justice and Memory.indb 29 02.11.2009 13:38:56
Justice and Memory.indb 30 02.11.2009 13:38:56
From Collective Violence to a Common Future:
Four Models for Dealing with a Traumatic Past
Aleida Assmann
The Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit dedicated his book The
Ethics of Memory to his parents, whom he introduced to the reader on
the second page of his preface. “From early childhood,” he writes, “I
witnessed an ongoing discussion between my parents about memory.”
Margalit then reconstructs this parental dialogue, which started after
the Second World War when it became obvious that both of their
huge families in Europe had been destroyed.
This is what his mother used to say:
The Jews were irretrievably destroyed. What is left is just a pitiful remnant of the
great Jewish people [by which she meant European Jewry]. The only honorable
role for the Jews that remains is to form communities of memory – to serve as “soul
candles” like the candles that are ritually kindled in memory of the dead.
This is what his father used to say:
We, the remaining Jews, are people, not candles. It is a horrible prospect for any-
one to live just for the sake of retaining the memory of the dead. That is what the
Armenians opted to do. And they made a terrible mistake. We should avoid it at all
costs. Better to create a community that thinks predominantly about the future and
reacts to the present, not a community that is governed from mass graves.1
After 1945, it was first the father’s position that prevailed – and not
only in Israel. What mattered then in Israel was the collective project
of founding a new state, of forging a new beginning for survivors
and opening up the future for successive generations. Four decades
later, during the 1980s, the mother’s position became more and
more dominant. The survivors turned to the past that they had held
at a distance for so long. After the foundation of the state had been
politically accomplished and confirmed by two wars, Yad Vashem
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became the symbolic cultural center of the nation and Israeli society
transformed itself more and more into a ritualistic community of
memory.
Margalit has presented two paradigmatic solutions for the problem
of dealing with a traumatic past: remembering or forgetting, either
preservation of the past or orientation towards the future. I want to
argue that today, we are no longer dealing with only these two mutu-
ally exclusive models but are experimenting with four. I will refer to
them as
1. dialogic forgetting
2. remembering in order to prevent forgetting
3. remembering in order to forget
4. dialogic remembering
The fourth model is still more of a claim and project than a reality.
All four are attempts at dealing with or overcoming a traumatic his-
tory of violence; I will address them in my paper in this sequence.
All of them are also attempts at overcoming the pernicious basic law
that persists after a traumatic outbreak of violence: the victors impose
their version of history on the defeated victims whose experience is
silenced. Such a memory conquest of the stronger over the weaker
perpetuates and stabilises the oppressive power relations and hence
cannot be conceived here as a “model” for dealing with a traumatic
past. The same is true for an imposed silence which exonerates the
perpetrators and harms the victims. The following models therefore
all deviate from these basic and widespread modes of preserving a re-
pressive status quo in trying to limit and overcome traumatic violence
by negotiating a new and mutual vision or memory of the past.
1. Dialogic Forgetting
It is an age-old experience that the memory of violence, injustice,
suffering and unsettled accounts is prone to generate new violence,
mobilising aggression between neighbours which breaks societies
apart. This is why humans in history have looked for pragmatic
solutions how to bring to an end a lethal conflict by controlling and
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containing the explosive force of memory.2 Forgetting was discovered
time and again in history as a resource under such circumstances.
The term must not be taken too literally in this context. It is but
another expression for “silence”. While the silence that is imposed
by the victors on the losers is the perennial strategy of repressive
regimes to muffle the voices of resistors and victims, self-imposed
dialogic silence is a model for peace designed and agreed upon by
two parties connected through actions of mutual violence in order
to keep an explosive past at bay. Such a forgetting was introduced,
for instance, in ancient Greece after civil wars in order to achieve
closure after a period of internal violence and to mark a new era in
which a divided society could grow together again.3 Of course the
state could not directly influence the memories of its citizens, but it
could prohibit the public articulation of resentments that were liable
to reactivate old hatred and new violence. After the Peloponnesian
War, an Athenian law ordered such a form of stipulated forgetting.4
The injunction to forget was legally enforced by restricting public
communication through specific taboos. A new word was even coined
to describe what was henceforth forbidden: mnesikakein which means
literally: to remember what is bad. The same model was implemented
after other civil wars, for instance the Thirty-Years-War. The 1648
peace treaty of Münster-Osnabrück contains the formula: perpetua
oblivio et amnestia.5 This policy of forgetting often goes hand in hand
with a blanket amnesty in order to end mutual hatred and achieve a
new social integration of formerly opposed parties.
It is interesting to note that even after 1945 the model of dialogic
forgetting was still widely used as a political resource. The internation-
al court of the Nuremberg trials had of course dispensed transitional
justice by indicting major Nazi functionaries for the newly defined
“crime against humanity”. This, however, was an act of purging rather
than remembering the past. In postwar Germany, the public sphere
and that of official diplomacy remained largely shaped by what was
called “a pact of silence”. The term was used 1983 in a retrospective
description by Hermann Lübbe (“kollektives Beschweigen”).6 He made
the controversial point that maintaining silence was a necessary prag-
matic strategy adopted in postwar Germany (and supported by the
allies) to facilitate the economic and political reconstruction of the
state and the integration of society. These goals were swiftly achieved
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in West Germany at the price of putting the former NS elites back
into power. Dialogic forgetting or the pact of silence became, as Tony
Judt has also shown, a strategy of European politics. It was widely
adopted during the period of the cold war in which much had to be
forgotten in order to consolidate the new Western military alliance
against that of the Communist block.7
A complex example for the strategy of forgetting is the case of the
Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The victor of this war, General Franco,
stayed in power until 1975. During his dictatorship the victor’s narra-
tive prevailed. It was entrenched in textbooks and public monuments,
silencing the point of view and memory of the defeated Republicans.
Thus, the victor’s memory was established and enforced as the official
perspective on this past (including the prohibition to challenge it).
After Franco’s death in 1975, an unwritten law came into practice,
generally referred to as “the pact of forgetting”. The prescribed si-
lence was introduced as a model to ensure an easy transition into a
new democracy. The formula “amnesia and amnesty” prevailed once
more, but, given the established state of an asymmetric memory, it
had the further one-sided effect of offering a general amnesty to the
Francistic functionaries. Only in October 2007, seventy years after
the civil war, an important shift occurred that brought the one-sided
pact of forgetting to an abrupt end: Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero
passed a so-called “memory law” in parliament which finally intro-
duced the Republican version of the civil war into public memory by
explicitly condemning the Fascist dictatorship and acknowledging the
memory and suffering of its victims. This change in memory policy
is significant: at a belated stage, this covered-up chapter of history is
now forcefully and literally reintroduced into the present in painful
acts of uncovering mass graves and exhuming the bodies of killed
family members. In spite of its ongoing controversies, the Spanish
example shows that between the 1970s and the 1990 the norms and
standards of democratic states have undergone a decisive change.
During the last two decades, we could witness a general re-orientation
from their policy of forgetting to new cultures of remembering.
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2. Remembering in order to never forget
Especially after civil wars, forgetting was prescribed as a potent remedy
against socially dangerous and explosive forms of remembering to
foster a speedy integration. Dialogic silence was a remedy but it was
clearly no general cure in other situations to dispose of a traumatic
past. The pact of forgetting works only after mutual forms of violence
between combatants or under the pressure of a new military alliance
like NATO. It cannot work after situations of asymmetric relations
in which all-powerful perpetrators attacked defenseless victims. The
paradigmatic case of such an asymmetric situation of extreme violence
is the Nazi genocide of European Jews.
The paradigmatic shift from the model of forgetting to an orien-
tation towards remembering occurred with the return of Holocaust
memory after a period of latency. This memory returned in various
steps. In the 1960s it reemerged together with the images of the
Eichmann trial in Jerusalem which were projected into a transna-
tional public arena. The televised event transformed the silenced
memories of Israeli and diasporic Jewish families into a new ethnic
community of memory. After the broadcasting of the American tel-
evision series “Holocaust” in 1978, the impact of this event spilled over
to those who had no share in the historical experience, but joined
the memory community on the basis of empathy. In the 1980s and
90s, a number of events happened in Germany that transformed the
social consensus and made the nation of the former perpetrators
ready to formally join the transnational Holocaust community of
memory. After 2000, this memory community was further extended
when it was officially taken up by other European states and the
United Nations. This general turn from amnesia to anamnesis could
be witnessed in Germany and the respective countries on all levels
of personal and collective remembering; it was supported by books
and films, public debates and exhibitions, museums, monuments
and acts of commemoration on a social, national and transnational
level. Holocaust memory today is supported by an extended com-
munity with a long-term commitment. This memory is sealed with
a special pledge for an indefinite future: “to remember in order to
never forget”. Through its widening in space as well as time it has
acquired the quality of a civil religion.
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In the case of the Holocaust, the model of dialogic forgetting as
a strategy of sealing a traumatic past and opening up a new future
was no longer considered a viable solution for the problem. On the
contrary, this form of closure was exactly what had to be prevented
by all means. Remembering was the only adequate response to such
collectively destructive and devastating experiences. It was rediscov-
ered not only as a therapeutic remedy for the survivors but also as a
spiritual and ethical obligation for the millions of dead victims. Thus,
slowly but inevitably, the pact of forgetting was transformed into a
“pact of remembering”. The aim of such a pact is to transform the
asymmetric experience of violence into symmetric forms of remember-
ing. To leave the memory of suffering to the affected victim group
was now recognised as prolonging the original murderous constel-
lation. The fatal polarity between perpetrator and victim can never
be reconciled but it can be overcome by a shared memory based on
an empathetic and ethical recognition of the victim’s memories. The
establishing of such a “pact of remembering” between the Germans
as the successors of the perpetrators and the Jews as the successors of
the victims was a historically new and unique answer to the histori-
cally unprecedented crime of the Holocaust.8
3. Remembering in order to forget
The cumulative process of the returning Holocaust memory was a
decisive event in the 1980s that brought about a profound change
in sensibility in other places of the world also dealing with historic
traumas. Against this background of a new awareness of the suffering
of victims, forgetting was no longer acceptable as a general policy in
overcoming atrocities of the past. Remembering became a universal
ethical and political claim when dealing with other historic traumas
such as the dictatorships in South America, the South-African regime
of apartheid, colonial history or the crime of slavery. In most of
these discourses about other atrocities, references and metaphorical
allusions were made to the newly established memory icon of the
Holocaust. I want to argue, however, that although the Holocaust
became the prototype of traumatic memories and was and is regularly
invoked in the rhetoric of memory activists all over the world, it was
36
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not chosen as a model. The transformation of traumatic suffering into
a semi-religious transnational and perpetual memory is not what was
and is aimed at in other contexts. When I described the shift from
the second to the third model as one of “remembering in order to
never forget” to “remembering in order to forget”, I am exaggerating
the difference for the purpose of analytic clarity. I therefore hasten
to add, that “forget” in the context of the third model must not be
taken too literally as an act of erasure or wiping the slate clean. It
stands rather for the urge to leave behind and go beyond – in this the
third model clearly deviates from a semi-religious fixation of and on
a normative past as a form of negative revelation.
Since the 1980s and 90s, we have witnessed a new policy of memory
that is no longer in strict opposition to forgetting but in alliance with
it. In this model, the aim is also “forgetting”, but the way to achieve
this aim paradoxically leads through remembering. In this case, re-
membering is not implemented to memorialize an event of the past
into an indefinite future but is introduced as a therapeutic tool to
cleanse, to purge, to heal, to reconcile. It is not pursued as an end in
itself but as a means to an end, which is the forging of a new begin-
ning.
Cultures in history have produced ample evidence for such forms of
transitory and transitional remembering. In the ritual framework of
Christian confession remembering is the introduction to forgetting:
the sins have to be publicly articulated and listed before they can be
blotted out through the absolution of the priest. A similar logic is at
work in the artistic concept of “catharsis”: through the re-presenta-
tion of a painful event on stage a traumatic past can be once more
collectively re-lived and overcome in the very process of doing so.
According to the theory of Aristotle, the group that undergoes such
a process is purged in this shared experience. Forgetting through
remembering is at bottom also the goal of Freudian psychotherapy:
a painful past has to be raised onto the level of language and con-
sciousness in order to be able to move forward and leave it behind.
“To remember in order to forget” holds also true for the witness at
court whose sole function is to support with his testimony the legal
procedure of finding the truth and reaching a verdict. As the goal
of every trial is the verdict and conclusion of the procedure, its aim
is closure and therewith the final erasure of the event from social
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memory.9 There is a world of a difference between the legal witness
testifying to a crime within the institution of the court and the “moral
witness” (Avishai Margalit) testifying publicly to a crime against hu-
manity outside the courtroom before a moral community. While the
former’s narrative is subordinated to the legal process, the testimony
of the latter is part of a civic culture of remembrance. A merging
of the legal and therapeutic function was aimed at in the staging of
remembering in South Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation Com-
mission as designed by Bishop Tutu und Alex Boraine created a new
form of public ritual, which combined features of the tribunal, the
cathartic drama and the Christian confession. In these public rituals
a traumatic event had to be publicly narrated and shared; the victim
had to tell his or her experiences and they had to be witnessed and
acknowledged by the accused before they could be erased from social
memory.
The model of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was
invented in South America when countries such as Chile, Uruguay,
Argentina and Brazil transitioned from military dictatorships to de-
mocracy in the 1980s and 90s. By enforcing the moral human rights
paradigm, new political and extremely influential concepts were
coined such as “human rights violations” and “state terrorism”. This
led to the establishment of investigative commissions, which became
the antecedent of later Truth commissions. They emphasised the
transformative value of truth and stressed the importance of acts of
remembrance. “‘Remember, so as not to repeat’ began to emerge as
a message and as a cultural imperative.”10 Within the human rights
framework, a new and highly influential concept of victimhood was
constructed. It replaced the older frameworks within which power
struggles used to be debated in terms of class struggles, national revo-
lutions or political antagonisms. By resorting to the universal value
of bodily integrity and human rights, the new terminology depoliti-
cised the conflict and led to the elaboration of memory policies.11 In
the new framework of a human rights agenda and a new memory
culture, other forms of state violence could also be addressed such
as racial and gender discrimination, repression and the rights of
indigenous people. When decades and sometimes centuries elapse
after a traumatic past, justice in the full sense is no longer possible;
memory, however, was discovered as an important symbolic resource
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to retrospectively acknowledge these crimes against humanity. What
the transnational movement of abolition was for the 19th century, the
new transnational concept of victimhood is for the late 19th and early
20th century. The important change is, however, that now the victims
speak for themselves and claim their memories in a globalised public
arena. The dissemination of their voices and their public visibility
and audibility has created a new “world ethos” that is not automati-
cally enforced but makes it increasingly difficult for state authorities
to continue a repressive policy of forgetting and silence.
A new response to the disenfranchised discourse of human rights
and mutual global media observation is the memory policy of public
apology. We are without doubt, writes Christopher Daase, “living in an
age of political apologies: The Pope apologises for the inquisition, the
United Nations apologise for their inactiveness during the genocide
in Rwanda, the Queen apologises for the repression of the Maori in
New Zealand, President Jacques Chirac for the Dreyfus affair and
President Bill Clinton for the slave trade.”12 The list can go on and it
does go on. Whatever we may think of these acts, they are evidence of
new departures in the construction of nations as moral communities
in the contemporary world of media observation. Democratic states
and their societies distinguish themselves from others in taking the
principles of care and public accountability seriously.13 This involves
a new memory policy and culture of remembrance that addresses
unresolved issues of the past and listens with empathy to the voices
of victims.
The TRC in South Africa placed “truth” (rather than justice) in the
first position. It was inspired by the idea of reconciliation and hence
by negotiation, compromise and an orientation towards integration
and a new beginning. Today there are almost thirty TRCs working all
over the world, where the rules of the procedure have to be reinvented
each time according to the specific circumstances. Their aim is first
and foremost a pragmatic one: they are designed as instruments for
“mastering the past”.14 The fact that the equivalent German term
“Vergangenheitsbewältigung” has a negative ring is another indicator of
the difference between the second and the third model that I am here
proposing. Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the sense of mastering the past
is the explicit aim of the third model, while perpetual preservation
of a normative past is the aim of the second model. We have learned
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in the meantime that a new beginning cannot be forged on a tabula
rasa, nor is there such a thing as a zero hour. To begin anew requires
not forgetting but remembering. The road from authoritarian to civil
societies leads through the needle’s eye of facing, remembering and
coming to terms with a burdened past. The transformation process
of memory that starts with TRC commissions on the political level
has to be deepened on the social level, which takes much more time.
But however long it may take and how deep it may go, remember-
ing is not the aim of the process but only its medium. The aim is to
facilitate recognition, reconciliation and, eventually, “forgetting” in
the sense of putting a traumatic past behind in order to be able to
imagine a common future.
4. Dialogic Remembering
With the third model, we have looked at cases in which a state transi-
tions from dictatorship to democracy or confronts a traumatic history
in order to create a shared moral consensus within its nation and
society. My fourth model applies to situations that transcend such
internal reconstructions of nations and societies. It concerns the
memory policy of two or more states that share a common legacy of
traumatic violence. Two countries engage in a dialogic memory if they
face a shared history of mutual violence by mutually acknowledging
their own guilt and empathy with the suffering they have inflicted
on others.
As a rule, national memories are not dialogic but monologic. They
are constructed in such a way that they are identity-enhancing and
self-celebrating; their main function is generally to “enhance and
celebrate” a positive collective self image. National memories are
self-serving and therein closely aligned to national myths, which Peter
Sloterdijk has appropriately termed modes of “self-hypnosis”. With
respect to traumatic events, these myths provide effective protection
shields against events that a nation prefers to forget. When facing
negative events in the past, there are only three dignified roles for the
national collective to assume: that of the victor who has overcome the
evil, that of the resistor who has heroically fought the evil and that
of the victim who has passively suffered the evil. Everything else lies
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outside the scope of these memory perspectives and is conveniently
forgotten.
After the Second World War, for instance, with the Germans in the
evident role of the perpetrators, all the other national memories chose
one of these dignified positions: the narrative of the victor was that
of the allies, the narrative of the resistor was assumed by the GDR
and by France, the narrative of the victim was chosen by Poland and
Austria. After 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union, the opening
of Eastern European archives brought to light a number of documents
that challenged some of these clear-cut memory constructions. The
Holocaust that had been a peripheral site in the Second World War
moved gradually into its center to become its defining event. In the
light of this shift in historical perspective, new evidence of active
collaboration, passive support, and indifference to the crime of the
Holocaust brought about a crisis in national memories. In Western
Europe, the national constructions of memory have become more
complex through the acknowledgement of collaboration. In many
Eastern states, however, the memory of the Holocaust has to com-
pete with the memory of one’s own victimhood and suffering under
communist oppression which is a hot memory that emerged only
after the end of the cold war. Because there is a notorious shortage
in memory capacity the atrocities that one has suffered claim more
space than the atrocities that one has committed.
Another lack of dialogic memory has become manifest in the rela-
tions between Russia and Eastern European nations. While Russian
memory is centered around the great patriotic war and Stalin is cel-
ebrated today as the national hero, the nations that broke away from
Soviet power maintain a strikingly different memory of Stalin that
has to do with deportations, forced labor and mass-killings. The tri-
umphalist memory of Russia and the traumatic memory of Eastern
European nations clash at the internal borders of Europe and fuel
continuous irritations and conflicts.
There are dark incidents that are well known to historians and
emphatically commemorated by the traumatized country but totally
forgotten by the nation that was immediately responsible for the
suffering. While in the mean time they have learned a lot about the
Holocaust, younger Germans today know next to nothing about the
legacy of the Second World War and the atrocities committed by
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Justice and Memory.indb 41 02.11.2009 13:38:58
Germans against, for instance, their Polish and Russian neighbours.
The Warsaw uprising, a seminal event commemorated in Poland,
is unknown to Germans because it is fully eclipsed by the Warsaw
ghetto uprising. Germans have rightly reclaimed the area bombing
of Dresden for their national memory, but they have totally forgot-
ten a key event of Russian memory, namely the Leningrad Blockade
(1941–44) by the German Wehrmacht, through which 700.000 Russians
were starved to death.15 This event has never entered German national
memory due to a lack of interest, empathy and external pressure.
There are promising beginnings between teachers and historians
of neighbouring countries working on shared textbooks and mutual
perceptions. On the whole, however, dialogic memory is still more
of a project than a reality and is best exemplified by its absence. It
must be emphasised, however, that the European Union creates a
challenge to the solipsistic constructions of national memory and
provides an ideal framework for dialogic remembering. As we all
know, the European Union is itself the consequence of a traumatic
legacy of an entangled history of unprecedented violence. If it is to
develop further from an economic and political network to a com-
munity of values, the sharing of traumatic memories will have to play
an important part in this process. Janusz Reiter, the former Polish
ambassador to Germany, commented on this situation: “With respect
to its memories, the European Union remains a split continent. After
its extension, the line that separated the EU from other countries now
runs right through it.” On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of Buchenwald, the former prisoner of the concentration
camp Jorge Semprún said that one of the most effective possibili-
ties to forge a common future for the EU is “to share our past, our
remembrance, our hitherto divided memories”. And he added that
the Eastern extension of the EU can only work “once we will be able
to share our memories, including those of the countries of the other
Europe, the Europe that was caught up in Soviet totalitarianism”.16
As early as the 1920s, the historian Marc Bloch criticised the mono-
logic character of national memory constructions, describing their
solipsistic nature as a “dialogue between the deaf”. 80 years after
Bloch the European Union is offering a framework which makes
possible and demands the restructuring of monologic into dialogic
memories. Dialogic remembering which is, of course, applicable in
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any region of the world has a special relevance for Europe; it could
produce a new type of nation state that is not exclusively grounded
in pride but also accepts its quantum of guilt, thus ending a destruc-
tive history of violence by including the victims of this violence into
one’s own memory. Such an inclusive memory, which is based on the
moral standard of accountability and human rights, can in turn help
to back up the protection of human rights and support the values of
a civil society.
Dialogic remembering links two nations through their common
knowledge of a shared legacy of a traumatic past. This, however, does
by no means entail a unified master narrative for Europe. Richard
Sennet has remarked that it needs a plurality of contesting memo-
ries in order to acknowledge uncomfortable facts. That is exactly the
potential that the frame of the EU has to offer: the transforming of
solipsistic into dialogic memories, even though it may take another
shift of sensibility before this potential will eventually be embraced
by its member states.
Conclusion
The Israeli writer Amos Oz once remarked: “If I had a say in the
peace talks – no matter where, in Wye, Oslo or wherever – I would
instruct the sound technicians to turn off the microphones as soon
as one of the negotiating parties starts talking about the past. They
are paid for finding solutions for the present and the future.”17 Un-
fortunately, issues concerning the confronting of the past and the
solving of urgent problems for the future are not always so easy to
sever. On the contrary, all over the world acts of remembering are
today part and parcel of the project of establishing the foundations
of a more just society and a better future.
It must be conceded, however, that memories are double-edged and
can promote integration as well as disintegration: they are both part
of the problem (as Amos Oz suggests) and of its solution. Whether
memories are part of the problem by prolonging inequality and
violence or whether they are a means to overcome it depends on the
way they are framed in a given political and social situation. In my
paper, I have focused on four models that have been devised and ap-
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plied to cope with a traumatic legacy of the past and to forge a new
beginning.
The first model, dialogic forgetting was prescribed to achieve the
closure of a violent past in a symmetric situation of power. Forgetting
or silence can only work to create the basis for a new future if the ag-
gression was not one-sided but mutual. While repressive silence is the
“natural state” that continues the violence by prolonging oppressive
power relations, protecting the perpetrators and harming the victims,
dialogic silence is built on a mutual agreement.
The second model, remembering in order to never forget, has to
be considered as the unique answer to the unique historic trauma of
the Holocaust. The shift from forgetting to remembering, which is
linked to the Jewish trauma and evolved over the last four decades,
has irreversibly changed our moral sensibility on a global scale.
While the memory of the Holocaust was conducive to the emergence
of other memories, it did not, I would claim, become theirmodel.
The Holocaust is unique given the methods of its execution and the
number of irredeemable and irreconcilable victims. The answer to it is
a monumental memory that is semi-religious and an end in itself.
The third model is not unique at all but has been replicated in
variations all over the world. It can be paraphrased as remembering
in order to eventually forget in the sense of mastering the past and
putting it behind. I wanted to show that there is a clear difference
between the semi-religious memorialisation of the past (my second
model) and the mastering of the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung),
which calls for moral accountability with respect to atrocities com-
mitted in the past. Not only punishments but also “public displays of
remorse, no matter whether they stem from instrumental, rhetorical
or normative motivations, are central elements of collective conflict
resolution and reconciliation processes”.18
The last model is again dialogic and relational, this time applied
between states (but also possible for groups within one state). Dia-
logic remembering transforms a traumatic history of violence into
an acknowledgement of guilt. On the basis of this shared knowledge
the two states can coexist peacefully rather than be exposed to the
pressure of periodical eruptions of scandals and renewed violence.
For the fourth model, however, there are as yet only few illustrations.
It is still best described by its conspicuous absence.
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Memories, to sum up, are dynamic. What is being remembered of
the past is largely dependent on the cultural frames, moral sensi-
bilities and demands of the ever-changing present. During the cold
war, the memory of the Second World War was very different from
today, the Holocaust has moved from the periphery to the center of
West European memory only during the last two decades, but also
other historic traumas went through periods of latency before they
became the object of remembering and commemoration. Today, na-
tional memories emerge and are presented in a transnational if not
in a global arena where they coexist in a web of mutual contiguities,
references, imitations and reactions.
Remembering trauma evolves between the extremes of keeping the
wound open on the one hand and looking for closure on the other. It
takes place simultaneously on the separate but interrelated levels of
individuals, of society and the state. It therefore has a psychological,
a moral and a political dimension. But we must not forget that it also
has a religious dimension when it comes to the proper burying as a
prerequisite for the memory of the dead. It is precisely this cultural
and religious duty of laying the dead to rest, that is so shockingly
disrupted after periods of excessive violence. In the case of millions of
Jewish victims, there are no graves because their bodies were gassed,
burnt and dissolved into air. For this reason this wound cannot be
closed. At other places the victims were “disappeared” or shot and
hid in anonymous mass graves. Some of these, relating to the Span-
ish civil war, are reopened only now after more than 70 years.19 After
the politicians and the society have expressed their respect for the
victims, it is finally up to the family members to perform these last
acts of reverence.
Notes
1 MARGALIT 2003: p. vii–ix.
2 Machiavelli once warned the victors that it is easy to conquer a people, but next
to impossible to conquer their memories. Unless they are scattered and dispersed,
the citizens of a conquered city will never forget their former freedom and their
old memories. They will introduce them on the every occasion that presents itself.
MACHIAVELLI 1955: p.19.
3 EMRICH, SMITH 1996; MARGALIT, SMITH 1997.
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Justice and Memory.indb 45 02.11.2009 13:38:58
4 LORAUX 1997.
5 The peace treaty (Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugensis of 24th October 1648)
contains the following article: “Both sides grant each other a perpetual forgetting
and amnesty concerning every aggressive act committed in any place in any way
by both parties here and there since the beginning of the war.” BUSCHMANN
1994: p. 17.
6 See ASSMANN, FREVERT 1999: pp. 76–78.
7 JUDT 2005.
8 A problematic side effect of this model is the perpetuation of a neat division of
perpetrators and victims which is programmed and transmitted as fixed an im-
mutable across generations in the respective national memories into an indefinite
future. It may constrain the capacity of these nations for re-imagining themselves
in the future. It also has an effect on the possibility of social and political coexist-
ence within a state. The former victims and former perpetrators of the genocide
are today separated in different nations: Israel and The United States on the
one hand and Germany (together with Austria and other collaborating nations)
on the other. Germany, however, is also becoming the site of growing Jewish
communities which was possible only on the basis of a clear and responsible
relation of the Germans to their past, an exemplary attitude that was ironically
referred to as the German DIN- norm of remembering. The coexistence of Jews
with Germans in the former country of the perpetrators is highly complicated;
it requires them necessarily to reinforce their difference and to take a kind of
extraterritorial position.
9 SHENNE 2007: pp. 79–91.
10 JELIN 2006: p. 5; see also JELIN 2003.
11 JELIN 2006: p. 6.
12 DAASE 2009.
13 BORNEMANN 2002: pp. 281–304; BENNETT 2008.
14 See HAZAN 2007. The edition of May 2007 is dedicated to the problem of re-
establishing justice after armed conflicts.
15 To quote from a recent historical account: The siege of Leningrad was “an inte-
gral part of the unprecedented German war of extermination against the civilian
population of the Soviet Union. (. . .) Considering the number of victims and the
permanence of the terror, it was the greatest catastrophe that hit a city during
the Second World War. The city was cut off from the outside world for almost
900 days from September 7th to 27th January 1944.” GANZENMÜLLER 2005:
p. 20. See also JAHN 2007.
16 SEMPURÚN 2005.
17 OZ 1998: p. 83.
18 DAASE 2009.
19 INGENDAAY 2008: p. 40. Bibliography
46
Justice and Memory.indb 46 02.11.2009 13:38:59
Bibliography
A. ASSMANN, U. FREVERT, Geschichtsvergessenheit, Geschichtsvers-
essenheit. Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945,
Stuttgart: DVA, 1999.
J. C. BENNETT, The Apology Ritual. A Philosophical Theory of Punish-
ment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
J. BORNEMANN, Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing: Listening,
Retribution, Affiliation, in Public Culture, Volume 14, Number 2,
Spring 2002, pp. 281–304.
A. BUSCHMANN, Kaiser und Reich. Verfassungsgeschichte des Heiligen
Römischen Reiches Deutscher Nation vom Beginn des 12. Jahrhunderts
bis zum Jahre 1806 in Dokumenten, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1994.
C . DAASE, <bundesstiftung-friedensforschung.net/projektfoerd-
erung/forschung/daase.html>, 9.3.2009.
H. EMRICH, G. SMITH (eds.), Vom Nutzen des Vergessens, Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 1996.
J. GANZENMÜLLER, Das belagerte Leningrad 1941–1944. Die Stadt in
den Strategien von Angreifern und Verteidigern, Paderborn: Schön-
ingh, 2005.
P. HAZAN, Das neue Mantra der Gerechtigkeit, in Überblick. Deutsche
Zeitschrift für Entwicklungspolitik, Mai 2007.
T. HENNE, Zeugenschaft vor Gericht, in M. ELM, G. KÖSSLER (eds.),
Zeugenschaft des Holocaust. Zwischen Trauma, Tradierung und Ermit-
tlung, Frankfurt–New York: Campus, 2007.
P. INGENDAAY, Der Bürgerkrieg ist immer noch nicht vorbei, in FAZ Nr.
276, 15. November 2008.
P. JAHN, 27 Millionen, in Die ZEIT Nr. 25, 14. Juni 2007.
E. JELIN, State Repression and the Labors of Memory, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
E. JELIN, Memories of State Violence: The Past in the Present, Storrs,
Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut 2006.
T. JUDT, Postwar. A History of Europe Since 1945, Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 2005.
N. LORAUX, La Cité divisée. L’Oubli dans la Mémoire d’Athènes, Paris :
Payot, 1997.
N. MACHIAVELLI, Der Fürst, Stuttgart: Kröner, 1955.
47
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A. MARGALIT, G. SMITH (eds.), Amnestie, oder Die Politik der Erin-
nerung, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1997.
A. MARGALIT, The Ethics of Memory, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2003.
A. OZ, Israelis und Araber: Der Heilungsprozeß, in Trialog der Kulturen im
Zeitalter der Globalisierung, Sinclair–Haus Gespräche, 11. Gespräch
5.–8. Dezember 1998, Herbert Quandt-Stiftung, Bad Homburg
v.d. Höhe.
J. SEMPURÚN, Nobody will be able any more to say: this is how it was!,
in Die Zeit, 14. April 2005. (Transl. A.A.)
48
Justice and Memory.indb 48 02.11.2009 13:38:59
Justice, Truth, and Peace
Three Dimensions of Consequences
Anton Pelinka
In dealing with war crimes and crimes against humanity, three differ-
ent, sometimes conflicting patterns have been developed since 1945.
The three patterns can be distinguished according to their different
guarding principles:
– Justice: Perpetrators must be brought to court and convicted.
– Truth: All major aspects of the crimes must become known to the
public.
– Peace: At the end of any process, social reconciliation must become
possible.
The paper’s basic hypothesis is: In the short run, neglecting justice
and truth in favour of peace and reconciliation may have a positive
impact on stabilizing democracy in a peaceful way; but in the long
run, such neglect has its price especially regarding social peace.
The three patterns are not necessarily conflicting. In many cases
– especially after World War II, in the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials
and in the occupation policies in Germany and Japan – an optimum
had been found in combining all three goals. But in some cases, an
approach has been used to promote one of the three patterns by giv-
ing that pattern priority over the others. The South African Truth
Commissions are not primarily oriented on establishing justice; and
in some other cases, like in the first years of post-Franco Spain, peace
by reconciliation is the dominant purpose – if necessary, at the cost
of justice and truth.
The paper will try to deal with these three patterns by elaborating
three dimensions:
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Justice and Memory.indb 49 02.11.2009 13:38:59
– First, stressing the necessity to go beyond a pure functionalist ap-
proach; beyond the aspect of constructing, deconstructing, and
reconstructing history. Despite the not disputed importance of
the functionalist approach – who (de- or re-) constructed specific
events out of specific interests to be allowed speaking of “truth”,
the substance of the instrumentalised events are central. Without
the insistence on referring to reality, on proving reality, on meas-
uring reality, the discourse about justice, truth and peace becomes
an arbitrary meta-debate. Without comparing the quality and the
quantity of evidence, any debate about conflicting narratives is
losing any kind of academic liability and responsibility.
– Secondly, distinguishing between elites and society. Justice especially
cannot be implemented in the same way for elites and for societies.
As justice has to be always seen as linked to personal responsibility,
justice for persons accused of crimes is a completely different mat-
ter than justice for a nation or a country. And: Reconciliation as
the main purpose of educating a new generation is a very different
matter than reconciliation between the leaders of warring armies,
factions, nations.
– Thirdly, discussing the phenomena of the intergenerational trans-
fer. It is evident that some of the most horrendous crimes became
more of a mobilizing factor after one (or even more) generation.
Narratives can be of very secondary importance after one genera-
tion; others are of even more defining power after decades. To get
an understanding of this dimension, the reference to the real past
– beyond (de-, re-) construction is necessary.
– Substituting for a systematic conclusion, at the end the case of Aus-
tria is used as an example: How reconciliation has its price – neglect-
ing justice, covering up truth; and how the short-term advantages
of this kind of reconciliation have their long-term disadvantages.
Austria’s two different reconciliations – regarding the end of the
First Republic 1934 and regarding the Austrian involvement in the
Nazi regime, including all its crimes – have some distinct Austrian
qualities; but they can also be seen as an example for the logics
truth and justice are linked to reconciliation and peace.
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Dimension 1: Which tragedy, which trauma?
It is not sufficient to debate the “meta level” – the meaning, the percep-
tion, the interpretation of certain facts. It is not enough to talk about
the interests behind a specific narrative. It is necessary to go into the
substance. It is necessary to distinguish: tragedy is not tragedy is not
tragedy; mass murder is not mass murder; war is not war.
The Baltic Republics today are confronted with a discourse about
the different Holocausts.1 There is much talk of a “Holocaust against
the Lithuanian (or Latvian or Estonian) people” – a term which
equates the Soviet policy of violent (better: murderous) expulsion
of the Lithuanian (or Latvian or Estonian) elites and the policy of
Russification with the extermination of Jews. Is any tragedy called
“Holocaust” identical to what became “the” Holocaust? To answer
this question, we have to go into the substance: The expulsion of the
elites in the Baltic states, combined with murderous methods; and
the promotion of Russian migration into the Baltic region must be
called a crime, can be called a crime against humanity – but trying
to kill all the members of a society (and almost succeeding in this)
is different from killing the elites of a society in order to get control
over that society. The intention of Soviet policy even under Stalin was
not the annihilation of any kind of Lithuanian or Latvian or Estonian
society. The intention of the Nazi policy was to kill anyone defined
as Jewish – was to annihilate any kind of Jewish existence, of Jewish
society.
Underlining this substantial difference cannot and must not be
understood as an attempt to neglect the systematic crimes against
the Baltic societies. But it is necessary to stress the difference of the
general fate of Jews in the Baltic under Nazi rule – and the general
fate of Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians under Soviet rule.
It is necessary to compare: The “ethnic cleansing” in Poland, Czech-
oslovakia, and Yugoslavia in 1945 can be called a crime – and must be
called a systematic crime as it contradicts basic human rights. But it
is not on the same level – neither quantitatively, nor qualitatively with
the Holocaust. It is necessary to learn about and to understand the
Palestinian narrative of 1948. But comparing it with the Holocaust:
while there is reason to condemn the treatment of the Palestinians
in 1948 and the years after as a violation of basic rights, it is – again,
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Justice and Memory.indb 51 02.11.2009 13:38:59
in its qualitative and quantitative dimension – different from the
Holocaust.
The Holocaust is not “unique”, but “unprecedented”. But this
implies a dreadful possibility: “Although the Holocaust has no prec-
edent, it could become one.”2 This potential of the future opens the
debate again to simplifications: Is the fate of Bosniaks in the former
Yugoslavia in 1995, the fate of Sudanese in Darfur after 2000 not only
comparable but identical with the fate of the European Jews between
1939 and 1945? Again: It is necessary to compare the quality of mass
murder – the intention of the perpetrators and the consequence of
their deeds; and it is necessary to compare the quantity – what is the
percentage of the victims able to survive?
Fascism is not Fascism is not Fascism. Too easily the term fascism
is used to blur significant differences between different regimes.
Spain under Franco is not Italy under Mussolini is not Austria under
Dollfuß is not Portugal under Salazar is not Hungary under Horthy
– and they all are not Germany under Hitler.
All these different types of fascism or semi-fascism have a lot in
common – non-democratic rule, oppression of political opponents,
ending the rule of law. But the intensity of suppression as well as the
existence of a monopolistic mass party make a lot of difference – not
to speak of the Holocaust which is the decisive quality of Nazism and
not of fascism in general. Neither Dollfuß’ Austria nor Mussolini’s
Italy, neither Franco’s Spain nor Salazar’s Portugal are responsible
for a Holocaust like mass murder. But Pavelic’s Croatia can be and
probably must be put into the same category as Hitler’s Germany. And
Horthy’s Hungary? It is once more necessary to compare: Hungary
before and after March 1944 – when, after German troops occupied
Hungary, the Hungarian government voluntarily cooperated with the
German-inspired and controlled extermination policy, very much like
the Vichy government did in France.
Everything can be, must be compared with everything – but nothing
is the same. Comparing is not equating – on the contrary, if we insist
that Cambodia’s “killing fields” is not the same kind of tragedy, and
especially not the same kind of crime (neither in quantitative, nor
in qualitative terms) as the GDR-regime, we have to compare first.
If we insist that Franco’s regime has been a very different form of
fascism, different from Hitler’s regime and German fascism, we have
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Justice and Memory.indb 52 02.11.2009 13:39:00
to compare first. If we insist that dictatorship is not dictatorship, our
evaluation must be based on solid comparison – on what else?
Ethnic cleansing is not ethnic cleansing is not ethnic cleansing.
Czechoslovakia 1945 is not Israel 1948 is not Greece and Turkey in
the 1920s is not the USSR in the 1940s. Ethnic cleansing may imply
genocidal consequences, but ethnic cleansing per se is not the Holo-
caust. The politically motivated and government controlled Arme-
nian massacre of 1915 cannot be equated with the principally agreed
population exchange between Greece and Turkey almost one decade
later – despite the fact that a chain of basic human rights’ violations
characterised the consensual population exchange. The partition of
British India had disastrous consequences in 1947. But the millions
who migrated as part of the population exchange in the Subcontinent
and hundreds of thousands killed in the process of hate mobilisa-
tion is not the same as government intended and implemented mass
murder as it was the case in Cambodia three decades later. To come
to such a judgment, to come to any judgment, we have to compare
first.
War crimes are not war crimes are not war crimes are not war crimes.
Warsaw and Rotterdam, results of an aggressive warfare, are not the
same as Hamburg and Dresden, results of a defensive warfare. Japan’s
aggression against China and Germany’s aggression against Poland
and the USSR – they are not on the same level as Hiroshima. We can
argue that Dresden and Hiroshima have been war crimes – but they
were on a different level than bombing the civilians in Polish cities
as early as September 1939. To say this, we have to compare first.
Concentration Camp is not Concentration Camp is not Concentra-
tion Camp. The British Camps in South Africa during the Boer War
are not Dachau – and Dachau is not Wöllersdorf. But neither Dachau
nor Wöllersdorf are Treblinka. We have to compare – the horror in
quantitative as well as in qualitative respects.
We may compare on the meta-level: The use the British wartime
propaganda made of Coventry – and the use the revisionist post-1945
propaganda is making use of Dresden. But we have to compare the
realities, we have to compare the substance first and foremost: What
does Treblinka stand for – objectively; and what does Wöllersdorf stand
for – not as a symbol of Austria’s semi-fascist dictatorship between 1934
and 1938, but as a repressive instrument to control political opposition.
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There is no reason to justify such a camp – but it was a camp decisively
different from the extermination camps in Poland.
The Palestinian narrative emphasises the significance of the Nakba
of 1948: the mass migration – partly forced by an Israeli policy which
must be called “ethnic cleansing”. But accepting the narrative – that
the Nakba was a catastrophe forced on the Palestinian people – is not
accepting a possible equation: what the Holocaust has been for the Jews
has been the Nakba for the Palestinian. The extermination of a people
is not the same as the expulsion of a people from a certain territory.
Again: Comparing two tragedies does neither mean equating them
– nor trying to exculpate any systematic crime.
If we don’t underline the difference we cannot prevent the trivi-
alization of all the tragedies. If all evils are the same, the specific
explanation of any kind of evil – holocaust, genocide, apartheid,
ethnic cleansing, slavery, war, tyranny, intolerance – becomes blurred
and at the end impossible to understand and to prevent its repeat.
To underline the difference, we have to insist on one quite simple
necessity: knowing the specific reality, knowing the specific truth of
any tragedy.
Dimension 2: Elites and societies
Bringing elites to justice (Nuremberg, Tokyo, Arusha, The Hague)
and reconciliation on the level of the societies are policies which can
be followed at the same time. The approach the Allies followed begin-
ning with 1945 in Germany is a good example: The leading person-
nel of Nazi Germany was brought to justice – the Nuremberg Trials
are the most visible case of this orientation. But the German society
was to be “re-educated”: by restructuring schools and universities,
by rewriting curricula, the German society was the object of a policy
focused on reconciliation.
Of course, we know that the Allies soon did fall into the trap of the
Cold War: the Wernher von Braun case is the most prominent one
that justice was stopped beginning with a certain date and regarding
a certain group of people within the Nazi elite.
In Austria, justice from the very beginning was in the hands of the
Austrian elites. Very soon, it became a policy oriented on reconcili-
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Justice and Memory.indb 54 02.11.2009 13:39:00
ation between the post- or even anti-Nazi elites and the Nazi elites.
There has been an elitist bargain: The Nazi elites seemed to be able
to deliver the voting bloc of the former Nazis – measured by member-
ship figures of the Nazi Party that was about 15 to 20 percent of the
Austrian electorate. And the Nazi elites received formal forgiveness
– reintegration into careers, return of property, an overall respect-
ability despite their past of active participation in a mass murderous
regime. The Jews who had survived were treated less well – professors
at universities, who lost their chairs in 1938, were not automatically
reinstalled in their former positions; and what had happened to their
property has been an ongoing story deep into the 21st century. The
reason for this difference? There was no Jewish voting bloc to speak
of after 1945. But there was a voting bloc of former Nazis.
Reconciliation – between whom? Between bystanders and perpe-
trators and victims, between different generations? Reconciliation
– based on justice not done? Questions which must be raised and
answered: Who participated in crimes, who has been responsible?
Was it a bureaucratic mass murder – like Stalin’s Gulags – or was it
a plebiscitarian mass murder, in which masses were not only on the
victims’ side, but also on the side of the perpetrators, like Rwanda
1994? How to deal with the Rwanda phenomenon – when thousands
and thousands participated in a murderous frenzy; when the society,
and not just a political elite, acted as one collective murderer.
The provocative nature of Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Ex-
ecutioners” is to be seen exactly on that level: The Holocaust described,
analysed, and explained not as the deeds of an elite, but of so many
“ordinary Germans”. How to deal with the “banality of the evil”, if
this implies that almost everybody could have become an Eichmann?
How to accept Yehuda Bauer’s conclusion: “The horror of the Holo-
caust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it
didn’t”?3
“Justice” is the – necessary – answer to crimes individuals can be
made responsible for: The Stangls and Eichmanns, the Görings
and Himmlers. For the masses, for a society like the German (and
Austrian) society in 1945, the first and foremost necessity is “truth”
– the society must come to terms with the reality. “Justice” has been
the purpose of Truth Commissions in South Africa.4 It is a possible
way to combine the search for truth with the search for justice – with
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Justice and Memory.indb 55 02.11.2009 13:39:00
respect to individuals. But how can justice be found for societies – for
the German society in 1945, for the (“white”) South African Society
in 1994 and after? Instruments like the Truth Commissions are able
to open an insight into truth – and by doing so to start a process of
reconciliation between societies, respectively sub-societies.
“Reconciliation” is never a concept for elites – it is a concept for
societies or sub-societies: like the Austrian “camps” fighting the civil
war in 1934; like Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. But
“reconciliation” means nothing for the relationship between Arme-
nians and Turks, not to speak of Germans and Jews. “Reconciliation”
is a possible approach to overcome tragedies, crimes, atrocities – linked
to a symmetrical conflict. It is no reasonable approach at all for an
asymmetrical one. This implies one significant political consequence:
without levelling the conflict between perpetrators and victims,
reconciliation is not possible. Those identified as perpetrators – not
as collective, but as individual perpetrators – have to be brought to
justice first. Only then reconciliation between societies or sub-socie-
ties is possible.
“Reconciliation” may be possible, may be reasonable for the Catho-
lic-conservative camp and for the Republican-leftist camp in Spain
– but it is neither possible nor reasonable for the Khmer Rouge and
those who barely survived the death camps in Cambodia between
1975 and 1978. “Reconciliation” is a concept which cannot succeed in
completely unbalanced, asymmetrical conflicts where all the burden
of victimhood is obviously on one side only. First, justice must be
done. And only after that, Hutu and Tutsi can become reconciled.
Any kind of reconciliation must be based on truth: The crimes of
both sides in the Spanish civil war must be discussed. This does not
mean that the two sides are on equal moral footing – but based on an
interest in “truth”, two generations after the war the two sub-societies
can come to terms with the past.
Any reconciliation must be based on a minimum of justice: You
cannot expect reconciliation between perpetrators and victims. There
is the Jewish joke – in the meantime, it has become an old Jewish
joke: The Germans will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust.
The underlying message is that you cannot reconcile two completely
contradicting experiences – the experience of the murderer and the
experience of the victim. It needs the acceptance of the truth – that
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murder has been murder; that perpetrators have been perpetrators.
And it needs justice to be done: murderers have to be brought to
court, have to be brought to justice. After that – after, for example,
the German and Austrian societies have learned to accept the realities
of the Holocaust under the overall responsibility of Nazi authorities
as well as the realities of the mass participation in the murder: only
then something like reconciliation can begin.
Dimension3: The generational gap
“The ‘blocking of memory’ is not restricted to those on the Nazi
side. Psychiatrists have dealt with thousands of victims of the Nazis
over the years who have blocked just as desperately . . .”5 The task of
uncovering the past is not only blocked by the intentional and unin-
tentional interest of perpetrators – it is also blocked by the interest
of victims.
Tom Segev reminds us that Israel’s society started to become fully
aware of the Holocaust not before the Kastner affair and the Eich-
mann trial; not before the survivors had started to come to terms with
the trauma of being alive as the “seventh million” – while six millions
were unable to survive.6 The encyclopaedic work “The World Reacts
to the Holocaust” explains that it needed one generation at least to
define and to accept the full significance of the Holocaust: in Israel
as well as in Germany, in the United States as well as in France.7
When did the Holocaust become such a dominant topic – as can
be seen in the Holocaust memorials, in the Holocaust curricula, in
Holocaust studies? Not before the 1970s! What Norman Finkelstein
calls the “Holocaust Industry”, the “Shoa Business” did not exist in
1945. There was no such “industry”, there was no such “business”
when Auschwitz was liberated and in the years after. It needed about
one generation to make the extermination of European Jewry one of
the central topics of public discourse and academic research especially
in Europe and North America. It needed a new generation of non- or
post-perpetrators as well as of non- or post-victims.
The Armenian genocide – when did it become an international
topic? When did Armenians succeed in making the events of 1915
an international agenda? The Armenian narrative is decisively in-
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Justice and Memory.indb 57 02.11.2009 13:39:00
fluenced by the feeling that “Turkey” – an abstract actor – had never
accepted responsibility. The memory of 1915 has been the justifica-
tion of terrorist acts, of the killing of Turkish representatives more
than half a century after the mass murder, after the genocide. 1915
has been on the agenda of Western Parliaments decades, generations
later– like in France, when a majority was willing and able to define
a murderous event almost one century after it had taken place.
When became the “Indian Wars” a genocide-like crime against Na-
tive Americans? When did the perception of colonising the Americas
change? It changed generations, almost a century after the end of
the “Indian Wars” in the United States. Centuries after the ethnic
cleansing of American territory started, generations after the last
Native Americans became victims of genocide-like crimes, “white”
Americans developed collective empathy with the fate of American
Indians – and a feeling of collective responsibility for crimes so deep
in the past.
Of course, it many cases this has a lot to do with economic devel-
opments. Slavery became a moral issue in Europe and in America
after industrialization had started to make slave labour more and
more outdated and meaningless – from an economic point of view.
Moral reasoning about the treatment of Native Americans became a
dominant topic after the economic incentive behind the invasion of
native territory has stopped – because there was no native territory
any longer worth being taken away from its owners. But we have the
generational gap also and especially visible in cases of terror in which
economic reasoning did not play any significant part: The Holocaust
was not the result of a business like cost-benefit analysis; the “blocking
of memory” was not the consequence of having or losing economic
interest in the extermination of Jews and Roma.
Truth seems to be the central issue not immediately after a collec-
tive tragedy – but one or more generations after. There is a tendency
within the first generation – a tendency linking people identified
as part of the perpetrator collective and people identified as part
of victim collective – to play down the tremendous, the shattering
quality of the monstrosity. It needs generational distance; it needs a
new generation to ask the fathers “How could you have been part of
such a criminal system?” but also “How could you not have forcefully
resisted, how could you not have overcome your passivity?”
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This implies a specific hypothesis for the future of the Russian
discourse regarding Leninism as well as Stalinism. As there is – differ-
ently from Germany 1945 – no intervening foreign actor, the “truth”
about Stalin’s rule and its roots in Lenin’s doctrine and policies may
become a mass mobilising debate not only after two, but perhaps after
four or five generations after the Soviet regime’s implosion. There can
be no Russian equivalent to the policy of “re-education” in Germany,
beginning with 1945 – because there is no inter – or transnational ac-
tor comparable to the US or the other allies. The revolt of a younger
generation against the narratives of the older generation might take
significantly longer in the Russian case than in Germany. But it can
be expected that this generational revolt will come.8
Different generations have different reactions. This is the unavoid-
able consequence of different memories. Blocking memories is the
reaction of those who are overwhelmed by their personal history.
Breaking the taboo of a history under cover for reasons of pragmatism
and/or opportunism is more the reaction of those who speak for the
collective memory of their parents or grandparents.
“Breaking the silence” means the politization after a period of
de-politization. To become a political issue, an issue challenging a
more or less superficial peace of collective mind, the memory of
deep tragedies had to be kept in the status of latency. The tragedy of
the American Indians, of the Ottoman Armenians, of the European
Jews and Roma had been known from the moment it had happened.
But the political consequence – the mass mobilisation for the cry
for justice, based on a deep feeling of horror independently of an
individual fate – this needed time. This needed new generations.
Political mobilisation as a ongoing protest against systematic crimes
against humanity seems to be possible only when generations not af-
fected directly and personally become deeply shocked and negatively
fascinated by events of the past. It needs the post-perpetrators and
the post-victims to shape an ardent political agenda out of so many
individual memories.
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The Case of Austria – a kind of summary
The three different dimensions can be exemplified in the case of
Austria in the 20th century. After 1945, Austria had to face two spe-
cific tragedies – first, the civil war of 1934 and the following years of
authoritarian, semi-fascist dictatorship; and, secondly, the year 1938,
the “Anschluss”, and the seven years of Austria’s integration into Nazi
Germany. When Austria – thanks to the Allies’ victory – became inde-
pendent and democratic again, these two central events of Austria’s
most recent history were treated in a very different way:
– 1934, the end of Austria’s democracy and the Dollfuß-Schuschnigg-
dictatorship were answered – after 1945 – by “peace as elitist reconcil-
iation”. The two major political parties, successors of the two factions
of the civil war, agreed to disagree regarding the reasons for the civil
war and the quality of the authoritarian regime. Austria dealt with
the tragedy of 1934 in form of a political coexistence of parties who
behaved like partners in the international arena accepting that they
have to live side by side despite principal differences.
– 1938, the end of Austrian independence and the seven years of
Nazi rule were answered by an intellectually inconsistent, but
politically feasible double victims’ theory: For foreign purposes,
Austria insisted it was the victim of Hitler-Germany, liberated by its
own anti-Nazi resistance and by the Allies; for domestic purposes,
Austria claimed the role of a different victim – the victim of fate,
of all the foreign powers, or of any kind of forces beyond any kind
of Austrian responsibility. Austria dealt with the tragedy of 1938 in
form of the coexistence of different victims’ narratives.
The coexistence between the two civil war camps was a horizontal
coexistence: two partners did not try to find an overall truth or to
insist on justice. Their coexistence was based on the acceptance of
conflicting perception of truth – and the absence of justice.
The coexistence between the different victims’ narratives was a
vertical coexistence: The political elites ruling Austria from 1945 on
created and/or accepted the need neither to look for truth – nor, and
especially so, for justice.
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There is a formula which seems to be so simple and convincing:
Karl Kraus’ formula of the Dollfuß regime as the “lesser evil”. This
formula is intellectually convincing:
– The evil of the Dollfuß regime’s semi-fascism has to be put into
the context of the years 1933 and 1934. Hitler’s regime, especially
its visible brutality and its complete neglect of the rule of law, has
been part of Dollfuß’ background. Before outlawing the Social
Democrats, Dollfuß had outlawed the Nazi Party. Dollfuß was not
only fighting the left, not only the forces defending the democratic
republic, he was fighting Hitler also.
– But Dollfuß’ regime was an evil: Breaking the rules of the demo-
cratic constitution, introducing step by step a political monopoly
for his own quasi-party (Vaterländische Front), suppressing basic
freedoms like the freedom of the press, putting political opponents
in camps without due process – this clearly means dictatorship, this
cannot be seen as democracy in disguise.
The first part of the formula is difficult to accept by the Austrian left
– and the second part creates problems within the Catholic-conserva-
tive camp which still sees, rightfully, Dollfuß as part of its collective
history.
To come to terms with this part of Austria’s history, it is necessary
to go into the substance of the regime – its unfinished fascism, its al-
liance with the church, its dependence on fascist Italy, and especially
its repressive character. But it is also necessary to compare – Dollfuß
was no Hitler, and nobody made this more evident than the Austrian
Jewish community which tried to do everything to defend Austria’s
independence against Nazi Germany – not because of the regime’s
character, but because of Kraus’ formula of the lesser evil.
After 1945, the political elites, reshaping an independent and demo-
cratic Austria, agreed to disagree about the years between 1934 and
1938; but they agreed not to be bothered too much by the remnants
of Nazism or by any Austrian responsibility for Hitler’s regime. At
the beginning, the Allies forced the Austrians to do something. But
soon, following the logic of maximizing votes and of the common
interest not to be reminded of the different skeletons in the different
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cupboards, Austria and the Austrian elites were happy to have the
victims’ theory.
The contradictions of the different Austrian narratives came into the
open some decades after 1945 – when Simon Wiesenthal and Bruno
Kreisky had their famous conflict9; but especially in 1986, when Kurt
Waldheim’s election reflected a deep cleavage: not so much a cleavage
between left and right; but much more of a cleavage between genera-
tions. What had been fully covered by the elitist consensus after 1945
became uncovered – the elitist agreement regarding the narrative of
the Nazi years; an agreement to live with different formulas like:
– “If you make my Nazis an issue, I will make your Nazis an issue
too”;
– “We all have been victims – either as opponents of the Nazi regimes
by that regime, or as Nazis by the allies”;
– “The responsibility for the Nazi crimes is exclusively a German, not
an Austrian responsibility”.
By excluding the given complexities, a national narrative was con-
structed with the necessary “smoothing and mitigating character”.10
It was a narrative streamlining contradicting realities and excluding
any kind of serious comparison: between the victimhood of those
who were the objects of the Nazi’s extermination policy – and those
who had reason to see themselves as victims of the Allies’ war like the
bombing; between those who had opposed the occupation in Austria
in 1938 – and those who had welcomed it; between Austria as a state
that had lost its independence – and Austria as a society with about
the same percentage of Nazi perpetrators as the percentage of per-
petrators in Germany.
The post-1945 Austrian narrative was an elite consensus conceal-
ing all the contradictions that did exist. It was reconciliation without
truth. It may have its positive impact for identity- and nation building
in Austria after 1945. But it had its price. And this became evident
as soon as questions regarding the truth started to be asked – within
Austria as well as from the outside. In Austria, it had been a new
generation which started to challenge this consensus of convenience.
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The first victim of this challenge had been Kurt Waldheim who did
not understand why he became a symbol of intellectually and morally
dubious compromises.
The new generation was interested in the truth: The truth of Wald-
heim, who can be called the average Austrian – before 1938, he was
not a Nazi; between 1938 and 1945, he was not active in any kind of
anti-Nazi resistance; and beginning with 1945, he was an Austrian
patriot who did not want to speak of his years as a German intel-
ligence officer in the Balkans. The truth came out into the open
about the willingness of both major parties to accept former Nazis
and permitting them to make significant political careers in Austria
– no questions asked about their past. The truth became known – one
generation after the liberation of Austria by the Allies.
But what does that mean for justice? Austria is still on record that
Austrian juries acquitted prominent Nazi criminals – like Franz
Murer. The Austrian public prosecution took care that some mass
murders – like the murderous physician Heinrich Gross – never had
to face a jury. Justice has not been done.11 But did this mean recon-
ciliation, did it mean peace? Yes and no.
The events of May 15, 1955, are a good example for the reconciling
effects the post-1945 consensus had: The words of Austria’s foreign
minister Leopold Figl at the signing of the Austrian State Treaty,
“Austria is free”, is an interesting contradiction to the Declaration
of Independence that declared Austria to be free already on April
27, 1945. In this declaration, the Austrian government declared that
Austria had been liberated from the Nazis by the Allies in 1945. Ten
years later, the Austrian government declared Austria liberated once
more – this time from their liberators of 1945. The Declaration of
Independence excluded significant parts of the Austrian society – the
Nazis could not see their defeat as liberation. But the second liberation
united Nazis and Anti-Nazis: Everybody was liberated from everybody.
It signifies reconciliation and domestic peace at a certain price – and
this price was the negligence of truth as well as of justice.
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Notes
1 LEVIN 1996: pp. 346–348; EZERGAILIS 1996: pp. 373–381.
2 BAUER 2002, p. 74.
3 BAUER 2002: p. 42.
4 MINOW 1998: p. 52–90.
5 SERENY 2001: p. 249.
6 SEGEV 1993.
7 WYMAN 1996.
8 BRENT 2008: pp. 288–325.
9 STÖGNER 2008: pp. 73–76.
10 HEER, WODAK in HEER, MANOSCHEK, POLLAK, WODAK 2008: p. 8.
11 MANOSCHEK, GELDMACHER 2006: pp. 582–584.
Bibliography
G.J. BASS, Stay the Hand of Vengeance. The Politics of War Crimes Tribu-
nals, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Y. BAUER, Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven: Yale University Press
(Nota Bene book), 2002.
J. BRENT, Inside the Stalin Archives. Discovering the New Russia, New
York: Atlas & Co, 2008.
A. EZERGAILIS, Latvia, in WYMAN 1996, op.cit., pp. 354–387.
N.O. FINKELSTEIN, The Holocaust Industry. Reflections on the Exploita-
tion of Jewish Suffering, London–New York: Verso, 2000.
D. J. GOLDHAGEN, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1996.
J. HAGAN, Justice in the Balkans. Prosecuting War Crimes in the Hague
Tribunal, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003.
H. HEER, W.MANOSCHEK, Alexander POLLAK, Ruth WODAK
(eds.), The Discursive Construction of History. Remembering the We-
hrmacht’s War of Annihilation, Houndsmills–New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008.
P.B. HAYNER, Unspeakable Truths. Facing the Challenge of Truth Com-
missions, New York–London: Routledge, 2002.
S. KINZER, A Thousand Hills. Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who
Dreamed It, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008.
D. LEVIN, Lithuania, in WYMAN 1996, op.cit., pp. 325–353.
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J. LUKACS, The Hitler of History. Hitler’s Biographers on Trial, London:
Phoenix Press, 2002.
J. LUKACS, Remembered Past. John Lukacs on History, Historians, and
Historical Knowledge. A Reader, ed. by M.G. MALAVASI and J.O.
NELSON, Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005.
W. MANOSCHEK, T. GELDMACHER, Vergangenheitspolitik, in H.
DACHS et al. (eds.), Politik in Österreich. Das Handbuch, Vienna:
Manz, 2006, pp. 577–593.
M. MINOW, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness. Facing History after
Genocide and Mass Violence, Boston: Beacon Press, 1998.
M. MINOW, Breaking the Cycles of Hatred. Memory, Law, and Repair,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
A. PELINKA, Austria. Out of the Shadow of the Past, Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1998.
T. SEGEV, The Seventh Million. The Israelis and the Holocaust, New York:
Hill and Wang, 1993.
G. SERENY, The German Trauma. Experiences and Reflections 1938–2001.
London (Penguin Books), 2001.
K. STÖGNER, Bruno Kreisky, Antisemitismus und der österreichische Um-
gang mit dem Nationalsozialisms, in A. PELINKA, H. SICKINGER,
K. STÖGNER (eds.), Kreisky – Haider. Bruchlinien österreichischer
Identitäten, Wien: Braumüller, 2008, pp. 25–110.
P. THALER, The Ambivalence of Identity. The Austrian Experience of
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R. WODAK et al.,“Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter!” Diskurshistorische
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D. S. WYMAN (ed.), The World Reacts to the Holocaust, Baltimore, MD:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
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Justice and Memory.indb 66 02.11.2009 13:39:02
Transforming the Holocaust
Remarks after the Beginning of the 21st Century
Dirk Rupnow
The remembrance of the Holocaust is in the midst of a profound
change – it is a process that has become particularly visible since the
turn of the millennium and that is far from being completed. After
decades of denial, ignorance or only selective perception of the mass
crimes against Jewry that were initiated by Germans and Austrians and
committed with their collaborators in numerous European countries,
these crimes now have arrived at the center of interest. For the EU in
particular, the memory of the Holocaust has become a question of a
common European identity, especially since the return of genocide
to Europe in the time of civil war in former Yugoslavia. WWII and
“Auschwitz” have become the negative founding myth of Europe.
This is the case, at least, on the level of a politically staged, but also
institutionalised self-conception.1 Moreover, the Holocaust seems to
have achieved the status of a negative political, ethical, and cultural
norm beyond the borders of Europe. But at the same time, the his-
tory of WWII (and its aftermath, for example expulsions) and the
Holocaust can still have dividing effects inside Europe.
Transnational politics
In the US the Holocaust had already been integrated into the con-
struction of a US-American memory and identity in the 1980s and
1990s – for a number of domestic and external reasons. With regard
to the character of the US as an immigrant country with European
roots, the encounter of US soldiers with the Nazi atrocities at the end
of the war and the role of the US in the postwar trials against war
criminals this is not at all surprising. But in the meantime even in
Japan, nearby Hiroshima, exists a Holocaust Education Centre and
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in Cape Town, South Africa, a Holocaust Museum. In the debates
on the domestic Apartheid regime the Nazi anti-Jewish politics of
persecution and extermination served as a backdrop and point of
comparison, a benchmark for one’s own problematic past – not at all
without controversy.
The engagement with the Holocaust far away from its events be-
comes a means of dealing with other historical experiences of mass
violence and victimhood. The Holocaust evolved as a role model for
methods and forms of coming to terms with conflictive and traumatic
pasts. Primarily through the attempts to compensate for the crimes
with restitutions and reparations it has become a worldwide point of
reference and comparison for crimes against humanity, in the hope
of recognition and compensation.
Beyond the national contexts, a discrete transnational politics of
Holocaust memory has evolved at the end of the 20th and the begin-
ning of the 21st century, carried out, for example, by the EU and the
UN: the “Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust
Education, Remembrance and Research” (1998), the Stockholm In-
ternational Forum on the Holocaust: A Conference on Education,
Remembrance, and Research (2000), the UN’s “Holocaust Outreach
Programme” (2005) and the establishment of January 27th – the day
of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination
camp – as an international day of remembrance for the victims of
the Holocaust bear witness to that.2 Already in 1979 Auschwitz-Birk-
enau became a UNESCO World Heritage site (with a significant
name change from “Auschwitz Concentration Camp” to “Auschwitz
Birkenau: German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp
1940–1945” in 2007 at the request of the Polish government). And the
Ringelblum Underground Archives from the Warsaw Ghetto were
registered as a “Witness to the Holocaust” in the UNESCO Memory
of the World list in 1999.
Compensation payments (for example for forced labourers) and
restitution along with the work of historical commissions established
new instruments and standards for dealing with problematic pasts.3
A country’s attitude in relation to the Holocaust, and possibly its own
complicity with Nazi crimes, has become a criterion among others for
whether countries are suitable for EU membership. How countries
deal with their national past, the recognition of a particular histori-
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cal narrative has become the billet d’entrée to the Western world. A
country’s reaction to the Holocaust, understood as a paradigmatic
crime against humanity, counts as a litmus test for its current position
in relation to human rights questions and its democratic culture.
Alongside a “particularistic” reading, focusing exclusively on Ger-
mans as perpetrators and Jews as victims, a “universal” reading of the
Holocaust has been established: In some constellations, the Holocaust
discourse has been separated from historical events and has become
a metaphor for “the evil” in general. Not only different groups of
victims (for example Sinti and Roma, Homosexuals) compete for
recognition and attention within the Holocaust discourse – beyond it,
victims of other crimes against humanity try to associate themselves
with it.
The Holocaust seems to be the only historical event that attracts
attention worldwide – even where it is denied or only used for a com-
parison with other mass crimes – and that resulted in such concerted
international efforts to institutionalise and standardise its memory.
That sets it apart from other events that have undoubtedly compara-
ble transnational dimensions (like WWI) but that do not attract that
much interest.
The transnational dimension is inherent in the Holocaust; it derives
from its spatial extension: anti-Jewish discrimination, theft, and mass
murder occurred all over Europe. The European and global dimen-
sion of the Holocaust discourse is for one the result of this spatial
aspect as well as of emigration and expulsion because of Nazi policies.
But more important, it is also the flipside of the universal claim of
National Socialism’s racist, anti-Semitic ideology, which negates all
moral boundaries, that turns the German mass murder and crimes
into a universal ethical challenge.
The national cultures of remembrance are no longer separated
from each other, which, in a strict sense, they probably never have
been. But that is even truer in an age of global communication,
mass media, and mass tourism. Today’s entire Holocaust discourse
can only be understood simultaneously in its international context
and its national connections. This is not only true for politics and
public rituals but for all kinds of representation of the past, as well
as for legal practices and restitution. This current phase received its
dynamic above all through the collapse of the Communist regimes
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in Eastern Europe at the end of the1980s. Before, the Cold War had
somehow frozen the memory of the Holocaust and WWII. Only in
the past decades have most European countries begun to discuss their
own involvement and participation. After a short phase of “dealing
with the past” in the immediate postwar period, such discourses had
been silenced to a large degree for almost four decades. The lifting
of ideological blockages through the collapse of the Communist
regimes in Eastern Europe made not only the actual crime scenes of
the mass murder accessible but also resulted in a new perception of
the European dimension of the Holocaust.
National memories
In many European countries, however, different historical experi-
ences of dictatorship and violence intersect. While the Holocaust has
become the object of transnational European and global politics of
memory and the EU as well as the UN made efforts to institutional-
ize its remembrance, other historical experiences of dictatorship and
violence came to the fore, above all of Communist rule in Eastern
Europe after the end of WWII, often implicitly reevaluating and sani-
tizing authoritarian regimes of the interwar and war period as ideals
of nationalistic politics and milestones on the way to independence.
These different pasts and their victims compete for public and also
political recognition. In many cases it is hard to identify victims and
perpetrators unambiguously, with far-reaching consequences for the
national memories.4
Most recently, in addition to that, immigration into Western Euro-
pean countries begins to influence discourses about the past: Other
perspectives on WWII and the Holocaust or completely different
memories and pasts are being imported into the national cultures
of memory for which references to a specific European history and
understanding of the 20th century, to patterns of guilt and responsibil-
ity cannot count as self-evident. Divers and multi-identitary societies,
that are increasingly shaped by immigration, cannot be reduced any-
more to one binding and authoritative historical narrative but hold
divergent and contradictory images and conceptions of history and
– first of all – different historical experiences.5 It goes without saying
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that national memories or cultures of memory were never monolithic
and uniform but always shaped by competing, conflicting private
and local, group specific and institutional memories – but now we
seem to be confronted with a different level of fragmentation in our
societies.
Despite the central position it has obtained by now, the meaning and
significance of the Holocaust cannot be seen as undisputed. On the
contrary: It seems that precisely the Universalisation and Globalisa-
tion of Holocaust memory leads to more and more competing and
oppositional memories, not to recognition of the uniqueness of the
Holocaust – a crucial development that has been widely overlooked
by Levy/Sznaider in their study on “Holocaust and Memory in the
Global Age” due to a focus exclusively on Germany, the USA and
Israel, but largely ignoring Eastern European countries.6 In most
cases, the Universalisation of the Holocaust actually seemed to have
aggravated the national particularities and did not – as could have
been expected – result in a homogenisation of memories.7
In Hungary, for example, that situation became visible and manifest
in the competing concepts of the “House of Terror” (2002) and the
“Holocaust Memorial Center” (2004/06). While the “House of Ter-
ror” focuses on Hungarian victimhood and downplays the Holocaust,
the Holocaust Memorial directs the attention not only to the fascist
Hungarian Arrow Cross Party, the German occupation and Hungarian
collaboration but also to the part of the conservative-authoritarian
Horthy regime – which had been positively assessed after 1989. In
recent years the accession talks with the EU and EU membership had
an enormous impact on Hungary’s attitude towards its past and led
to at least a symbolic recognition of the Holocaust and the complicity
of Hungarians in it.8
As another example, in Italy – with Mussolini’s Fascist movement
being first a paradigm for Nazi Germany, later its ally, towards the
end of the war changing its allegiance, Mussolini remaining a Ger-
man puppet in Northern Italy – a self-perception evolved after the
war that was dominated by the resistanza myth (“Italiani, brava gente”).
Even though Italy introduced its own race laws in 1938 and Italian
Jews fell victim to the Holocaust, the Fascist regime was seen as barely
antisemitic and thus considerably different from German National
Socialism, most notably when it comes to the politics of extermination.
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The national holiday (April 25th) therefore commemorated the parti-
san uprising in the major Northern Italian cities. In fact, a complex
system of different kinds of camps existed in Italy: first controlled
by the Italian Fascists, later by the German occupiers; with the Risiera
di San Sabba near Trieste as the most notorious one, equipped with
a crematory, partly having the function of a transitory concentra-
tion camp, partly of an extermination camp employing shootings,
beatings and gas vans. Also atrocities committed by Italians like the
invasion in Abyssinia (1935) and the following exterminatory warfare
were widely repressed and forgotten in postwar Italy. As one of the
founding members of the EU, when the examination of one’s own
past was not yet an issue on the European level, the country had largely
failed to confront the complexity of its past. But in recent years inside
Italy this self-perception has been strongly challenged by historical
research. Shortly after the Stockholm conference Italy introduced a
Giorno della memoria (January 27th), as a ricordo della Shoah but officially
dedicated to the memory of “the extermination and persecution of
the Jewish people as well as the Italian military deportees and politi-
cal resistance fighters in German concentration camps”. Moreover, a
competing memorial day has been installed in 2004 by the Berlusconi
government, on the initiative of the “post-fascist” National Alliance
party: the Giorno del Ricordo (February 10th) for the so-called Foibe
massacres, remembering the revenge of Yugoslav partisans towards
the Italian population in Istria and Dalmatia and the Italian expellees
(esuli) from that region, therewith calling attention to Italian victim-
hood and suffering – not only in contrast to Italian involvement but
also to Italian resistance.
Lithuania provides another example. Since the country has regained
its independence in 1991, various layers of historical experience over-
lap: pre-WWII Lithuania under the authoritarian Smetona regime
which boosted Lithuanian nationalism; Nazi occupied Lithuania,
the period which brought death to more than 90% of Lithuanian
Jewry; the Soviet period 1944–1991 which brought deportation and
death to many Lithuanian citizens. The definition of victims and
perpetrators is a major problem in the country’s collective memory:
many Nazi collaborators later became victims of the Soviet regime,
together with a great number of innocent citizens. The heroes of one
side were very often the perpetrators of the other. Additionally, Jews
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are often collectively denounced as Communists and collaborators
of the Soviet regime. Today, as a member of the EU, Lithuania has
to reconsider its WWII history, especially concerning war crimes and
massacres committed by Lithuanians themselves as Nazi collaborators
– challenging the dominating self-perception as victims. Not least in
preparation for the EU membership, an “International Commission
for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation
Regimes in Lithuania” was established in 1998 under President Ad-
amkus after strong debates concerning the country’s WWII and Soviet
past. The task of the commission is obviously to find an integrated
narrative, acceptable for all Lithuanians and foreign observers, which
comes to terms with both traumatic pasts at once.9
In Austria in the 1990s, triggered by international developments,
discussions on looted and confiscated property, restitution and
compensation arose anew and – due to international pressure and
some peculiarities of the US legal system – led to the installation of a
Historians’ commission. After decades of an official self-perception
as the “first victim” of Nazi Germany, amongst others instrumental
in inducing an independent Austrian identity, that seemed to be the
last step of officially recognizing an Austrian complicity with the
Nazi mass crimes. In fact, the disputed domestic clerical fascism and
the authoritarian regime of Dollfuß and Schuschnigg still impede a
broad recognition of the role of Austrians in the Third Reich. Earlier
than in Germany a Holocaust memorial had been realized in Vienna
(2000) but it was dedicated only to the 65.000 Austrian Jews – signal-
izing a specifically turned victim myth: the domestic Jewish victims
are remembered but not the role of Austrians as perpetrators at home
and abroad, participating in expulsion, looting and mass murder in
occupied Europe.
Ambivalences of Globalization
The transnational processes that are, in shorthand, referred to as
Globalisation, Universalisation, Europeanisation or Americanisation
of the Holocaust are highly ambivalent and complex. They proceed
by no means in a linear way and are not at all uniform but reflect
differently in varying national settings. This reminds us of the hetero-
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geneity and fragmentation of what we simply call “the Holocaust” or
“Shoah” as though it had been a monolithic and elementary event. It
is, of course, bound together by the antisemitic intention and the will
to murder all Jews and a very compact time-frame. But it happened in
different settings, with different procedures of the Germans, differ-
ent reactions of the local populations, different kinds and degrees of
complicity, collaboration and resistance, dealing with very different
historical starting positions, different kinds of Jewish populations
with different backgrounds and different degrees of assimilation and
integration – and therefore different results for the postwar situation,
as well as for memory and remembrance.
Unfortunately, the discourses on the events of the Holocaust on the
one hand, and on their aftermath and representations on the other,
are increasingly drifting apart so that, especially in German-speak-
ing countries, two completely separate areas of scholarship evolved,
which barely communicate with each other. But the aftermath and
representations cannot be reasonably examined and understood if
they are disconnected from the events which they refer to – just as
the politics and cultures of memory cannot be analyzed if they are
separated from politics and society. Memory beyond the individual
is only explainable in a specific social and political context and can
only be understood and judged in relationship to the historical back-
ground it refers to.
In view of the current situation, the memory of the Holocaust needs
less and less to be defended against denial, repression and silencing
– although these dangers are surely not finally banished and should
never be underestimated. Since the Holocaust became the point of
reference and comparison, the benchmark for other mass crimes it
gets more and more reduced to a cipher and marker for one’s own
victimhood – even when it comes to German victims of bombings
and expulsion at the end of WWII, focusing on individual suffering
rather than the historical context. Most of all, today the memory of
the Holocaust has to be defended against simplified trivialisations,
abbreviated analogies and constant instrumentalisations in national
and international rituals. With the omnipresence of the topic in
an international framework it becomes inadequately usable and
exchangeable. Routine and rituals of memory led to a leveling and
normalisation that previous generations desperately tried to reach.
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And, as we can see in many public-opinion polls, the omnipresence
did not lead to a more detailed and differentiated knowledge – on
the contrary.
Meanwhile the era of the eye-witnesses of the Holocaust comes to
an end – a change in our culture of memory that has been discussed
at least since the 1980s. In the 2007 Yearbook of the Frankfurt Fritz
Bauer Institute, the German sociologist and psychoanalyst Christian
Schneider argued that their death seems not necessarily to be expected
with sorrow but maybe even secretly desired – unacknowledged and
unexpressed.10 The hypocritical outrage about his claim is foresee-
able, of course. But he points at an important insight: the fact that
the survivors as human beings that escaped from excessive violence
confront us – their audience – with the monstrous destructivity of
human reality and history that we ultimately still cannot face adequate-
ly. After all, it is still surprising that it is possible “after Auschwitz”
to live as nothing has happened and as the basic trust necessary for
living in our societies has not been fundamentally challenged.11
Simplifications, rationalisations and neutralisations dominate the
public discussions on the Third Reich and the Holocaust and allow for
a memory that is not alienating and unsettling. Already in an earlier
phase of Holocaust memory, on the occasion of the Barbie trial in
France in 1987, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut warned
against a memory that makes the past disposable to the present, that
puts to sleep the conscience, toughens the audience’s ideological cer-
tainties and serves as entertainment.12 In contrast: against forgetting
memory can always be mobilised. His diagnosis from the late 1980s
couldn’t be more timely today. Naturally there is a desire for a clear
moral and pedagogy – but a simple lesson cannot be drawn from
“Auschwitz”, if not a banal one that trivialises the complex events and
would not have needed the mass murder to come into being. In a time
of an increasing Universalisation of the Holocaust it will be important
not to lapse into mere arbitrariness and constant relativisations of the
events. Instrumentalisation and exploitation might be inescapable,
just as a pure and authentic form of memory is unreachable. Rituals
will be a necessary part of our dealing with the past, moralisation
and the rhetoric of concern (Betroffenheit) unavoidable. But memory
should not wear out in it. It is more and more important to focus on
the concrete events of the Holocaust and to identify what is specific
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about them – against all simplifications and abstractions, undermin-
ing the instrumentalisations and disturbing our certainties. That is
the only way to do justice to the historical events.
Notes
1 Cf. JUDT 2005. For a critical evaluation of the possibilities and potentials of a
European politics of memory cf. Jan-Werner MÜLLER, Europäische Erinnerung-
spolitik revisited, in Transit – Europäische Revue 33/2007, pp. 166–175.
2 Cf. ZIMMERMANN 2006: pp. 202–216; KROH 2008.
3 Cf. RATHKOLB (ed.) 2002; UNFRIED 2003.
4 Cf. T. JUDT, The past is another country: myth and memory in post-war Europe, in:
MÜLLER 2002: pp. 157–183.
5 Cf. GEORGI 2003.
6 Cf. LEVY, SZNAIDER, 2001.
7 For the complex interplay of the global and the local and the meaning of the
national for transnational processes cf. SASSEN 2007.
8 Cf. FRITZ 2007.
9 Cf. <http://www.komisija.lt/en/>, 26.11.2008.
10 Cf. SCHNEIDER: p. 159.
11 Cf. DINER 1988: p. 8.
12 Cf. FINKIELKRAUT 1989.
Bibliography
J. C. ALEXANDER, On the Social Construction of Moral Universals. The
“Holocaust” from War Crime to Trauma Drama, in European Journal of
Social Theory 5, 2002, pp. 1, 5–85.
A. ASSMANN, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur
und Geschichtspolitik, München: C. H. Beck, 2006.
D. DINER, Das Jahrhundert verstehen. Eine universalhistorische Deutung,
München: Luchterhand, 1999.
D. DINER, Der Holocaust in den politischen Kulturen Europas: Erin-
nerung und Eigentum, in K. HENKE (ed.), Auschwitz. Sechs Essays
zu Geschehen und Vergewärtigung (= Hannah-Arendt-Institut, Berichte
und Studien 32), Dresden: HAI, 2001, pp. 65–73.
D. DINER, Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse. Über Geltung und Wirkung des Hol-
ocaust (= toldot 7), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007.
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D. DINER, Vorwort des Herausgebers, in: D. Diner (ed.), Zivilisations-
bruch. Denken nach Auschwitz, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1988,
pp. 7–13.
A. FINKIELKRAUT, Die vergebliche Erinnerung. Vom Verbrechen gegen
die Menschheit, Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 1989.
N. FREI (ed.), Transnationale Vergangenheitspolitik. Der Umgang mit
deutschen Kriegsverbrechen in Europa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (=
Beiträge zur Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts 4), Göttingen: Wallstein,
2006.
R. FRITZ, Gespaltene Erinnerung. Museale Darstellungen des Holocaust
in Ungarn, in R. FRITZ, C. SACHSE, E. WOLFRUM (eds.), Na-
tionen und ihre Selbstbilder. Postdiktatorische Gesellschaften in Europa
(= Diktaturen und ihre Überwindung im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert 1),
Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007, pp. 129–149.
V. B. GEORGI, Entliehene Erinnerung. Geschichtsbilder junger Migranten
in Deutschland, Hamburg: Hamburger Ed., 2003.
C. GERBEL, M. LECHNER, D. C. G. LORENZ, O. MARCHART,
V. ÖHNER, I. STEINER, A. STRUTZ, H. UHL (eds.), Transforma-
tionen gesellschaftlicher Erinnerung. Studien zur „Gedächtnisgeschichte“
der Zweiten Republik (= kultur.wissenschaften 9), Wien: Turia + Kant,
2005.
M. JEISMANN, Auf Wiedersehen Gestern. Die deutsche Vergangenheit und
die Politik von morgen, Stuttgart–München: DVA, 2001.
T. JUDT, Postwar. A History of Europe Since 1945, New York: Penguin
Press, 2005.
V. KNIGGE, N. FREI (eds.), Verbrechen erinnern. Die Auseinandersetzung
mit Holocaust und Völkermord, München: C. H. Beck, 2002.
H. KÖNIG, Politik und Gedächtnis, Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2008.
R. N. LEBOW, W. KANSTEINER, C. FOGU (ed.), The Politics of
Memory in Postwar Europe, Durham–London: Duke University
Press, 2006.
J. KROH, Transnationale Erinnerung. Der Holocaust im Fokus ges-
chichtspolitischer Initiativen, Frankfurt a.M.–New York: Campus,
2008.
D. LEVY, N. SZNAIDER, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holo-
caust, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2001.
M. MAZOWER, Dark Continent. Europe’s Twentieth Century, London:
Penguin, 1998.
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J. MÜLLER (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-War Europe. Studies in
the Presence of the Past, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002.
O. RATHKOLB (ed.), Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy. Coming
to Terms with Forced Labor, Expropriation, Compensation, and Resti-
tution (= Bruno Kreisky International Studies 3), Innsbruck–Wien–
München–Bozen: Studien, 2002.
J. K. ROTH, Holocaust Politics, London–Leiden: Westminster John
Knox Press, 2001.
S. SASSEN, A Sociology of Globalization, London: Norton, 2007.
C. SCHNEIDER, Trauma und Zeugenschaft. Probleme des erinnernden
Umgangs mit Gewaltgeschichte, in M. ELM, G. KÖßLER (eds.), Zeu-
genschaft des Holocaust. Zwischen Trauma, Tradierung und Ermittlung
(Jahrbuch 2007 des Fritz Bauer-Instituts), Frankfurt a.M.–New York:
Campus, 2007, pp. 157–175.
R. STEININGER, Der Umgang mit dem Holocaust. Europa – USA – Israel,
Wien–Köln–Weimar: Böhlau, 1994.
H. UHL (ed.), Zivilisationsbruch und Gedächtniskultur. Das 20. Jahr-
hundert in der Erinnerung des beginnenden 21. Jahrhunderts, Inns-
bruck–Wien–München–Bozen: Studien, 2003.
B. UNFRIED, Restitution und Entschädigung von entzogenem Vermögen
im internationalen Vergleich. Entschädigungsdebatte als Problem der
Geschichtswissenschaft, in Zeitgeschichte 30, 2003, pp. 5, 243–267.
M. ZIMMERMANN, Die transnationale Holocaust-Erinnerung, in G.
BUDDE, S. CONRAD, O. JANZ (eds.), Transnationale Geschichte.
Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ru-
precht, 2006.
78
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Historical Scholarship,
Politics of the Public Past
and (Semi-) Private Memory
Mitchell G. Ash
Once upon a time, there was a TV detective series called “Miami Vice”.
When Don Johnson, the lead actor in that show, got ready to finish
off one of the evil-doers, he often said first, “You’re history”. With
that two-word line Johnson – actually his writers – gave us a clear and
concise representation of an understanding of history that is widely
shared, and not only in the United States. Of course I am referring
to an imagining of “history” as the dead past, something like a mix-
ture of an enormous cemetery with a basement storage room or an
attic filled with junk people haven’t gotten around to throwing away.
This imagining is the basis for many readers’ intuitive, or shall we
say rather unconsidered, expectation that works of history, especially
biographies, are supposed to be magical acts of reanimation that can
somehow “make the past come alive.”
Put more psychologically, we confront here a wish to negate his-
tory and replace it with a permanent present. This wish is hardly
confined to American popular culture; it corresponds to modernity’s
(and NOT only post-modernism’s!) need for ever new beginnings, to
“make it new.” The optimal fulfilment of that wish would be to look
away from, ignore or in the end actively push aside the past, especially
those aspects of the past that seem difficult to integrate into positive
identity constructions. In German this is called einen Schlußstrich zie-
hen, “drawing a line through” the past. Seen in this light, censorship,
including self-censorship, need not only be a denial or erasure of
“history” dictated by governments, but becomes an integral part of its
(re-) construction in a particular, politically or emotionally acceptable
form. Such reconstructions, along with the corresponding acts of (self-)
censorship are undertaken not only by governments, but by ordinary
consumers of mass media products – and their commercial purveyors
– as well. Of course, there is a fundamental difference between gov-
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ernment censorship, which involves implicit or direct coercion, and
the implicit or at times quite explicit collaboration at work between
mass media purveyors and their consumers. And yet, although the
selection of preferred stories about the past in the commercial realm
is carried out first by producers, directors and marketing experts, and
subsequently by audiences, while government censorship is enacted
by rather different people, the resulting historical narratives – along
with the forgettings that inevitably result when historical stories are
recounted only in specified, conventional ways – are in certain respects
surprisingly comparable with one another.
The opposite of the eternal “now” is the idea that history never
dies, but lives in all of us continuously, influencing everything we do
despite our determined efforts to pretend otherwise. This claim is
not only advanced by historians, but it seems, shall we say, rather less
popular in the public sphere. Here the dynamics of scientific and
scholarly competition, which rewards innovation and thus seems to
demand permanent revision of accepted consensus positions, appear
to correspond perfectly with the well-known prominence of claims
to novelty and exclusivity that are driving forces in the media world.
In the media world, as in politics, it often seems less important to
place past events and actions in context in order to come to an un-
derstanding of how and why they occurred as they did, than to select
and “package” historical “material” or, in current internet-speak,
“content” – documents, images and other representations that appear
to be relevant for political and cultural debates in the present.
In such products and the debates that accompany them, “history”
always appears in the singular. The rhetorical claim is that “history”
– or what passes for history - shows, teaches or tells us something
clearly and unambiguously. But the tales about and other, concrete
representations of this supposedly unitary object called “history”
exhibit such obvious plurality that some, in harmony with formerly
fashionable post-modernist ways of speaking, are tempted to claim
that there is no such thing as “history” in the singular – that it is more
correct to speak instead of “histories” in the plural, constructed ac-
cording to the interests, viewpoints and (supposed) experiences of
the tellers (groups) in question. Of course, the scholarly field of his-
tory itself exhibits a seemingly never-ending plurality of narratives
and interpretations, despite historians’ sincerely advanced claims to
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objectivity. I hope that I need not dwell for long on the dangers of
drawing hasty, relativistic conclusions from this fact. The persistence
of conflict and debate about interpretations of history need not imply
that there are multiple “truths” about such events as the Shoah, or
that all interpretations are morally equivalent.
Three distinct, yet intertwined discursive fields
The title of my remarks is intended as a rudimentary basis for our
discussion of these multiple narrative (re-)constructions – and forget-
tings – of the past. As a first step, I would like to propose a three-fold
distinction between historical scholarship, politics of the public past
– by which I mean the political culture of historical representations in
the public sphere – and (semi-)private memory. Admittedly, the second
and third items in this triad sound a bit awkward in English. This is
less true in German; in that language the terms are, Geschichtswissen-
schaft, Geschichtskultur or Vergangenheitspolitik, and tradierte Erinnerung.
Maybe there is a point to be made here about the way the German
language makes it possible to bring objects into existence that did not
exist before. Be that as it may, all three fields of discourse, and the
silences they include or imply, are of course in continuous interaction
with one another, but each discursive field is a complex entity in its
own right. Thus, it seems appropriate to discuss the organisation and
dynamics, the discursive structures, or “rules of the game” in each
area, and then to consider their potential and actual interactions more
specifically. In the process, I hope to challenge, or at least express
scepticism about certain widely held assumptions.
Too often it is simply assumed without further reflection, for
example, that historians’ research results and new interpretations
are, or ought to be, accepted more or less automatically as official
representations in the public sphere. Maybe only historians assume
this, but their surprise is real enough when their authority in matters
historical is not accepted without a struggle, or is even openly rejected.
An example familiar to me from personal experience occurred in
1995. In that year, an exhibition, conceived mainly by historians,
to be held at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington,
D.C., to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of
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the first atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was vehemently
rejected by the Air Force Association and its political allies because
it challenged the often and long-recounted, conventionally accepted
American narrative of that event and attempted to present a more
complex, differentiated story. Many features of the exhibition were
challenged, such as the effort by the exhibition’s creators to include
accounts and interpretations from Japanese and not only Americans
involved. But the central point of contention was the suggestion that
the decision to drop the atomic bomb was not motivated solely by
the humane desire of America’s political leaders to save American
soldiers’ lives. That has been the central element in the American
master narrative of this event since 1945, and remains so to this day.
Other interpretations, no matter how well-grounded they may be
in careful historical research, were in 1995 and continue still to be
denounced as “revisionist” history. The use of that term was and is
still intended to produce deeply disturbing associations with pseudo-
historical revisionism based on the denial of the Shoah.1 The idea
that historical scholarship per se involves challenging, rather than
uncritically propagating accepted interpretations of the past had
precious little place in this discussion.
Equally often there is talk in both the public sphere and in the
scholarly realm about historical controversies as “struggles over
memory,” as though the results of such controversies – assuming they
lead to consensus – automatically find their way into the brains of all
concerned, as though there were no potential or very real conflict
here with other, potentially conflicting accounts of the past passed
along in the (semi-)private sphere. Most of us already know that such
assumptions are questionable; what we need to discuss is how these
discursive fields interact with, influence – or fail to influence – one
another. Specifically, we also need to discuss how silences and censor-
ship (or self-censorship) can play a role in each field.
Historical Scholarship
Surely there will be no difficulty with the claim that this particular
discursive field is largely self-contained. That scholars write mainly
for their colleagues is a common complaint in the public sphere, and
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the irritation is mutual. In one respect, such complaints are simply
beside the point. Of course historians write mainly for one another,
because their aim is to convince their colleagues that a particular
interpretation of the sources is correct. Nonetheless, as historians
well know and never tire of complaining about, the results of their
work rarely reach a wider public. In order for this to happen, acts of
translation, even transformation must take place. Research results
and their interpretations must be expressed in understandable lan-
guage that may not always sound scholarly, the works involved must
be marketed more aggressively than is common among academic
publishers, and some public interest in the topic needs to exist in the
first place. Only then can works of historical scholarship seriously
claim to participate actively in the political culture of the past. For
example: the immensely detailed tomes of scholars like Ingo Haar
and others are valuable contributions to our knowledge of the Nazi
occupation policy in Eastern Europe and the roles of historians in
supporting it, but such texts are heavy going even for scholars.2 In
stark contrast to the magisterial work of Saul Friedlander on Nazi
Germany and the Jews3, they are known to a wider public, if at all,
only through extended reviews in serious newspapers.
Of course this segmentation of discursive spheres was not always
so complete as it appears to be today. The works of Jules Michelet,
Leopold von Ranke, Heinrich Treitschke and others were read by
colleagues and the educated public with attention and enjoyment
in the nineteenth century.4 Perhaps figures like Fritz Stern and Saul
Friedlander can claim to be successors to this tradition today.5 More
interesting for this discussion are writers like Götz Aly, who work in
both fields at once, write like journalists and often seek deliberately
to provoke controversy, but argue like historians and base their work
on extensive archival research.6 The special case of Daniel Goldhagen
will be discussed at greater length below. However, once we realise
that such works by historians, or writers identified as such, rarely if
ever achieve the truly massive public reception accorded to iconic,
privileged “places of memory” such as The Diary of Anne Frank or
Schindler’s List, we can turn with greater interest to the second dis-
cursive field.
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Political Cultures of the Past
This vast realm includes at least four subfields, each of which is in
constant interaction with the others: (1) history as represented in the
media, for example in television documentaries and of course also
in film; (2) the treatment of past events in (often very public) legal
settings such as trials, legislative hearings and the like; (3) political
commemoration rituals and monuments of various kinds; and (4)
pedagogical (re-) presentations of history in the schools. As I have
already suggested, professional historians – much to their chagrin
– are a decided minority of the participants in this field. They may be
used as consultants for television or film documentaries, or as expert
witnesses in court proceedings, but they do not have, and I suspect
they never will have a secure monopoly of expertise in this discursive
field; indeed, their authority is continuously challenged even on the
ground where one would think it was most secure. Their range of
methodologies, extending from systematic oral history to the critical
assessment of written sources (called Quellenkritik in German), while
undoubtedly impressive, can hardly be considered binding for all
players – the more visible the scholarly apparatus, the less interesting
the book in the eyes of publishers and many readers as well.
In any case, there are not now and never will be property rights
to the professional title of historian, nor will academically trained
historians ever be able to claim exclusive domain over historical
writing. The key players in each social subsystem decide according
to their own criteria how to assemble, present and market the re-
spective “products.” Courts decide guilt or innocence according to
their own very specific rules; in film and television documentaries,
as reviewers never tire of (re-)stating, aesthetic concerns or the need
to achieve sensational impact often trump scholarly criteria. Thus, it
is only natural that the political culture of the past is constituted by
a veritable cacophony of voices and a multitude of representational
objects presented in all available media. In Germany, the long-run-
ning debate on the Holocaust memorial in Berlin is an example of
the mine fields that such discussions can become.
Commemorations and other events within the space of political
culture and the school- books or other instructional materials in which
particular accounts of the past are laid down are only two aspects of
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this many-layered complex. Professional historians participate in the
creation of such materials, of course, but their role is seldom decisive.
I have already mentioned the prominent roles of media objects such
as the diary of Anne Frank and Schindler’s List as privileged “places
of memory”; such objects appear to be more familiar, and their les-
sons better remembered, by young people than works of history or
by historians in the narrower sense.
This brings me to the other two subfields – the courts and the schools.
The legal arena is a major setting for public debate on recent history,
but the pedagogical effectiveness of judicial proceedings as teachers
about the past is more often asserted than actually established. Equally
often the results are frustrating. Former East German activist Bärbel
Boley’s widely cited comment on trials of the East German political
leadership and secret police functionaries is apposite: “We got law,
but not justice”.7 Similar frustration also resulted from many trials
related to the crimes of the Shoah, for example the famous trials of
Auschwitz perpetrators in Frankfurt in the 1960s – trials which, by
the way, were far more numerous and began far earlier than is often
realised, but have never truly satisfied demands to “work through the
past” or bring all perpetrators to justice.8 The sort of public political
education that may have been intended and the messages actually
received need to be distinguished carefully from one another.
Of course the same is also true for school instruction. As anyone
who has been disappointed by the results on examination papers
can attest, merely sending a message is no guarantee that it will be
received! Recently, it has become ever clearer that even the best-
intended pedagogical efforts to overcome the alleged “repression”
of the Nazi past in school instruction have not been as effective in
Germany as might have been desired. This is due in part at least to
collision between messages being sent in the schools with messages
transported in the third discursive field of (semi-)private memory, to
which I will turn in a moment.
I want to suggest here, however, that such collisions were inevitable
from the very beginning. The well-meaning efforts of the “68ers”
to expose schoolchildren to their view of the Nazi past, and even to
require them to accept it, may have been poorly grounded pedagogi-
cally. It is, after all, a standard principle of good teaching to try and
reach the pupils where they are cognitively, emotionally and morally,
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rather than to be satisfied with prescribing to them a history that
they ought to accept for normative moral reasons, but which may
have little to do with actual experiences they learn about elsewhere
from people closer to them than their teachers. Holocaust pedagogy
appears to have been a classical example of such a disconnect: What
“really happened” – more accurately, what conventional, politically
accepted discourse deems most important about the past – may not
link up very well with what students have heard about the experiences
of their parents’ or grandparents’ generations. This issue becomes
still more complicated if these students are located in the former
East Germany, and may therefore be asked to confront both Nazi and
Communist pasts both at school and elsewhere.9
(Semi-)private memory
In opposition to historical scholarship and the political cultures of the
past, the preferred media of (semi-)private memory tend to be oral.
Although documents such as photos, unpublished autobiographies,
diaries and the like make their appearance as well, conversations
(and silences!) in family settings small and larger, but also among
friends and acquaintances in semi-public places like bars, pubs, and
restaurants, are the predominant vehicles of discourse in this field.
It therefore seems to me inappropriate to describe memory in this
sphere as strictly private. In any case, as cognitive science research
suggests, even individuals’ memories appear to be retained more
effectively when they are embedded in stories, which are of course
forms of social communication.10 Seen in this context, semi-private
memory, including silences and forgetting characteristic of such
settings, becomes a multi-layered social construction, influenced by
expressed memories (or silences) of family, friends and comrades,
school teachers, but also – and perhaps more strongly than is often
realised – by public political, especially media discourse.
This field has been extensively researched and analysed in recent
years, most prominently by social psychologists such as Harald Welzer
and his colleagues.11 As their work shows, and as thoughtful informed
people have long suspected, this discursive field cannot be serapated
from the political cultures of the past. The influence of information
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and images from the media on the memories of witnesses – includ-
ing survivors of the Shoah – is well-known. More interesting for this
discussion may be the finding nicely expressed in the title of one
of Welzer’s books: “Opa war kein Nazi” – “Grandpa was not a Nazi.”
Politically engaged people – including advocates of the normative
pedagogy mentioned above – have remarked with some cynicism
for decades that every German family seems to have had at least one
resistance fighter in its heritage.12 Welzer sees such stories not as evi-
dence of shocking pedagogical failure, or of the disconnect between
well-meaning pedagogy and living memory as suggested above, but
rather as a positive sign of the impact of official, politically correct
(West) German pedagogy. He portrays the third generation of German
youth as clever if unconscious tricksters, combining official discourse
with a representation of family members as “good” Germans and thus
creating an integrated whole, which has the additional benefit of
supporting individuals’ positive identity constructions.13 Comparisons
with patterns in other European countries have led to some interesting
modifications of this result, with important implications for the idea
(or illusion) of establishing a common European historical identity.
What individuals make of all these resources, and how widely that
can vary even within families, is another matter entirely. A case in
point is the interesting television film “A Few Things I Know about My
Father”, which received the Peace Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in
2006. The film’s author is the younger son of a former high Nazi
official in Slovakia – the father was executed as a war criminal shortly
after the end of the war. The film is presented as a documentary
about the discovery of materials about the father, and the son’s own
dogged efforts – far too persistent for some of his siblings – to learn
more about what these documents mean by connecting them with
materials in archives as well as the memories of former neighbours
and, of course, his own relatives. The filmmaker thus produces a
rich narrative of rediscovery and interlards this with a family drama
that, in one scene, peaks in a confrontation between the author and
his politically more conservative sister in her pottery studio that
nearly erupts in violence. Despite the film’s evident weaknesses as a
documentary and the filmmaker’s rather too evident sense of moral
superiority, even this work reveals the obvious advantages that non-
scholarly media enjoy in the public culture of history and memory.
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By using images and tone as well as text, such works can achieve a
quality of personal drama and immediacy only rarely reached in
novels and still more rarely approached in works of scholarship.
Problematic Interactions
The previous paragraph presented an example of both the interac-
tions and the tensions and even conflicts among all three of these
discursive fields or spaces; other examples will have occurred to many
readers from their own experiences. As I have already suggested, a
significant gap has opened between historical scholarship and political
culture of the past, and also between these two discursive realms and
(semi-)private memory transmissions. Such gaps may be less a matter
of content than of form. As early as 1965 Roland Barthes wrote in his
collection of excerpts from the work of Michelet that, “We no longer
recount history today as a story.”14 At the time, Barthes may have been
referring to the work of the Annales school which emphasised long-
term changes in demography, climate and economic structures over
detailed accounts of single events or individuals. Later, he could also
have cited the social and economic history coming from the Bielefeld
school. Scholars using both approaches consciously placed themselves
in opposition to history as narrative and appeared to some readers
to negate, or at least limit, the role of individual historical actors
and their decisions by making them appear to be objects of larger
historical forces. Of course I do not intend to rail against specialised
historical scholarship or to create some sort of artificial opposition of
analytical versus story telling modes of scholarly presentation.15 But
the implications of this stylistic gap for the language of historians
as well as the relation of their discipline to the other two fields of
discourse seem clear, and troubling.
Some of these troubling implications became clear during the
intense debate over Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing
Executioners more than ten years ago.16 I do not wish to go into those
debates again here, but it is worth remembering that the book itself
soon became a location for collisions among all three of the discur-
sive spheres I have tried to define. In a situation in which so many
stories, remembrances and interpretations focus on a single event,
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Goldhagen forcibly pulled the telling of the Shoah from the symbolic
back to the immediate. His at times disturbingly concrete descrip-
tions of killing,17 his emphasis on the individual responsibility of
the killers and his insistent questioning of the motives behind their
actions were among the more attractive aspects of the book for many
readers. Goldhagen himself wrote that the argument of his book was
rooted in (semi-)private memory, specifically in conversations with his
father, an émigré from Nazism.18 He thus presented the book as an
attempt to heighten the authenticity of a discourse based in part on
semi-private memory, which had already acquired nearly iconic status
in the realm of public political culture of the past, with the help of
historical and social scientific argumentation. The book – rumoured
to have been rejected by Harvard University Press, then published
by trade presses in the United States and Germany and aggressively
marketed not least by its author – became for a time a privileged
site for controversial debates within and enactments of the political
culture of the past (Geschichtskultur). I have suggested elsewhere that
the book was so widely received and discussed because it supported
already established, identity creating narratives on both sides of
the Atlantic, albeit in different ways. In the US, it supported a long
held and rarely questioned narrative of German evil; in Germany, its
purchase was a symbolic act in support of the normatively “correct”
memory that had finally come to be accepted, at least by the majority
of the first postwar generation.19
The problem for scholars lay in Goldhagen’s attempt to embed
his positive contributions within a narrative (re-)presentation of the
Shoah as a “German project,” thus subsuming his concrete descrip-
tions and analyses of the killers as individuals within a long known
and widely challenged master narrative of the history of German Anti-
Semitism. A gap soon yawned between the widespread, often posi-
tive public reception of Goldhagen’s book and its almost universally
critical reception among historians. Ruth Bettina Birn, a Canadian
historian, carefully demonstrated multiple instances of selective and
at times even wilfully tendentious use of sources by Goldhagen and
was threatened with a lawsuit in return. She concluded that in this
case the media alone decided what was to “count” as history, either
without listening to or while deliberately overhearing the objections of
experts.20 Equally plausible is another interpretation: neither detailed
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scholarly critiques nor differentiated analytical perspectives have any
chance in the public sphere against established consensus narratives.
But we may well ask whether it is a good idea to use poorly argued
scholarship in support of positive political aims, such as spreading
knowledge of the Shoah.
The image of modernity as a cultural complex based on perma-
nent self-creation and thus in constant danger of forgetting itself
represents only one side of the coin. The need to construct mean-
ingful identities at least in part through historical storytelling seems
to be very much alive. The open question – one with many answers
– remains, however, which tales from which privileged people and
sources acquire iconic status as “places of memory” in a given politi-
cal culture. History affects us all – whether this occurs by means of
identity myths or the endless discussion of possibly uncomfortable
scholarly arguments based on logic and evidence, is another matter.
This brings me to my final question: Are we dealing here with an
interaction among participants whose authority and weight are in
principle equal? Are politicians merely receptacles and magnifiers
of public sentiment; are school teachers merely willing recipients of
historians’ knowledge? Or is not the situation better described as a
continuous struggle for attention, recognition and authority, with no
end in sight?
My answer is clear from what I have said thus far: Given the fact that
all three of the discursive fields I have described are riven with con-
flict, it should not surprise us to discover that the interactions among
the spheres are also conflicted. The persuasive force of enlighten-
ment alone has its limitations; neither the truth of particular claims
about the past, defined as consensus among informed experts, nor
the moral force of ideas is a guarantor of their acceptance. Serious
work, in some cases media work and in other cases more straight-
forwardly political work, is required to assure success. And, as the
German proverb goes, the devil never sleeps.
Notes
1 For extensive accounts and documentation of this controversy see HOGAN 1996;
BIRD and LIFSCHULTZ 1998.
2 HAAR 2000; FAHLBUSCH and HAAR (eds.) 2006.
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3 FRIEDLANDER 1997, 2006.
4 For example: VON RANKE 1905; VON RANKE 1913; VON TREITSCHKE
1879–1894; MICHELET 1972 and 1973; BARTHES 1980.
5 STERN 1977; STERN 1987; STERN 1999.
6 ALY 1999; ALY 2007.
7 The original German is: “Wir wollten Gerechtigkeit, und bekamen den Rech-
tsstaat”. The citation has become so common that no one feels the need to cite
an original source for it.
8 On the roles of historians as consultants and researchers in the Auschwitz trials
of the 1960s, see Norbert FREI (ed.) 2000.
9 This issue becomes still more complicated if we differentiate between West and
East German pedagogical settings. See, for example, ECKERT, VON PLATO
and SCHÜTTRUMPF (eds.) 1991.
10 For recent discussions of this subject, see WELZER (ed.) 2001; WELZER 2005.
11 WELZER, MOLLER, and TSCHUGGNALL (eds.) 2002.
12 Whether or not this is true of Austrians would be an interesting research topic.
For first steps in this direction, see BOTZ (ed.) 2007.
13 WELZER (ed.) 2007.
14 BARTHES 1980, p. 14.
15 For such a dichotomy, drawn far too sharply in this case, see WEHLER 2007.
16 See, among many others, HEIL (ed.) 1998.
17 Goldhagen often created such impressions of concreteness by describing actual
killings as though he himself had seen them. For an insightful analysis of Gold-
hagen’s writing, see LA CAPRA 2001, chap. 4.
18 GOLDHAGEN 1996. Afterward to the Vintage paperback edition 1997, p. 616.
19 ASH 1997.
20 BIRN and RIESS 1997. The subsequent, acrimonious debate between Goldhagen
and Birn need not detain us further here.
Bibliography
G. ALY, “Final solution”. Nazi population policy, and the murder of the
European Jews, trans. B. COOPER and A. BROWN. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999.
G. ALY, Hitler’s beneficiaries. Plunder, race war and the Nazi welfare state,
trans. J. CHASE. New York: Metropolitan, 2007.
M. G. ASH, American and German Perspectives on the Goldhagen
Debate: History, Identity and the Media, in Holocaust and Genocide
Studies 11, 1997, pp. 396-412.
R. BARTHES, Michelet, trans. P. GEBLE. Hamburg: Europäische
Verlagsanstalt, 1980.
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K. BIRD and L. LIFSCHULTZ (eds.), Hiroshima’s Shadow. Stony Creek,
CT: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998.
R. B. BIRN and V. RIESS, Revising the Holocaust (review of Daniel
Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners), in The Historical
Journal 40, 1997, pp. 193–215.
G. BOTZ (ed.), Schweigen und Reden einer Generation. Erinnerungsge-
spräche mit Opfern, Tätern und Mitläufern des Nationalsozialismus.
Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2007.
R. ECKERT, A. VON PLATO and J. SCHÜTTRUMPF (eds.), Wen-
dezeiten, Zeitenwende. Zur “Entnazifizierung” und “Entstalinisierung”.
Hamburg: Ergebnisse, 1991.
M. FAHLBUSCH and I. HAAR (eds.), German Scholars and Ethnic
Cleansing 1919–1945. New York: Berghahn, 2005.
N. FREI (ed.), Geschichte vor Gericht. Historiker, Richter und die Suche
nach Gerechtigkeit. Munich: Beck, 2000.
S. FRIEDLANDER, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols. New York:
Harper Collins, 1997, 2006.
D. J. GOLDHAGEN, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Ordinary Germans
and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf, 1996.
I. HAAR, Historiker im Nationalsozialismus. Deutsche Geschichtswissen-
schaft und der „Volkstumskampf“ im Osten. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 2000.
J. HEIL (ed.), Geschichtswissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit. Der Streit um
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch
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M. J. HOGAN (ed.), Hiroshima: History and Memory. Cambridge:
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D. LA CAPRA, Writing Trauma. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2001.
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of Illinois Press, 1973.
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F. STERN, Dreams and Delusions. The Drama of German History. New
York: Random House, 1987.
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F. STERN, Einstein’s German World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1999.
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vols. London: G. Bell and sons, 1913.
L. VON RANKE, History of the Reformation in Germany, trans. Sarah
AUSTIN. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1905.
H. VON TREITSCHKE, Deutsche Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert, 5 vols.
Leipzig: Hirzel, 1879-1894.
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in der gegenwärtigen Geschichtswissenschaft. Vienna: Picus Verlag,
2007.
H. WELZER, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis. Eine Theorie der Erin-
nerung. Munich: Beck, 2005.
H. WELZER (ed.), Das soziale Gedächtnis. Geschichte, Erinnerung,
Tradierung. Hamburg: Hamburg Edition, 2001.
H. WELZER (ed.), Der Krieg der Erinnerung. Holocaust, Kollaboration,
und Widerstand im europäischen Gedächtnis. Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007.
H. WELZER, S. MOLLER, and K. TSCHUGGNALL (eds.), “Opa war
kein Nazi.” Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis.
Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002.
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Coping with Traumatic Past(s):
Case Studies
Justice and Memory.indb 95 02.11.2009 13:39:07
Justice and Memory.indb 96 02.11.2009 13:39:07
Considering the Violence of Voicelessness:
Censorship and Self-censorship Related to the
South African TRC Process
Christine Anthonissen
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was
established after an intense public debate on how the State should
respond to knowledge of and persisting references to extensive hu-
man rights violations perpetrated on the one hand by the National
Party government that had ruled from 1948 to 1994, and on the other
hand by some sections of the liberation movements during the latter
years of resistance. Many advocated a policy that would let bygones
be bygones. The motivation underlying such a position was one that
recognised there had been a recent history of violence in which there
had been atrocities on both sides. Then, the argument went, there
were victims and perpetrators on either side and in equal measure.1
The best way forward would be to “forgive and forget”, to no longer
speak about what had happened, to draw a veil of silence, to draw a
closing line (a Schlußstrich) that would signal the end of the bad chap-
ter. With a view to unification, in commitment to a newly established
ideal of nation building, we would turn to the future and commit
the past to silence. In so doing, a supposedly wholesome national
amnesia would be encouraged. The advocacy for such a position is
now history – it did not succeed. The position that won out was one
that held there could be no peace, no unity, no reconciliation without
the truth, painful as it may be to victim or perpetrator.
The decision to establish the TRC entailed a pledge of extensive
state support for a process of investigation and public disclosure of
specific kinds of politically motivated injustices.2 The process was
intended to achieve a number of things, including (i) that it would
allow proper audience to those who had suffered, (ii) it would oblige
those who had perpetrated atrocities to come forward and make
full disclosures, and (iii) it would undeniably inform those who had
turned a blind eye and a deaf ear, who somehow were able to believe
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or pretend that barring a few unfortunate indiscretions by isolated
outsiders, everything had always been more or less fine.3 The TRC
process was conceived as a grand initiative that would lay the foun-
dations for coming to terms with traumas and atrocities of the past
in such a way that moving forward to national unity would finally
be possible. We are now ten years beyond the final hearings of the
TRC. Although much that was started with the institution of the TRC
is ongoing, and the work from no perspective can be considered to
have ended, some of the early momentum has diminished and much
remains unresolved. Thus it is good at this stage to take stock of what
was anticipated, what was achieved, and what remains as challenges
on an individual as well as a collective level.4
Much recent research has commented on the languages that were
used and the kinds of discourses that were constructed during the
recorded TRC hearings.5 This paper will consider the largely trans-
parent component of discourse, namely the part where language
ceases, where accidentally or calculatedly, there are no words and
thus often also no recorded contributions to collective memory. In
reflecting specifically on silence and censorship, this paper will introduce
and elaborate the concept of “voicelessness” and then also the notion
“violence of voicelessness”, which I suggest is a productive concept for
understanding what obliges and maintains silence in relation to the
kinds of human rights violations that the TRC set out to investigate.
The paper will give a brief outline of the context in which TRC hear-
ings of 1996 to1998 developed as a national, governmentally instituted
initiative aimed at breaking the silence, at overcoming voicelessness.6
The TRC encouraged and facilitated voluntary recollection of suffer-
ing and of gross human rights violations for which some perpetrators
were directly responsible, while others were indirectly responsible by,
for example, giving orders, providing support or simply looking in
the other direction. Such prompted recall and relating of traumatic
experience, as opposed to spontaneous or involuntary recollection, has
recognised difficulties that need to be considered when the silences
in communication of violence are topicalised. This paper considers
censorship as a form of silencing. It will refer to silencing discourses
that were endemic in the media of the late 1980s in South Africa
when stringent censorship attached to the State of Emergency was
operative. It will also refer to the silences that are perpetuated even
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after the TRC, if not through overt censorship, then more covertly
through the invisibility of “stories” of inflicted trauma.
The discourses to be considered here are of a kind that have been
critically analysed from a number of different theoretical and meth-
odological perspectives. The TRC testimonies as well as media reports
on the violating events themselves and on their coverage at TRC
hearings have been linguistically and discursively analysed drawing
on perspectives developed in Discourse Analysis7, Critical Discourse
Analysis8, Systemic Functional Linguistics9 and Narrative Theory10
– or in some cases also a combination of various of these theoretical
approaches11. Such analyses have served to disclose some of the ways
in which people articulate and come to terms with their experiences
of state repression, of officially sanctioned violence, of trauma at the
hands of powerful institutions; they have also served to illustrate how
institutional violence can be mystified by the control of what may
be published, by the terms in which atrocities are referred to, by the
minimising of perverse actions of their own and amplifying of the
impropriety of the other; and they have served to underscore certain
features of, for example, justificatory discourses that repeatedly occur
in contexts as far apart as Argentina, South Africa or Austria. This
paper will attend to the silences that become particularly noticeable
through the ways in which public communication in the media silences
minor details, alternative versions of an event, and even complete
stories. In doing so it relates to various theoretical instruments intro-
duced in Critical Discourse Analysis, that acknowledge the impact of
unequal power relations, and the manipulative actions of those who
are in charge of powerful institutions such as the security services in a
totalitarian state, the information services of a government suspected
of doing “dirty tricks” or the news media serving an ideology that
will keep people who are careless of basic human rights in power.
The violence of voicelessness
Besides considering censorship as a form of silencing, I shall also
introduce the concept “voicelessness” to refer to the inability of trau-
matised people to contribute to a discourse in which they should be
central participants. The definition of “voicelessness” used here is one
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developed in the field of psychology, where patients have been found
to respond to trauma, abuse and oppression with an overwhelming
sense of powerlessness. The feeling of utter incapacity gives rise to
an inability to articulate the trauma that a person has lived through,
thus to what Hardy12 refers to as the victim’s “learned voicelessness”.
Following an experience of severe trauma a victim becomes mute,
often involuntarily, but at times also deliberately.
This particular concept of “voicelessness” as it is embodied in re-
sponses to suffering resulting from violent excesses that were recalled
in the course of TRC hearings is useful in understanding:
(i) the effect of silencing discourses through censorship in the latter
part of 20th century South Africa,
(ii) some of the aims of the TRC as an initiative aimed at breaking
the silence, and
(iii) the silences that are perpetuated, even after the TRC.
Related to voicelessness are feelings of rage, pain and sorrow that
are often suppressed. The learned inability to articulate menacing
experiences such as victimisation, harassment, abduction, or torture
can even underpin the development of pathology.13
In the course of overcoming disabling voicelessness, for example in
attempting to regain one’s voice in therapy, victims are often reported
to express deep feelings of anger and sadness. There are a number of
ways in which victims of human rights abuses have been assisted, such
as in therapy or in joining support groups in their communities. The
TRC intended through public testimony in a controlled and relatively
safe space to assist in overcoming such forms of voicelessness.14 By
recognising the validity and authenticity of recalled experiences, the
TRC did in some instances fulfill such a facilitating function.
Cuéllar15, in discussing the resistance of former victims to being
interviewed, introduces the term “violence of voicelessness” to refer
to the experience of many victims who at some stage interacted with
“trauma experts”. Many had found the recounting of their trauma
a harrowing experience. Afterwards they felt their experience had
become a commodity for intellectual elites. Many who had testified
and had been interviewed by therapists and social scientists interested
in the ability of people to come to terms with violent events, eventu-
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ally were left with the impression that once the story had been told,
their interviewers had abandoned them, retelling their stories but
forgetting them. This “industry of retrieval” resulted in many groups
and individuals turning away from outsiders who wished to hear their
stories.16 Such voluntary voicelessness and its effect of withdrawing the
story from the public domain17, of reclaiming control over personal
histories, needs to be given due attention.
The following sections will refer to aims of the TRC in removing
silences, and also to the manner in which overt as well as covert forms
of silencing have contributed to continued voicelessness, even when
censorship is lifted and public spaces have been opened up.
Aims of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
In South Africa during the early 1990s there was lively public debate
on how to bring closure to the conflict that had preceded the elections
for an inclusive democracy.18 As has been noted, the decision finally
was to institute a high profiled commission, the TRC, which would
investigate claims and make arrangements for public hearings in a
large number of centres across the country. Those who had suffered
human rights violations would testify to their experience; others who
had lost kin under suspect circumstances could request investigations
that would eventually reveal more complete details. Thus there was
a concerted effort to break the silence on events of disappearance,
torture, killing or other abuse of kin who were no longer there to
protest or ask questions. Additionally, public hearings would offer
perpetrators of violent human rights abuses an opportunity to apply
for amnesty in exchange for full disclosure of the particular events.
There were also hearings at which groups and organisations such as
political parties or big commercial institutions were offered an oppor-
tunity to make public submissions in which they would disclose their
direct or indirect role in structures that enabled human rights abuses
of various kinds. Such organisations were also given the opportunity,
where appropriate, to apologize and make a commitment to restitu-
tion. The official institution of public testimonies aimed at achieving
a number of goals which included broad, rather idealistic aims such
as mediating reconciliation and facilitating national unity.19
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There were, however, also a number of much more specific and
more achievable goals, of which I shall mention a few:
In public hearings, it was contended, the silence would be broken on
many human rights violations that were at the time either covered up
or constructed as justified responses to real threats to (for example)
state security or the integrity of an established, ordered community.
Such breaking of the silence would achieve the aim of acknowl-
edging the extent of the atrocities committed in the years directly
preceding the transfer to democratic government. This would over-
come the denial of many attached to the earlier regime, that human
rights abuses had not occurred systematically and excessively. It would
put to rest the claim that violations reported in the media were noth-
ing more than isolated incidents of outrageous behaviour of a few
undisciplined individuals.
Public hearings would assist in committing the past to memory by
providing a means of bringing beneficial closure to past traumatic
histories. Public relating and remembering of irredeemable losses
offered the possibility of memorialisation: those who had lost their
lives as well as those who had lost loved ones would be afforded due
respect and honour.20
Structured and resourcefully supported opportunities for articu-
lating and confronting damaging experiences offered occasion for
attending to psychological scars in a manner that could heal the
wounds. Of course, in some cases returning to traumatic memories
meant re-opening old wounds, so that for certain witnesses the
retelling of a traumatic experience had not been one of healing.21
A related aim was to create safe spaces that could assist those who
had suffered gross human rights violations in dealing with anger,
humiliation, sorrow and injury. Even those who had inflicted abuse
are known to suffer from various forms of post-traumatic stress and
anxiety. In shifting blame to higher ranking officials, in presenting
themselves as minor employees with limited agency, many perpetra-
tors constructed themselves as victims co-opted into a vicious system.
Such perpetrators sometimes testified to feelings similar to those
reported by victims so that they claimed their motivation to testify
sprung at least in part from a desire to tell their side of the story.
They needed either to justify what they did, or to gain understand-
ing for the fact that they were paying a high price for their services to
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the former power holders. They experienced rejection, isolation and
stigmatization in communities where they had expected to be received
as heroes. The TRC was to give sympathetic audience to such claims
as well. Thus another goal set in establishing the TRC was to create
safe spaces that would assist those who had perpetrated gross human
rights violations in disclosing the whole truth and at the same time
unburdening themselves of the weight of shame and guilt22.
Those who had suffered gross abuses as well as those who had in-
flicted such abuses could look back and experience “voicelessness”.
The TRC was set up with the aim of enabling a kind of intervention
that would overcome voicelessness and allow victims/survivors as
well as perpetrators to speak out. Such breaking of the silence was
intended to provide a remedy for national discord. Robins23 refers to
this as a powerful, even if flawed, process which at least “opened up a
highly visible public accounting of the complexities and ambiguities
of ‘the struggle’.”
Censorship in the media
This section will indicate the forms of overt and covert censorship
that were extant in the struggle years that preceded the democratic
elections of 1994 and the Government of National Unity that followed.
Overt forms of censorship refer to legislation and the implementation
of such legislation, that specifically prohibited media reference to
state actions as they materialised in police and military engagement
in specific “hot spots”. Covert forms of censorship refer to silencing
by other, less explicit means such as denial, shame or fear.24 Often
during the years of intensified conflict, when a state of emergency
was successively introduced (1985–1990), self-censorship was imposed
in anticipation of retribution by official mechanisms of a particularly
powerful kind.25 Following the lifting of the state of emergency early
in 1990 all the censorship regulations attached to Emergency Regula-
tions were of course removed. After the institution of the Government
of National Unity in 1994 many other regular forms of censorship that
had not been removed were no longer invoked. Nevertheless, many
covert forms of censorship and self-censorship remain, which I shall
exemplify in reference to TRC aims of breaking the silence.
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Overt censorship
Legislated regulations that were in one way or another justified had
an effect on what was disclosed, on what kinds of events were allowed
into the public domain for discussion and consideration. Specifically
notable in the final years of the struggle for liberation of an oppressed
majority, was media censorship that had been provided for in a di-
verse range of laws introduced into the national legal system as early
as 1953. The Emergency Regulations announced in 1985 and annu-
ally renewed until 1989, were allowed in terms of legislation passed
32 years earlier – the Public Safety Act (3 of 1953). The censorship
provided for by the Public Safety Act was augmented by provisions
in other legislation such as:
– Defence Act (44 of 1957)
– Police Act (7 of 1958) – amended 1977, 1979
– Post Office Act (44 of 1958)
– Prisons Act (8 of 1959)
– Armaments Development and Production Act (57 of 1968)
– National Supplies Procurement Act (89 of 1970)
– Internal Security Act (74 of 1982)
– Protection of Information Act (84 of 1982)
The TRC aims included the disclosing of information that had
formerly been withheld from the public domain by censorship laws
and practices. In many cases26 this aim was certainly achieved. Still,
much remains undisclosed, that is silenced. In many other cases the
disclosure of lived pain was given in a testimony of 20 to 30 minutes
at a TRC hearing.27 Such recounts did not live long in the public
memory and eventually they got lost in the sea of other stories, so
that finally the silence is perpetuated.
Covert censorship
This form of censorship is manifest where overt, controlled censor-
ship has been removed, but silencing continues due to a number of
motivating factors. The media give very selective attention to stories
of past suffering. In terms of “newsworthiness,” personal suffering of
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ten to twenty years ago is rarely high on the list, especially if it seems
the stories are all very similar. So, where the disclosures at the TRC
hearings got extensive coverage at the start of the process in 1996, a
wearying readership soon dictated that TRC events moved from the
front page to page three or page five. Soon only already well-pub-
licised events (such as the Cradock Four, the Guguletu Seven, the
Motherwell bombing or the role of the former State President and
his refusal to testify) remained prominent in the media. It is not a
new media principle that attention goes first to recent news, and that
this blurs and silences the less recent. As the poor and those poorly
educated do not make out the core readership of any printed news,
their interests are rarely considered in the selection of news stories.
Most of those who suffered at the hands of the former state security
forces belong to communities that ten years after the change of gov-
ernment remain poor and poorly resourced. Thus the disclosure of
their stories got less attention. Life moves on, people move on, the
histories of insignificant people are treated as insignificant by the
media. That is a form of covert censorship.
Self-censorship is another form of covert censorship. Prompted by
(for example) fear of rejection or retribution many perpetrators would
disclose no more than they absolutely needed to. Thus the aim of
achieving “full disclosure” was defeated. Where evidence had been
wiped out (as for example in the fire that destroyed the police files
carrying evidence of illegal and abusive conduct in the Paarl police
unit) there was little to confirm whether a full disclosure had been
made or not, and so many histories remain silenced and the victims
remain voiceless. Shame silences both perpetrators and victims, and
leaves them unable to talk about the troubles they’ve caused or experi-
enced. Victims cannot relate humiliating experiences; perpetrators are
humiliated when they are confronted by their own inhumane actions.
Prejudice can also perpetuate voicelessness: if a witness is seen to be
too meek, too aggressive, too hesitant or too overbearing, members
of the audience may doubt the reliability of his/her testimony. When
there are different possible renderings of a given event, prejudice
may deafen the hearer to an alternative version and so silence the
story. In a similar manner a witness who feels intimidated and who
does not trust the interrogators will self-censor and rather remain
voiceless than be humiliated by an insensitive audience.
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Victims’ silence at the TRC took on a variety of shapes. Many re-
fused to bring their stories to such a public space. Such self-censor-
ship based on internal refusal to share their story could have been
due to their reluctance to re-open old wounds or their feeling that
words cannot articulate sufficiently what they have been through.
Although interpreting services were available, many were inhibited
by linguistic insecurity and cultural difference. A speaker who was
not confident in English or Afrikaans (the languages in which most of
the commissioners were proficient and in which reporting was done)
could be easily intimidated. Those unfamiliar with communicating
in a formal setting by means of an interpreting mediator were easily
rendered voiceless. Speakers whose narrative techniques are suited to a
culture of “orality”, who are used to drawing on traditional values and to
interpreting life histories in such terms, often succumb to voicelessness.
In more sophisticated contexts, such as those of school halls or church
halls where the tables and interpreters’ booths were set up quite formally,
they may easily have been silenced, inadvertently, in quite covert ways.
Sensing that an interest in their narratives of suffering and loss was often
neither personal nor sensitive, many victims/survivors maintained con-
trol, convinced that they kept ownership of their history by withholding
their stories. Where scholars and counselors appeared to be appropri-
ating and re-articulating most sensitive personal histories, victims would
self-censor and refuse to talk. For fear of becoming a public spectacle,
some felt they would rather be voiceless. Finally many witnesses became
fatigued – incessant probing and requests for more detail, for yet another
recount by counselors, researchers and the media, simply silenced them.
The locus of voice
The concept “locus of voice”28 is introduced to explain where the
creative and constructive power of discourse is situated. Cuéllar29 com-
ments on how “testimony” becomes “story” and how ownership of the
history and the memory seem to shift once a witness’s story has been
moved into a public space. He notes the feelings of dislocation, frag-
mentation, disempowerment and despair that some reported after the
“momentary catharsis” of sharing their story either at a TRC hearing
or in interviews with trauma experts from various backgrounds. Im-
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portant points to consider here in reflecting on how interrogating
and analysing testimonies can silence the experiencers, are related to
questions of who owns the stories recounted in TRC testimonies and
disseminated in the media, or how the stories are retold and dissolved
into new narratives. Victims who consented to witnessing at the TRC
eventually were faced with having to deal with other testifiers’ experi-
ences that left impressions of their stories having been “robbed” and
“recolonised”; with the way in which personal stories are inevitably
transformed and alienated once they are out in the public space; with
selective media reporting that made some events highly visible and
others only barely so; and, with the deception of popular adages such
as “remembering in order to forget”. The aim of remembering in
order to finally come to terms and then to move forward is not eas-
ily achieved. When speakers are not voiceless, it is still important to
determine where “voice” is located – who controls, who determines
what will become part of a collective public memory and what will be
committed to silence. Who has access to the stories and the memories,
and who has the right to retell and claim authorship?
The question that emerges is how it is possible for recounts of
trauma to actually break silence and facilitate healing. And of course
one needs to assess whether the breaking of the silence as it was done
by a TRC in South Africa, actually achieved the aims that had been
set, communicatively and otherwise.
As has been indicated, one of the main objectives of the TRC was
to break the silence on injustices that had never been disclosed, had
only limitedly been explained, or that had been officially denied as
if they had never even happened. Testimonies of victims/survivors
of gross human rights violations at the hands of state institutions
very clearly functioned as a means of recognising the authenticity of
their experiences. The healing potential of having one’s story heard
and acknowledged as a real event where suffering and loss resulted
from excessive, unwarranted (even criminal) acts of powerful people
authorised by the state, is one of the recognised effects of breaking
the silence. A further recognised effect lies in the healing potential of
knowing the truth even if it is a terrible truth such as that a loved one
who had disappeared, had been killed in distressing circumstances
where there was no hope of even recovering the remains. Perpetrators
of violence were obviously less forthcoming in offering to testify. Even
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so, the potential relief of finally giving up dark secrets is a recognised
route to reconciliation not only with others, but also with themselves.
The TRC hearings were structured to locate the voices of witnesses
in a space that is public and yet safe enough for them to be spoken
clearly. Rigby30 articulates the difficulty of an attempt at constructing
memories that will not only sustain historical wounds and thereby
reproduce divisions and enmities from generation to generation, but
will underpin the possibility to transform and heal. In attempting to
break the silence, the TRC took on such a challenge.
To have imagined that finally we would reach a point where all had
been disclosed, where all had been put into perspective and positively
integrated into personal and communal histories, and where reconcil-
iation had largely been achieved, would have been rather utopian. In
the remaining part of the paper I shall refer to various ways in which
silences that had been encoded during the fatal years of repressive
violence were to a certain extent lifted during the hearings. I shall
specifically refer to overt silencing during the 1980s and then also to
covert silencing that continues even after the stories have been medi-
ated in a TRC process. There are discourses that still contain untold
stories, silences. Covert censorship results not only from fear and
shame, from lapses in memory or from personal limits in ability to
articulate; it also results from flagging public interest, from listeners’
weariness that becomes visible in a longing for the Schlußstrich, the
clean break, the opportunity of a new beginning even if the silence
has only partially been broken.
Silences broken and silences perpetuated
It is necessary here to distinguish between overt silencing that oc-
curred during the period of repression, notably when a State of
Emergency afforded the security forces inordinate liberty in their
pursuit of “enemies of the state”, and the resulting silences in the
media where reporters were either not able to gain information or
were allowed only at their own peril to publish information they in
fact had gained. Excerpts 1 and 2 below are illustrations of how such
overt state silencing was effected, and then also of how the TRC
hearings penetrated those silences. Excerpts 3 to 5 below illustrate
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how silences around narratives of atrocities in the 1980s were broken
during TRC testimonies; however, they will also illustrate how some
silences are perpetuated even after the TRC process.31
I. Pre-1990/pre-TRC: overt censorship, silence
The following excerpt illustrates how silences were encoded in the
terms of reference introduced in some of the undercover, illegal ac-
tions of security forces. Often such terms were completely opaque so
that even critical media did not have access to them (compare “associ-
ate”); other terms in fact were taken into the popular struggle jargon
of the time and also used in the media (compare “askari”). During
the testimony of some perpetrators such silences were broken in that
they were upfront about the referential meanings of the jargon they
had developed and used.
Excerpts 1 and 2 were recorded as part of the very lengthy testimony
of Gideon Nieuwoudt, related during the amnesty hearing on the
Motherwell Bombing, Port Elizabeth.
EXCERPT 1 – Coded language as instrument in silencing
Motherwell is an area on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth in the Eastern
Cape which became renowned for a particular event in which four
black policemen died in a car bomb attack. It was made to look like
a terrorist attack on the police, but it soon transpired that a special
unit of Vlakplaas in Pretoria had been engaged to make, install and
detonate a bomb that would kill a number of black colleagues. The
colleagues were suspected of having leaked information on planned
police action to local members of resistance organisations. At the
TRC hearing family members denied the police force version of the
allegations.
In this excerpt Advocate Booyens (B), a TRC commissioner, directly
asked Gideon Nieuwoudt (GN), a commanding officer in the area at
the time of the bombing, about particular terms that had been in use
in the security services and in military intelligence at the time. These
terms were critical in determining the role of various participants
who had been go-betweens in the security force actions of gaining
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information on the community leaders in the African townships. The
particular terms in question here are the referring expressions “Am-
abutu” that referred to the informal armed resistance groups in the
township communities, and “askari”, “associate”, “source” and “agent”
that each referred to a different kind of informer and collaborator.
B: In paragraph 19 you talk about the Amabutu, what is that?
GN: That is a terminology which was used, to mean the army of
the people. . .
GN: . . . Charles Jack was a trained person whom we used as an
informer and he later gave evidence in several court cases and
at a later stage during 1983/1984 he then joined us perma-
nently at our Branch.
B: I think the term is commonly known here, he was an aska-
ri?
GN: Right.
B: In other words a person who was trained as an MK and then
was turned to work for you?
...
B: Paragraph 4, page 318, you say XXX . . ., you refer to that and
then you define what you mean by XXX . . ., perhaps you
should explain to us, you talk about associates, what do you
mean by that?
GN: Mr Chairman, associates would act as go-betweens between the
agent and the handler. And in my case, as is well-known in
Port Elizabeth, I made specific use of associates to deal with
the agents for me in order to protect their identities.
B: So an associate would be a civilian person who is well disposed
towards you?
GN: Correct.
B: As far as the source is concerned, would the source necessarily
always have known that he was working for the Security Police
or would he sometimes be under the impression that he was
working for MI6 or the CIA or something like that?
GN: The agent wouldn’t know that he was working for the Security
Branch.
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B: Were the sources sometimes deliberately brought under the
impression that they were working for some of the other intel-
ligence agencies that I have referred to?
GN: Yes.
EXCERPT 2 – Explicit decision not to testify; self-censorship, silence
in order not to incriminate a colleague
This excerpt is also taken from the record of the hearing on the
Motherwell bombing. Following the incident in 1989 there was an
investigation and trial which already disclosed that the bombing had
most likely been part of a “dirty trick” on the part of the security
forces. At the TRC hearing almost ten years later, Eugene de Kock,
former chief commander of Vlakplaas who was already serving a life
sentence for his role in improper political killings, testified and of-
fered detailed information on how the request for assisting in a car
bomb attack in Port Elizabeth had been managed from Pretoria. Dur-
ing the 1990 trial, Kobus Kok (K) who had built the bombing device
without being clear on exactly where and why it would be used, had
chosen not to testify at all – he had self-censored to protect colleagues.
This decision to use silence he disclosed at the TRC hearing in the
following way:
K: I can’t specifically remember what I have written here.
DeJ: It is not what is written there, it is what is the truth.
K: I’m telling you the truth.
...
P: What was your version?
K: I gave no version, I refused to say anything. I did not give evi-
dence.
...
K: I was charged as an accused in the murder trial.
P: Were there allegations that you were involved?
K: Yes, there were.
...
K: To the contrary, I refused to say anything and I pleaded not
guilty.
P: Why did you deny it? Why didn’t you just say that I followed
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a direct order from security head office, I did not doubt it at
any time; I will not doubt Waal du Toit.
K: I was accused of murder and I was part of the system in which
I believed. I was part of the group who rendered technical as-
sistance. I was definitely not going to protect myself, not testify
against my other colleagues.
The silence on how the secret military unit at Vlakplaas had contributed
to state repression had been broken some time before the TRC was
instituted. Much had already been disclosed in 1993–4 when Eugene
de Kock was tried and sentenced. Even so, former colleagues often
protected one another and thus they were very guarded in their testi-
monies. However, during the TRC process De Kock, who apparently
felt he had been sold out by his former supervisors, did not hold back.
He co-operated in giving detailed information in such a way that his
earlier collaborators were obliged to apply for amnesty. Kobus Kok
acknowledged at his Amnesty Hearing that he had chosen to remain
silent in 1990 in solidarity with colleagues. By then, with the protection
of the former regime removed, he owned up to his role in a way that
he did not do when questions had been asked earlier on.
The story of the Motherwell bombing had not escaped the media
in 1989, even if many unanswered questions remained. Due to the
notoriety of the case, the TRC hearings where this event was dealt
with received considerable media attention. Thus the silence had
been broken not only in the safe space of the TRC venue, but also in
the wider public space of the national media.
II. Post-TRC: continued censorship of a new, more covert kind
The TRC did indeed contribute to disclosing much that was formerly
completely concealed. A case in point is the incident that is recorded
as the Guguletu Seven. The full extent of the deception that had led
to the brutal deaths of seven relatively innocent and trusting young
men only became clear when members of the media closely followed
the TRC investigation team. They virtually stumbled on evidence
that the relevant police unit was attempting to conceal, even as late as
1996. Nevertheless, many silences remain and much that was disclosed
passed by virtually unnoticed, so that some events only briefly broke
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through the surface and have since slipped back into a forgotten space.
This section will illustrate the kinds of discourses that, after the TRC,
are silenced by new covert forms of media censorship. Excerpts 3 to
5 will refer to the narratives of:
(i) a young man, survivor of inordinately severe police assault dur-
ing custody, whose story never really got further than the TRC
transcripts now stored in barely accessible files,
(ii) a woman who lost her son, her only hope of a breadwinner,
her nearest male relative who would, according to custom, have
taken care of her in old age and whose story is similarly silenced
because of her narrative style that was unfamiliar and opaque
to the translators and interpreters, and
(iii) a middle-aged man, a police reservist whose participation in the
state machinery has, in the aftermath, left him unemployed, a
person without the respect of his family or community.
A large number of stories were not published in the media at all
(compare Ndinisi’s recount); others were published with relatively
scant details at the time of the event (compare Guguletu Seven, Trojan
Horse incident). Even in well-publicised cases the reporting is selec-
tive so that some aspects are highlighted, some witnesses’ stories are
prioritized, while others’ get no or very limited attention. Thus the
media may break the silence in some cases, but may covertly censor
and so commit to silence other cases.
EXCERPT 3 – Stories told and forgotten again
Andile Ndinisa was a youngster living in the township of Mbekweni,
Paarl, in the 1980s when during political protest he was shot in the
back by police. He sustained permanent injuries which have left him
unemployable and badly adjusted to his environment. His story, as
many similar others, received no media coverage at the time of the
shooting, nor after the TRC hearing in Paarl where he testified. At the
hearing the authenticity of what he had suffered as a result of rash,
unjustified police action was admitted. Except for a brief reference
to his testimony in the TRC transcripts, his narrative is silenced. The
restitution process eventually offered him a small amount of money
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(R30.000/€3.000), but no entry into the collective national memory.
Andile testified in Xhosa, thus the text below is the transcribed inter-
preter’s rendering. The excerpt breaks some of the silence of stories
told and almost immediately forgotten again.
N: . . . What I noticed and what I heard from people is that I am
short-tempered, I quarrel a lot with people and it makes me
unhappy. I become temperamental and thereafter I regret,
but my mother has been told that I’m being affected by the
bullets. But as for now I – I can’t stand for a long time because
I – if I stand for long time I have some pains on my back.
EXCERPT 4 – Remembering incidents, forgetting names; highlight-
ing some testimonies, glossing over others
As has been indicated before, the Guguletu Seven received substantial
media attention. This in spite of the fact that the relatives of three
of the seven youngsters were never traced. Thus the life histories of
these three are silenced. Three of the youngsters’ mothers testified
before the TRC. Interestingly, the narratives of the mothers living in
Guguletu, an urban township in close proximity to Cape Town, were
relatively conventionally structured, and certainly easier to interpret
and transcribe than those of the mother who came from a rural com-
munity. This resulted in the formers’ stories being better heard than
the testimony of Mrs Konile, mother of Zabonke, who resides in Indwe,
a rural village in the Eastern Cape. Her son, who had been living in
Guguletu, had most probably been unemployed. Along with six oth-
ers he was approached by an askari and deceitfully lured into a police
ambush staged for propaganda purposes. Mrs Konile’s testimony is
recorded in the written transcripts of the TRC hearings in rather
poorly translated form. Her story, in comparison to the others, was
afforded selective, limited reference in the media. It was most prob-
ably silenced because of the traditional oral narrative style she used,
which makes extensive use of implicature based in local customs and
beliefs. Commission members, interpreters and schooled members of
the media found her narrative relatively inaccessible.32
Mrs Konile testified in Xhosa. This excerpt gives first an extract of
her words as they have been extracted from the original soundtrack
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by Mpolweni-Zantsi. Following the Xhosa text is Mpolweni-Zantsi’s
translation of the particular extract, and of a number of lines from
the rest of her testimony. These are given to illustrate the metaphoric
and implicatory nature of her story about how she received the news
of her son’s death and the impact it had then, and still had at the
time of the hearing. A dream in which a goat features is, in rural
Xhosa tradition, commonly understood as a bad omen. Receiving bad
news is compared to having been hit by a rock. As the context of the
hearing was limitedly equipped to accommodate such culture-specific
references, the story was in effect censored.
Sihambe sibuy’ epeyini. Ndithi kulo ndihamba naye, ndithi, “Heyi! Yhaz’ umbilini wam,
undiphethe kakubi. Phezolo ndiphuphe kakubi. Ndiphuphe apha ngasemnyango, kukho
ibhokhwe emileyo, eyenjenje, ehh-emileyo ethe”, ahleke athi lo, athi “Eyi! Uphuphe kakubi
nyhani,” Ngasemthini.
We (Mrs Konile and a friend) went and came back (from the grants office). I said
to the one I was going with, I said, “Heyi! You know what, my heart is palpitating
with a strange feeling, and it persists. Last night I had a terrible dream. I dreamt
that here at the door there was a goat that was standing, like this, ehh- standing like
this, next to the tree” (gesturing with her hands), and my friend laughed and said,
“Eyi! You really had a bad dream.”
...
I was hit by a rock on that day, it was a Thursday. I was hit by a rock, the rock fell
on me. I was nearly buried by the rock. The rock landed on my waist . . . I was hit at
eleven and was recovered at four. I asked for water, they said there’s no water. . .
Due to good media coverage many can relate the details of the outra-
geous Guguletu Seven event that was staged by a “third force” of the
Botha government; however, very few can give the names of the seven.
A memorial plaque at the site of the ambush remembers them, and
so has given them some place in the national memory.
As a contribution to challenging the silence, the names of the seven
youngsters are given here:
Christopher Piet Ngewu
Zabonke John Konile
Godfrey Jabulani Miya
Mandla Simon Mxingwa
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Themba Mlifi
Zandisile Zennith Mjobo
Zola Alfred Zwelani
EXCERPT 5 – Perpetrators’ silences
The provisions for hearing testimonies intended to give all witnesses
equal protection, whether they testified as victims or as perpetrators.
Nevertheless, perpetrators very often were given quite a hard time
when they were interrogated. Some perpetrators only testified after
being subpoenaed; some disclosed critical information but eventually
were given limited audience. Thus, as with many victim testimonies,
the stories are silenced in a new way: they are not retold. Disclosures
that put the perpetrator in a sympathetic light do not fit the stere-
otype and so have been given little media coverage. Other perpetrators
most likely did not make full disclosures. Where limited disclosure
was evident it may have jeopardised the granting of amnesty – but
the silence is perpetuated.
This excerpt is taken from the transcript of the Trojan Horse Inci-
dent. The incident occurred when armed policemen in plain clothes
concealed themselves in boxes on a big transport lorry that was sent
out intentionally to provoke township youngsters into stoning it. As
soon as the first stone hit the windscreen, the police returned with
gunfire, killing three and injuring a number of other protesters. At
the hearing of this case a number of witnesses were subpoenaed. Douw
Vermeulen’s testimony illustrates how many perpetrators, rather than
giving spontaneous evidence in oral narrative style, would read a care-
fully prepared statement. Such statements enabled careful selection
of words and phrases, and allowed the speakers to choose focus in a
way that could conceal incriminating or embarrassing details.
I, Douw Vermeulen, hereby state under oath. I am an adult male and I am a security
advisor and I live in Goodwood.
I was approached by the Investigative Unit of the Truth Commission and notified
that I would have to appear before the Commission on (date) to give evidence and to
answer questions relating to the so-called Trojan Horse incident which took place on
the 15th of October 1985, in Athlone, in which Michael Miranda, Shaun Magmoed
and Jonathan Claasen died and others were injured . . .
On the 15th of October 1985, there was a lot of unrest in the Athlone area and the
focal points of the unrest were in Thornton Roads and Belgravia Road . . . experience
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had taught us that there was not much use in us trying to apprehend the ringleaders,
or try and arrest them by means of normal policing methods and normal police
vehicles . . . I was summoned . . . Mr L, the commanding officer . . . instructed me
to go . . . the persons under my command were, on instructions of L, given 9 mm
pistols and shotguns . . . At about 16h45 we entered the unrest area . . .
Conclusion
In summary it seems to be clear that silences of human rights viola-
tions during times of national conflict are not easily broken. Cen-
sorship takes on a number of forms: either there is overt censorship
illustrated in decisions not to speak out or to disallow others who could
speak out; or there is covert censorship illustrated in self-censorship,
or in the suppression of stories by for example keeping them out of
the public domain, denying them any significance in historic memory
of a community. When victims/survivors of human rights abuses are
voiceless, it becomes a perpetuation of the violence. Such voiceless-
ness is illustrated in the inability of those who have suffered abuse to
speak about it. It is also illustrated when the perpetrator chooses to
remain silent, to censor the retelling of an injustice. Other forms of
voicelessness are illustrated when the stories of victims are received
as untruthful, when others (for example the media) appropriate the
stories in such a manner that the event is recorded, but the people
who were most affected are forgotten. Finally, voicelessness is also il-
lustrated when a story of trauma is told, heard and then forgotten.
The South African news media reported in a very circumspect way
on some human rights violations in the years preceding democratic
elections; they reported again on many such violations shortly after
the elections, when the TRC process systematically attempted to
break the silence. Considering what was disclosed and what remained
undisclosed and silenced, one has to conclude that the public media
are limited vehicles for facilitating the process of regaining voice. An
important point to be drawn from this is that, inevitably, a degree of
censorship remains which obliges one to confront the silence and to
do so with a view to meaningful commemoration. One cannot draw
a line on discourses of past trauma, trying to silence them without
them ever having been told. There is a need to investigate how break-
ing the silence, even only in part, can be used to overcome anger,
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sorrow and injury to such an extent that a transition to a reconciled
way of life becomes possible and authentic.
The TRC, even where the process at times was flawed, assisted in
breaking the silence on a personal and communal level. The TRC
also offered a first step in the direction of memorialising – illustrat-
ing that, to some extent, the violence of voicelessness can be reversed,
and at the same time reminding that silence and censorship are never
completely removed.
Notes
1 Note that ROBINS 1998: p. 9 refers to the claim that human rights violations of
the liberation movements could be compared to those perpetrated by the state as
“a kind of perverse relativism”. FOSTER 2000, in making a similar point, under-
scores the difference that has to be recognized, between violence of the powerful
and the powerless.
2 For more detail on the discourses leading up to the institution of a TRC in South
Africa, see also TUTU 1999, ORR 2000, VILLAVICENCIO and VERWOERD 2000,
BELL 2001, CHAPMAN and VAN DER MERWE 2008.
3 According to DU TOIT 1997: p. 9 probably the greatest public impact of the TRC
was made by the victims’ stories – “the numbers who came forward, demonstrating
the sheer scope and impact of political atrocities … [t]he cumulative effect as wit-
ness followed witness”, was not so much to add new information as to acknowledge
publically and officially what had so long been denied. See also ROTBERG and
THOMPSON 2000.
4 The proceedings of a conference held in Cape Town to mark the anniversary, ten
years after the first hearings, have been collected in VILLAVICENCIO and DU
TOIT 2006.
5 Cf. MARTIN and ROSE 2003; BOCK et al 2006; VERDOOLAEGE 2007.
6 Cf. BUNDY 2000: pp. 13–16 concerning the difficulties of writing an official history
that would break silences in such a way that “as complete a picture as possible” would
emerge. The aim of gaining full disclosure of past atrocities turned out to be “an
exceptionally demanding brief”.
7 Cf. GALASINSKI 2000.
8 Cf. WODAK 1989, 1996; REISIGL and WODAK 2001, BENKE and WODAK
2003; WEISS and WODAK 2003; FAIRCLOUGH 1995a, 1995b; FOWLER et al.
1979; VAN DIJK 1993.
9 Cf. MARTIN and ROSE 2003.
10 Cf. LABOV 2001.
11 See for example the analyses of Helena’s story in MARTIN and ROSE 2003, of
Colin de Souza’s testimony by BLOMMAERT, BOCK and McCORMICK 2006 or
of the Trojan Horse testimonies by ANTHONISSEN 2006.
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Justice and Memory.indb 118 02.11.2009 13:39:10
12 1998, in McGOLDRICK and HARDY 2008: p. 9.
13 McGOLDRICK and HARDY 2008: pp. 7–11 are critical of the way in which typically
the victims of abuse are identified by naming various disorders, while we palpably
lack nomenclature for referring to the aberrations of those who traumatize others.
14 DU TOIT 1997; ROBINS 1998; CUÉLLAR 2005.
15 CUÉLLAR 2005: p. 163.
16 CUÉLLAR 2005: p. 169.
17 Also interesting is the elected voicelessness at the TRC of victims such as the Mxenge
family who rejected the apologies of former Police Captain Dirk Coetzee and his
askari-accomplice Joe Mamasela. They called for due process in which the murders
of activists Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge would be properly dealt with in a regular
court of law, where amnesty on the basis of disclosure would not be an option to the
perpetrators, ROBINS 1998: p. 12.
18 Cf. KEOG 1998, TUTU 2000, BUNDY 2000.
19 Cf. BELL 2001.
20 DU TOIT 1997; ROBINS 1998; CUÉLLAR 2005; CHAPMAN and VAN DER
MERWE 2008.
21 VAN DER MERWE, in CHAPMAN and VAN DER MERWE 2008: pp. 27ff.
22 It has to be noted, however, that amnesty hearings saw more discourses of justifica-
tion than discourses of confession and pleas for forgiveness; there was considerable
silence on feelings of guilt, contrition, shame or compassion for victims.
23 1998: pp. 11, 12.
24 Cf. ANTHONISSEN 2008.
25 ANTHONISSEN 2008.
26 Cf. the Guguletu Seven referred to below.
27 Cf. the story of Mr Ndinisa referred to below.
28 CUÉLLAR 2005:172.
29 2005: p. 173.
30 2003: p. 93–112.
31 The excerpts are taken from transcripts posted at http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/am-
ntrans/am1997.htm. There has been considerable discussion on the accuracy and
reliability of the transcripts mainly due to the unusual circumstances in which they
were produced, cf. ANTHONISSEN 2008b; video recordings for some are available.
Only the official transcripts published on the TRC-website were used in the analysis
given here.
32 Cf. MPOLWENI-ZANTSI 2008.
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An analysis of what has been “lost” in the interpretation and
transcription process of selected TRC testimonies, in Spil Plus
33, 2006, pp. 1–26.
C. BUNDY, The Beast of the Past: History and the TRC, in W. JAMES
and L. VAN DE VIJVER (eds.), After the TRC: reflections on truth
and reconciliation in South Africa, Cape Town: David Philip, 2000,
pp. 9–20.
A.R. CHAPMAN and H. VAN DER MERWE (eds.), Truth and Rec-
onciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver?, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
A.C . CUELLAR, Unraveling Silence: Violence, Memory and the
Limits of Anthropology’s Craft, in Dialectical Anthropology 29:2,
2005, pp. 159–180.
K. DOYLE, “Forgetting is not justice”: Mexico bares its secret past, in World
Policy Journal, Summer 2003, pp. 61–72.
A. DU TOIT, No rest without the wicked – assessing the truth commission,
in Indicator South Africa 14:1, 1997, pp. 7–12.
N. FAIRCLOUGH, Critical Discourse Analysis, London–New York:
Longman, 1995a.
N. FAIRCLOUGH, Media Discourse, London–New York–Sydney: Ed-
ward Arnold, 1995b.
D. FOSTER, The Truth and Recociliation Commission and under-
standing perpetrators, in South African Journal of Psychology 30:1,
2000, pp. 2–9.
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R. FOWLER, G. KRESS, R. HODGE and T. TREW, Language and
Control, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.
D. GALASINSKI, The Language of Deception – a Discourse Analytical
Study, London–Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage, 2000.
A. KROG, Country of my Skull, Johannesburg: Random House,
1998.
W. JAMES and Linda VAN DE VIJVER (eds.), After the TRC: reflec-
tions on truth and reconciliation in South Africa, Cape Town: David
Philip, 2000.
W. LABOV, Uncovering the event structure of narrative, in Georgetown
University Round Table 2001: pp. 63–83.
J. MARTIN and D. ROSE, Working with Discourse: Meaning beyond the
clause, London: Continuum, 2003.
M. McGOLDRICK and K.V. HARTDY (eds.), Revisioning Family
Therapy: Race, Culture and Gender in Clinical Practice, New York:
Guilford Press, 2008.
N. MPOLWENI-ZANTSI, The importance of the original: Challenges
in interpreting a Xhosa testimony before the South African TRC,
in Journal of Multicultural Discourses 3:3, 2008, pp. 231–232.
W. ORR, From Biko to Basson, Johannesburg: Contra Press, 2000.
A. RIGBY, Dealing with the past: forgiveness and the reconstruction
of memory in divided societies, in International Journal of Politics
and Ethics 3 (1), 2003, pp. 93–112.
M. REISIGL and R. WODAK, Discourse and Discrimination – Rhetorics
of Racism and Antisemitism, London–New York: Routledge, 2001.
S. ROBINS, The truth shall make you free? Toronto Committee for the
Liberation of Southern Africa in Southern Africa report, August 1998,
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versity Press: Princeton, NJ, 2000.
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1999.
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& Society, 4(2), 1993, pp. 249–285.
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Reconciliation Commission, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008.
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Africa: 10 years on, Cape Town: New Africa Books, 2006.
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C. VILLAVICENCIO and W. VERWOERD, Looking Back Reaching
Forward, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2000.
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Benjamins, 1989.
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Websites
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ary 2009
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27 January 2009
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January 2009
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January 2009
122
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Dealing with the Past in Spain
Between Amnesia and Collective Memory
Walther L. Bernecker
For some years, in Spain there has been a polarised and polarising
debate about how the events of the recent past, the Civil War and
the oppressive dictatorship, were dealt with. In order to understand
the biting polemic of the political-ideological fight for position, one
must look back at the Franco era and the early years of the democratic
process following Franco’s death in 1975. The Spanish case differs
from other European cases in many aspects. The war, which is the
focal point of the whole discussion on memory, was primarily a Civil
War. From the start it was internationalised, but in its origins and
historical significance it was primarily an internal Spanish conflict.
This must always be remembered when viewing the Spanish Civil
War (1936–1939). After the war, there was no political system in place
which allowed or encouraged discussion about the war. On the con-
trary: a long dictatorship followed, which practised brutal oppression
and allowed only a one-sided view of the war.1 Only the victor’s point
of view was tolerated. When finally, after the death of the dictator
(1975) and the gradual transition to democracy, the views of the de-
feated could be expressed, memory of the war was accompanied by
memory of the dictatorship and oppression. These two aspects have
always been inseparable.2
The Franco regime and memory
Before discussing the history of politics and the right to memory
granted by democracy in Spain, the history of memory of the Spanish
Civil War during Franco’s forty-year dictatorship, which was often
more a history of political instrumentalisation, must be addressed
briefly. The past has always been used for political expediency of
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the present. Memory and the public orchestration of memory have
always been eminently political. The total defeat of the Republicans
in 1939 led to a totally new direction in remembrance politics. From
then on, “tradition” was to be dictated by the victors.
Memory was handled by the Francoists from the first day of the Civil
War onwards. They took over the public realm, eliminated democratic
symbols, changed street and place names, organised parties and ral-
lies. They spared no effort to legitimise their rule through symbolic
politics, and use these to stabilise the emerging regime. From the
beginning and throughout the whole Franco era, the regime tried
damnatio historiae to erase all historical memory that did not corre-
spond with the tradition of the 17/18 July 1936 uprising: physically
by murdering all exponent powers on the Republican side, politically
by the ruthless division of power amongst the victors, intellectually
through censorship and prohibition, using one-sided indoctrination
as propaganda, culturally by eliminating all symbols deemed to be
“anti-Spain”, which had been fought against for three long years
with gruelling slowness right up to an unconditional surrender.
The victors were only concerned – sometimes directly and brutally,
sometimes conciliatorily and subtly – with integrating their rule in a
tradition going back to a glorious past and presenting themselves in
the historical continuity of imperial great power politics.
Memory encompassed both time and space equally. From the time
perspective, the “national” faction even started a new era: 1936 was
called “First Triumphal Year” (Primer Año Triunfal), 1939 “Victory
Year” (Año de la Victoria). Incidentally, they drew extensively on history,
particularly from the epochs which are considered Spain’s heyday:
the end of the 15th century under the reign of the Catholic Kings,
the imperial 16th century with Charles V and Philipp II as dominat-
ing monarchs. The following centuries of decadence, particularly
the 19th century as an era of negatively interpreted liberalism, were
eradicated to a large extent.
Regarding “space”, the new powers-that-be seized the topography
symbolically by changing names of places and streets, buildings
and institutions and decking them with names with new politically
historical relevance. The traditional cathedral of the patron saint
of Spain, Our Lady of the Pillar of Zaragoza, was renamed as the
“shrine of the race”; most main streets were given the names Avenida
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del Generalísimo or Avenida de José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The Church
played an important part in ritualising political memory for many
years.
Franco’s politics of memory served only one purpose: to legiti-
mise his regime, to anchor it as a quasi-logical development in the
traditions of glorious Spanish history and simultaneously erase the
memory of the opposition – the Liberals and Democrats, Socialists
and Communists, Freemasons and Jews.
Suppression of historical memory
After the end of the Franco era, the country was able to manage the
transition to democracy surprisingly easily. During the Franco regime
and afterwards, the Civil War was invariably an obligatory topic for
political and historical discussion; hardly anyone missed the chance to
mention the origin of Franco’s regime in the war. And the post 1975
boom in literature about the Civil War corresponded to the increased
demand from the majority of the population for information and
clarification, as in the previous decades history had been frequently
written by the victors as an instrument to legitimise their regime.3
It was to be expected that in democratic Spain on the anniversaries of
the Civil War, increased activities would take place in order to satisfy
the public’s need for information. The 1976/1979 anniversaries fell
directly in the middle of the politically troubled transitional phase;
the politicians and the public needed all their energy to cope with
the transition from dictatorship to democracy. After this balancing
act was accomplished successfully and since the Socialist Party had
governed unopposed from 1982 onwards, the 1986 anniversary gave
the newly democratised Spain an opportunity to remember the begin-
ning of the Civil War 50 years earlier without ideological guidelines
proscribed by the State. Undoubtedly in 1986 there were also public
events meant to remind the public of the beginning of the Civil War
(although the anniversary of the end of the Civil War came and went
without much notice in 1989); but measured against the paramount
importance of this war for modern Spain the commemorative cele-
brations were rather moderate. Most events had crossed over into the
relatively safer domains of the historians. Almost all those account-
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able in politics and academia were unanimous: not new excuses, but
clarification was needed; not the old men who had fought the war,
but young academics who only knew about it from sources and liter-
ature were the protagonists of the events. And even they were always
admonished to argue “objectively” and at a “historical distance”, as
one was after all speaking about an event that was long past and had
been a part of “history” for a long time.
These conferences and congresses resulted in several volumes which
presented a largely balanced picture of the Civil War; widespread
historical magazines (for example Historia 16) and daily papers with a
high circulation (El País et cetera) ran diverse articles on the Civil War.
On the other hand, official Spain had little to report. In June 1986,
only a few weeks before the actual anniversary of the start of the Civil
War, the parliamentary elections were on the political agenda. The
ruling Socialist Party was fighting to keep their absolute majority and
in this politically sensitive situation, centre and moderate right-wing
voters should not be unsettled or even scared off by public reference
in the mass media to the division of Spanish society in the 30s. At
that time the Socialist Party had been unequivocally left-wing.
The only announcement from the Moncloa Palace – made by Prime
Minister Felipe González as the Head of Government of Spain, not
as General Secretary of the Socialist Party – was that the Civil War
was “not an event that should be remembered, even though it was,
for those who had experienced and suffered it, a watershed in their
lives”. In the meantime, the war had finally become history, a part of
the memories and the collective experience of the Spanish people;
it was “no longer alive and present in the reality of a country whose
moral conscience is based ultimately on the principles of Freedom
and Tolerance”.4
Certainly this type of remark was to be heard in association with the
democratic reorganisation after 1975 and with the key word during
the collapse of the dictatorship: consenso, cooperation of all with all.
The traumatic experience of Civil War, the most brutal practice of
violence and division of society must have silently formed the back-
drop for many attitudes and measures in the transition to democracy:
for the acceptance of the monarchy by the Republican socialists, for
the moderate position of the communists, for the cooperation of all
political powers in drafting the new Constitution. The new democ-
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racy should not be built on one party against the will of the others,
rather with the cooperation of all political parties if at all possible.
The prerequisite for this was the reconciliation between all former
enemy factions. Old outstanding accounts should not be settled, but
a line should be drawn under the rows and enmities of the past. This
desire for reconciliation and the fear of re-opening old-new unhealed
wounds may have moved the ruling Socialists – the main losers in the
Civil War! – to ignore the 1986 anniversary officially, yes, to suppress
it and in addition to show political understanding for the former
“other” side. The Moncloa Declaration states furthermore that the
Government wishes “to honour and hold high the memory of all
those who strived at all times – and many who paid with their lives
– to defend Freedom and Democracy in Spain”; at the same time it
remembered with respect “those who from a different viewpoint to
that of democratic Spain fought for a different society, and gave their
lives for it”. The Government hoped that “the ghost of war and hate
would never again visit our country, darken our consciousness or
destroy our freedom. Therefore, the Government expresses a wish
that the 50th anniversary of the Civil War should finally seal the
reconciliation of the Spanish people.”
The Socialists who ruled until 1996 reverted to the legacy of fear as
a result of war, in order to guard their political caution, and not to
make any radical changes which could possibly endanger the stability
of the system. The stability in Spain which was achieved relatively
quickly following 1975 had its political and moral price; socio-political
peace had to be bought. The survival of the Francoist symbol system
was a reminder that the political reform had emerged from a pact
devised within the authoritarian institutions which eventually led to
transition.
The fact that there was no clear democratic break with Franco’s
dictatorship casts a shadow on those parts of the past, named by
Pierre Nora “Places of remembrance”. The transición represented a
sort of honourary accord, by which compensation for the handover
of the Francoist power resulted in the practise of collective amnesia.
This doesn’t apply only to the transitional conservative governments
of 1977–1982; but also to the Partido Socialista Obrero Español: with
their facelessness the Spanish social democracy continued the loss
of memory policy enforced in the Franco era. In both cases the mar-
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ginalisation and oppression of history stabilised the existing power
structure.
A further important reason for the official repression of memories
of the Civil War could have lain in the ideological consensus that
drove Spanish society during the transitional years and the ensuing
economic upswing to which the terms modernisation and Europe-
anization can be attributed. The background to this faith in progress,
the extrovert spending spree and the unbridled euphoria over Europe
of that phase was a deep-seated inferiority complex particularly re-
garding this progress and this Europe, from which the Franco regime
originally consciously had disconnected itself (“Spain is different”)
and from which it finally for political and economic reasons had
been distanced. Philosophers, authors and politicians have repeatedly
asked themselves about the reasons for Spain’s backwardness. The
Civil War is the historical incident in this debate which reflects the
backwardness of the Spanish people most clearly, the last point in a
long line of abortive attempts at modernisation.
The result of the Civil War, the installation of the Franco regime,
led to Spain’s exclusion from the International Community of States
after 1945, to ostracism and to economic boycott. Inferiority, isolation
and division into victors and losers were associated in Spain with the
Civil War and its consequences. Opening up the country to democ-
racy, to progress and to Europe was a conscious breaking away from
this unwanted past.
A social cloak of silence was laid over the Civil War and even more
so over the early years of the Franco era, at least in political discourse;
perhaps the generations of democratisation considered it inadvisable
to look back at such a conflict-laden epoch. Those remembrance
ceremonies expected by many from the Government in 1986, 1989
or even 1996 were sacrificed on the altar of compensation mentality.
Instead, the official parole, guaranteed equally by both sides, was:
“Never again!” The Civil War was rated a “Tragedy”, a crisis which
evoked the collapse of all values of communal living; the reasons
and responsibilities for this tragedy were not discussed, but the con-
sequences of this “tragic crisis”.
Coming to terms with a dictatorship does not mean just changing
the legal structure or a democratic culture of remembrance, but more
dealing with the elite of the old system. If asked about cleansing
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strategies relating to Spain’s handling of the elite during the tearing
down of the dictatorship, the situation is downright complex as in the
transitional years the new elite was recruited to a large extent from the
old. As in other new democracies, the actors in the Spanish transition
were forced to position themselves on the preceding dictatorship, to
look into the subject of Franco’s regime and to dissolve or remodel
its institutions.5 As the Spanish Democracy did not result from a
break with the dictatorship, but from a pact between the new and old
elite, initially the legitimising foundation of the Franco regime was
not discussively deconstructed by the political officials. The pillars
of the elite who supported the dictatorship in Politics, Economics,
Administration, Military and Justice had no radical payoff to fear.
How the elite of the dying dictatorship were dealt with was decisive
for political and public life during the transition phase and beyond.
Unlike other experiences of dealing with dictatorships, no questions
were asked in Spain about criminal proceedings to deal with crimes
committed in the dictatorship. Involvement in the Francoist system
was not broached in public, but for years – basically to date – it has
shaped political life and the political culture of the country.
In addition to the above, a further significant reason for this noticeable
reticence regarding a possible reckoning with the representatives of the
old regime may have been that Franco’s regime emerged from a Civil
War in which both sides had inflicted endless wrongs on each other.
Dealing with the dictatorship was not possible without dealing with the
Civil War at the same time; and whereas in the case of the dictatorship
the responsibility for the crimes could be unequivocally assigned, this
was not possible in many cases in the Civil War. Additionally at the time
of transition, many of the serious cases of violation of human rights
had happened a long time in the past – between 30 and 40 years – and
the desire for reconciliation was much stronger than the wish for set-
tlement by criminal prosecution. It was significant that representatives
of the left-wing opposition pleaded most for a general amnesty.
The “other” reckoning in Catalonia and the Basque country
Remembrance varied in the individual parts of the country; in Cata-
lonia and the Basque country in particular the discussion differed
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greatly from the rest of Spain. In the case of Catalonia, the polemic
conflicts and the blatantly differing perceptions of history that have
poisoned the historical political climate in all government levels in
recent years, have given way to widespread agreement on interpreting
the recent past and the memory of oppression. Certainly there have
been party political differences in Catalonia in the past – and still are.
“The fact that evaluating the past does not trigger any basic conflict,
points to a continuance of a particular consensus of remembrance
in regard to recent history”.6
Since the beginning of the transition, the past as remembered in
Catalonia differs from the rest of Spain. The differences can be seen
with the Second Republic as an example: After the positive integrative
role of the monarchy after 1975 had forced the left-wing parties to
put their Republican demands on the back burner, the Constitution
of the Second Republic (1931–1936/39) did not provide a template
for creating a new post-Franco constitution but rather served only as
a bad example. The situation was quite different in Catalonia. The
Statute of Autonomy of 1932 was the focal point for the Catalonian
fight to regain extensive self-government after Franco; this resulted
in the Second Republic appearing in a more positive light in Cata-
lonia than in the rest of Spain. The 14th April – the anniversary of
the Proclamation of the Republic in 1931 – was an annual occasion
for articulating extensive demands for autonomy. Francesc Macià,
first President of the Republican Generalitat, received many honours.
President Lluís Companys, later sentenced to death by Franco, be-
came the central symbol of the demand for autonomy, as his name
was easily associated with the memory of violent oppression under
Franco and the demand for a return to self-government. The wider
dynamics of civil society, which encountered a wide Catalonian anti-
Franco solidarity, gave the remembrance initiative a stronger all-party
importance in Catalonia than in the rest of Spain.
Negative reference to the Franco regime had a largely legitimising
effect in Catalonia, while in the rest of Spain the recourse to earlier
Civil War or anti-Franco positions was taboo. Even though the renam-
ing of Francoist streets and public squares didn’t happen as quickly
and radically as some reformers would have liked, there is no doubt
that memory of Franco was banned from the public realm earlier and
more systematically in Catalonia than in the rest of Spain. By the end
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of 1979 Francoist symbols were rarely found in Catalonia. The erec-
tion of a central memorial to the Catalonian victims of the Franco
regime in Fossar de la Pedrera was unique nationwide and shows the
singularity of Catalonia’s memory, in the same way as the resistance
to the undemocratic regime and the recourse to anti-Francoism was
always a source of political legitimacy. In general there has been a
greater presence of the more recent past in the Catalonian public
realm in the last third of the 20th century. And in 2006/2007 the Gen-
eralitat moved the topic of a historical memorial site called Memorial
Democràtic forward, which had been talked about earlier but shelved.
This memorial which should commemorate all victims of right- and
left-wing political oppression, was an initiative not emulated in the
rest of Spain for the time being.
The Basque case also differs greatly from the rest of Spain.7 The
collective memory of the Civil War and Francoist oppression influ-
enced the Basque politicians decisively during the years of transition.
The special circumstances of the Basque country at the beginning of
the Civil War must be taken into account here: The dominant PNV
(Partido Nacionalista Vasco) party sided with the Republicans but was
rather undecided on many points, not knowing exactly which fac-
tion they should join. The whole of the Basque country was divided
ideologically: While the Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa provinces ultimately
supported the Republicans, Alava and Navarra sided with the insur-
gents. Even the Catholic Church was divided in the Basque country:
While the bishops of Vitoria and Pamplona sided with the insurgents,
many simple priests took the side of the Basque nationalists (which
was ultimately also that of the Republicans). Obviously the Basque
battalions lacked the fighting spirit when it was about anything
other than the defence of Basque territory. As it was not clear how
the war would end, nobody wanted to support one side or the other
without reservation. Ambivalent behaviour was widespread. Leading
politicians of the PNV were also prepared to form a separate peace
agreement with the Francoists, in order to protect the Basque country
from major oppression by Franco’s followers. All that was in vain: the
provinces of Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya were branded as traitors after
their defeat and suffered the loss of their ancient privileges, whilst
Alava and Navarra were allowed to keep theirs. Following the defeat
however, contrary to Nationalist grievance during the transition, Fran-
131
Justice and Memory.indb 131 02.11.2009 13:39:12
coist oppression was not worse in the Basque provinces than in the
others. According to some authors it was less extensive. The economic
and social situation was objectively better in the Basque country than
in other regions; the child mortality rate was much lower than in the
rest of Spain. The majority of Basques perceived Francoism far more
critically and negatively than the “objective” situation warranted. In
the later years of Francoism, the 1960s, oppression increased greatly
in Euskadi; in this phase, it is justified to mention the above-average
suffering of the Basque people. The Basque nationalist discussion
about victims during the transition was obviously a transfer of experi-
ences of oppression from the 1960s to earlier phases – the Civil War
and early post-war years.
The Basque nationalist interpretation of the Civil War was that all
Basques had lost it; thus it was always justified to place the needs of
their community above those of their wartime political allies. Using
this argument the Basque separatists’ peace negotiations with Italy
in Santoña 1937 and the peaceful handover of factories in Bilbao
to the Francoists, actions that the Republicans had always branded
treacherous to the Republican cause, were turned into praiseworthy
virtues as they were done to defend all things Basque. As the transi-
tion following 1975 was based on a policy of silence about the Civil
War, the PNV was also spared any repercussions for their actions in
1936/37.
Mention of the particularly hard oppression of the Basque country
in the 1960s was also part of the “moral authority” (Paloma Aguilar)
of Basque nationalism during the transition. At that time assassina-
tions and raids, bomb explosions and street fights, general strikes
and mobilisation of the populace intensified to which the regime re-
sponded with a massive increase in repressive measures and repeated
proclamations of a state of emergency in the Basque country.
Radical Basque nationalism never viewed the Spanish Civil War as
a fight between two ideological factions that separated the Basque
country but as a fight for freedom against a foreign enemy – Spain
– which was occupying the then united Basque country. The PNV also
saw the Civil War mostly as a Basque nationalist fight against a foreign
occupier. Later ETA action was only superficially directed against the
Franco dictatorship; it was in fact about a lot more than that, namely
independence from the hated Spanish occupation, independent of
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Justice and Memory.indb 132 02.11.2009 13:39:12
the prevailing regime. This objective also explains the continuation
of the ETA armed fight following the transition to democracy and
the granting of generous autonomous rule. The PNV also spoke
at their meetings during the transition about the Basque country’s
continuous fight from the days of Sabino Arana to the present; the
fight was always “for the Basque country” (not for example during
the Civil War, “for the Republic”, as this was “Spanish”). The PNV
discussion always emphasised that the nationalists’ highest goal was
“defending the interests of the Basque people”.
But if the Civil War was a war between Spaniards, in which the
Basques were involved against their will, and only did this to defend
the Basque interests as far as possible, from a Basque nationalist point
of view, there is only one lesson to be learned from this: the (enforced)
pact with Spanish forces only brought misery and loss of life during
the war and a forty-year Spanish occupation of the Basque territory.
In future the Basques would have to carefully weigh up the option of
entering into a pact with Spain, as the focus of all their actions must
be the preservation of the Basque culture. At the same time national-
ists propagated a historically incorrect picture of a fight against the
aggressors of a united Basque country; the war was not presented as
a Basque Civil War – which it was – but as a united Basque defence
against an external enemy.
How the Basques dealt with the history of Civil War and Francoist
oppression was very different from the rest of Spain: The Basque
nationalists formed the picture of a united community which had
had an unwanted war forced upon it in 1936. From the 1960s, radi-
cal nationalists (ETA) fought violently against “Spanish occupation”,
while the more moderate nationalists (PNV) presented themselves as
all-round defenders of the Basque culture and used their negative
experience in the Civil War as justification for distancing themselves
from all things Spanish – hence their lack of consent to the democratic
Constitution of 1978. According to this argument, the Basques had
no responsibility for the Spanish Civil War and consequently when
dealing with the past after 1975, they did not have to accept the maxim
“everybody” is “guilty” (widely accepted during the transition) and
therefore everybody must accept a compromise in the democratic
process and follow a policy of consensus.8
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Between remembering and forgetting the Spain of the Republic
After the death of the dictator, the question of amnesty quickly
became the major topic for the opposition and at the same time its
solution became a major challenge for the government. The desire
for change was crystallised into one demand for a comprehensive
amnesty. As the amnesty applied to the actions of both parties and
their symbolic importance for reconciliation should not be endan-
gered, no unilateral recriminations were allowed. The whole political
spectrum agreed to an “amnesty of all for all” which – according to
the Basque nationalist Xavier Arzallus – should seal a particularly
painful chapter of Spanish history and lay the foundation for a new
beginning.9
If this final stroke in the politics of the past is assessed in the light
of Civil War categories, the reconciliation rhetoric cannot conceal
the fact that the defeated faction paid a significantly higher price for
the restoration of democracy. As well as being defeated in the war
and suffering the immediate consequences, there was also the added
political and socio-economic discrimination of close to 40 years of
dictatorship.
The official recognition of the former defeated powers as an equal
partner in society could not be achieved by legal means alone. It was
rather more about taking the identity of the defeated Spaniards seri-
ously and understanding their particular history as an integral part
of, if you like, the “national historical experience”. The Republicans
were accepted back into post-Francoist society on the condition that
yesterday’s battles and their memory should be left behind in exile.
And anyone who was not prepared to do this would ultimately remain
outside the political consensus.
There is still speculation today about this relinquishing of memory.
Some critics consider it to be the opposition’s widespread fear of the
old establishment at work, instead of a clever reticence in the interests
of Freedom and Democracy. It is no coincidence that in retrospect,
terms such as a “pact of silence” on the part of the elite, or even
“collective amnesia” have often come to mind. On the contrary, the
historian Santos Juliá clarified that the whole question of forgetting
during the transition could in no way be deemed as actively maintain-
ing silence about the past. In reality, the political public talked about
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and remembered the past endlessly, even if this type of thinking was
aimed at keeping the Civil War and its consequences out of the po-
litical debate.10 What may appear today as a renunciation of memory,
was ultimately a successful attempt to neutralise the explosive power
of the past with rhetoric.
Strategies of distancing the traumatic experiences of the 30s as far
away as possible from the present were characteristic. The first step
to mentally distancing oneself was accomplished by recognising the
war as a “fratricidal war” and a “national tragedy”. The collective
guilt thesis not only prevented the later settlement of political crimes
but also the public recognition of the fact that political oppression
by Franco claimed far more victims. Politically motivated murder,
oppression, exile and slave labour, all in all, the tales of woe of the
Republican faction were changed into a highly sensitive area of public
debate, which was rarely touched on.
Re-interpreting the political past under the Conservatives
The election victory of the conservative Partido Popular in 1996 fol-
lowed the long period of office by the Socialist government. The
conservative leader, José María Aznar, led a minority government
for four years followed by a government with an absolute majority
for another four years. The new self-confidence of the political right
which had increased proportionally to the crisis in the Socialist Party
during the 90s would have consequences for political history as a
whole and the recent past in particular. This was only visible in the
medium term. The emphasis and the volume with which the ultra-
conservatively charged interpretation of the past forced its self into
the political public was new at this time. It wasn’t just a question of
individual aspects but ultimately of the prerogative of interpretation
of the Civil War as a whole.
Camouflaged as a struggle against alleged usurpation of the history
of the Civil War by the left wing, the revisionist Neo-Francoist right
wing aimed its works at the totality of university-based critical social
history. Formed as a reply to the official historical view of the Civil War
created by countless individual studies, the revisionists came up with
several titles whose general tendency was to minimise the accountabil-
135
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ity of the insurgents, while routinely augmenting the actions of the
opposition to a picture of apocalyptic horror.11 The central vanishing
point was always the October revolution of 1934, the uprising which
supposedly proved like no other event in the short Republican phase,
the disloyalty of the left-wing to the Republic. And by predating the
outbreak of the Civil War to coincide with this event, 18th July 1936 was
promoted to an operation of counter-revolutionary self-defence.12
If the 50th anniversary occurred completely under the banner of
official historical unity, ten years later the resuscitation of ideologi-
cally distorted interpretations of the past, heralded the end of the
historical-political reluctance practised during the transition.
In 1999, the opposition parties of the time brought forward a col-
lective bill that was to provide money for reparation payments and
honour the memory of Civil War exiles 60 years after the end of the
war. Besides honouring the exiles, the bill aimed for an official new
evaluation of the question of war responsibility, as long as this was
pointed at those responsible for the “fascist military coup against the
legitimacy of the Republic”. This was a departure from the language
of official Spain that divided the collective guilt evenly between the
two factions. The government was not prepared to affiliate itself to
this new way of thinking. The Conservatives did indeed declare that
they supported the idea of honouring the “victims”. Civil War and the
dictatorship on the other hand had been overcome and their origins
were not to be discussed politically.13
During their second legislative period the Conservatives were con-
fronted with countless petitions and initiatives from the left-wing
opposition. The left wing “discovered” a new political arena in the
politics of the past: At regular intervals the Socialists and the “United
Left” attempted to introduce bills that demanded rehabilitation and
compensation for every new group of victims of Franco’s regime that
they presented. The purpose of this campaign “against forgetting”,
as it was called, was really more to raise the moral pressure on the
Government and force them to take the oath.
But expectations of State support for civilian activities remained
low, especially as the polls for the March 2004 election predicted that
the Conservatives would remain in office. It is well known that the
terrorist attacks in Madrid on 11th March changed political opinion
in the country very quickly and thus helped the opposing Socialists
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to an unexpected victory. This surprising result roused the legitimate
hope of the citizen initiatives, as the PSOE, following their political
commitment to the past in the preceding months, now had the moral
responsibility to act.
The mobilisation of collective memory at the turn of the century
At the turn of the century a temporal parallelism of a suddenly grow-
ing social commitment could be observed, that in cooperation with
various political protagonists created a lasting change in the way the
public handled Civil War memories.14 When searching for the origin
on a civil level one soon encounters the local reporter from León,
Emilio Silva. At the beginning of 2000 he started searching for the
remains of his grandfather who had disappeared in the Civil War
and with this unexpectedly started the ball rolling. An article about
his intentions published in a local newspaper started an unexpected
wave of offers of help. People who lived through the war got in touch,
archaeologists and coroners offered to help. A local community ef-
fort quickly formed under the name Asociación para la Recuperación
de la Memoria Histórica (Association for the Reclamation of Historical
Memory) and soon became active. In autumn of the same year – after a
break of twenty years – the first of several anonymous Civil War graves
was opened in Priaranza del Bierzo in the north-west of Spain.
The exhumations at León had a surprising effect on the whole
country: 25 years after the death of the dictator the question of the
desaparecidos, the people who disappeared during the war, was brought
to public notice. One of the darkest chapters of recent times was
opened as a matter of course, namely that of partially spontaneous
partially systematic excesses of violence and executions which had
swept through the towns and villages on both sides right from the be-
ginning of the war.15 Knowledge that had been kept hidden for years,
of roadside graves as well as victims that had been buried in fields
by the “national” faction soon became public, and quickly figures of
30,000 unidentified dead were mentioned. The movement started in
León but soon spread to the whole country with the help of count-
less local community efforts. The Asociación para la Recuperación de la
Memoria Histórica nowadays has nine regional offices. Furthermore
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innumerable local or regional associations and local community ef-
forts have sprung up – mostly on the internet – that represent the
interests of the victims and their families and take part in the search
for the missing persons. Soon afterwards exhumations were taking
place in other regions as well.16
The past was also using other channels to force itself into the public
view. An almost fashionable ardour developed on the subject and the
focus was extended to parts of Republican history that had hitherto
been ignored. Francoist oppression continued to be the main point
of interest and its inhumanity and systematic executions have since
been examined with the greatest care.17
In another sense memory also played a prominent and public part.
As at the turn of the century the metallic evidence of the leader cult
was still present. At that point in time the Caudillo was still present
in some town squares and streets either mounted on a horse or as
statues and bronze busts. Less noticeable but much more widespread
is the canon of names of Civil War soldiers and battlefields that can
be found as street names in countless cities and villages even today.
A census of the Francoist nomenclature for streets showed that after
25 years of democracy, 79% of provincial capitals placed continuity
before change.
It remains to be seen whether they have any politically-infectious
effect nowadays. The fact remains that – outside Catalonia and the
Basque country – there has been a lack of political will to eliminate
these types of relics in nearly the whole country. Less revealing are
the underlying motives for the individual cases. Individual communi-
ties were known to have conservative majorities on their city councils
that for a long time had made it a matter of great personal interest
to preserve Francoist symbols. Even after seven legislative periods the
statistical comparison with cities with a changing or stable Socialist
majority does not paint a better picture.
The length of time that symbols of Francoist rule have survived
seems symptomatic of the Spanish way of dealing with the politics of
the past after 1975. However, the new sensitivity to the politics of the
past has moved this unresolved area of history into the limelight. Since
then many different initiatives across the nation have been caught up
in this demand and have sometimes even taken the destruction of
Francoist symbols into their own hands.
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But while the Socialists at least finally realised the need for action
after decades of inaction, the Conservatives decided to switch to a
systematic blocking policy during the tense climate of their second
legislative period (2000–2004). Thus for example the removal of
symbols of the Franco regime, something that by all standards of
a democratic culture was long overdue, became the subject of new
arguments and a further historical-political mandate of Rodríguez
Zapatero’s government which has been in office since the spring of
2004.
The polemics of the Memoria law
The repeatedly announced “Law for the moral rehabilitation of the
victims of the Civil War and Dictatorship”, that is colloquially known
as “Law of historical memory” (Ley de Memoria Histórica), was ratified
by the Council of Ministers in the summer of 2006 after it had been
delayed and postponed several times. The bill envisioned that the
Spanish Parliament would elect a committee of five people with a
two-thirds majority. For one year the committee was to examine ap-
plications and decide if the applicant was to be classified as a victim
of the Franco regime and was thus entitled to financial reparation.
Moral rehabilitation was to be decided case by case. The existing
majority in parliament meant that the committee could only be ap-
pointed with the consent of the conservative People’s Party; the Peo-
ple’s Party announced at the beginning of 2007 that they categorically
refused to appoint such a committee. This decision meant that the
core statement of the law had no hope of being realised. Neither did
the bill meet the demands of many civil organisations to declare the
verdicts of the Francoist military courts and special tribunals “unjust”;
Prime Minister Zapatero stated that the Spanish government could
not annul the verdicts of the Franco courts in toto as such an action
would mean a “breach of the legal system”. This interpretation has
been rejected by well-known legal practitioners (so far without suc-
cess). Furthermore the bill was to widen the circle of people entitled
to pensions and reparation payments due to Francoist verdicts. And
finally all symbols that glorify one of the two Civil War factions are
to be removed from all public buildings.
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The parliamentary debate began in the autumn of 2006. Shortly
afterwards it could be foreseen that the bill in its present form would
not achieve the majority vote. The Conservatives were opposed to
the whole project as it allegedly tore open the rifts of the past. The
parties to the left of the Socialists and the civil organisations criti-
cised the draft as in their opinion it did not go far enough. It was
not planned to annul the Francoist miscarriage of justice, and the
financial aid for the exhumations was kept within a tight limit. The
bill was mostly symbolic. To receive a majority vote in Parliament the
bill was expected to undergo substantial changes as the Socialists did
not have a majority.
Amnesty International compared the project for this bill with a “Full
Stop Law” (similar to the Argentinean law, that made the prosecution
of countless human rights violations impossible) and particularly
criticised the fact that the names of the informers and executioners
were to remain anonymous; instead the human rights organisation
demanded the appointment of a truth committee and the elimination
of the mechanism that permitted impunity of those responsible. In
February of 2007 the first truth committee was formed on a regional
level (in Valencia); its task was to investigate Francoist oppression
between 1939 and 1953.18
At the end of 2006 the PSOE gradually moved away from its bill
and announced that it was going to thoroughly revise the bill so that
it could gain the needed majority. One controversial aspect of the bill
was the Government’s intention not to annul the verdicts of the Franco
regime “for reasons of stability of the law”. Despite heavy criticism
from the left wing the Government held its position but declared that
it was now prepared to recognise the “injustice” of the verdicts and
punishments as well as declaring the special tribunals “illegitimate”.19
The bill however was not to encompass economic retribution.
In a type of “response” to the bill, the Catholic Church in Rome an-
nounced in the autumn of 2007 that it was going to beatify a further
498 “martyrs” of the Spanish Civil War. This increased the number
of Spaniards beatified in the 20th century to roughly 10.000.
The civil and political debate of the Ley de Memoria Histórica pro-
duced a bizarre side effect in 2006. Big daily papers started to run
hundreds of obituaries in which friends and family of those executed
in or after the Civil War described the fate of the victims in the 1930s
140
Justice and Memory.indb 140 02.11.2009 13:39:13
and 40s in graphic detail. The obituaries from the Republican side
talked of the “murderous actions from the Francoist Hordes”, the
“persecution, incarceration and execution for loyalty to the Republic”,
of the “victims of Francoist terrorism”; even a high ranking General
such as the insurrectionist Gonzalo Queipo de Llano who ordered the
executions of hundreds of people in Seville is now publicly referred
to as “murderer”. The Francoist obituaries mentioned “murders of
the red hordes”, “martyrdom in a Tscheka” and “terrible executions
by uncontrollable Marxists”.20 The obituary war was started by dis-
appointed Republicans, who were dissatisfied with how the past had
been dealt with in the 30 years since the death of the Dictator and
finally wanted to publicly express their anger and mourning; the Neo-
Franco party, which discovered that it was losing a war in public that
it had believed won in 1939, reacted to these first obituaries. From
this time onwards it has no longer been taboo mention the atrocities
committed by either side.
In the summer of 2007 everything pointed to the bill failing. It had
come to a breakdown in communication between the Government and
its parliamentary negotiating partners, as they could not agree on the
main point – which was the problem of the illegality of the verdict of
the Francoist court-martials. Literally at the last minute they came to
an agreement, where the Government had to make some concessions.
At the request of Convergència i Unió, the Republican violence against
the clergy during the Civil War was condemned. And the Francoist
court martial verdicts were finally (and across the board) declared ille-
gitimate which in certain individual cases opened the door for appeals
against the verdicts. On 31st October 2007, the bill was passed with the
required majority in Parliament; only the conservative Partido Popular
and the Catalonian left nationalists Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya
continued to reject the project. In extra-parliamentarian areas several
citizen initiatives and Human Rights organisations criticised the law as
they saw it only as a gradual improvement in the victims’ situation.
Forecast
At the end of Rodríguez Zapatero’s first term of office and the begin-
ning of the second the question of official culture of memory leaves an
141
Justice and Memory.indb 141 02.11.2009 13:39:13
ambivalent impression. In the first years of the first legislative period
very little happened in this regard. From summer 2006 onwards the
legislative initiative developed a certain dynamic and between summer
and autumn 2007 it was finally possible to make some headway in this
project, that the law was passed in Parliament but with substantial
changes to the original draft. Despite the continuing criticism from
the civil organisations it must be emphasised here that the Ley de
Memoria Histórica represents a milestone in the official handling of
the recent past as compared to preceding decades:
During the long Franco dictatorship critical discussion of the Civil
War and the terrorism of the post-war era was not possible. At the
beginning of the new Democracy there was a general consensus of
all political factions to abstain from explicit judgement of the recent
past.21 When near the end of the 20th century as a new much younger
generation of Spaniards gave memory new popularity, it soon became
evident that remembering war and dictatorship in no way rested on
a consensus of memory which would lead to balance in the political
situation, but on the contrary would lead to a deepening of social
division. Clearly a critical winding up of the historical situation in
Spain is only possible at the price of aggravating political confronta-
tion leading to the formation of political camps. This insight ret-
rospectively confirms the political wisdom of the detested “pact of
silence” of the transition as the fledgling democracy could not have
withstood the type of socially polarising discourse that has been rife
in Spain in recent years. Thirty years later the situation looks com-
pletely different. It is widely agreed that positive impulses won from
winding up the past can be expected for democratic consolidation
of the collective conscience, as it creates trust in the government in-
stitutions. So the hope lives on in Spain that after years of rejection,
the hard-won legal compromise will have laid the foundations for an
open long-term unprejudiced handling of the past.
Translated from German by Tess Blundell
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Justice and Memory.indb 142 02.11.2009 13:39:14
Notes
1 Traumatic consequences of the Civil War and the terror of the post-war era from
a psychological-psychiatric viewpoint: RUIZ-VARGAS 2006.
2 See the last overview of the Historiography of the Civil War from the 1940s to date
from BLANCO RODRÍGUEZ 2007. For the vicissitudes of the collective memory
of the victims of the Civil War throughout the generations of war participants, the
“Children of war” and the “Grandchildren of war” see LEDESMA, RODRIGO
2006. The authors highlight the varying intensity of the memory of the victims:
During the Franco regime, those who „fell for Spain“, the national victims, were
omnipresent in the public realm, while the Republican victims were compulsorily
committed to oblivion; in the post-dictatorship democratisation phase the invis-
ibility of the victims on both sides speaks volumes; since the turn of the century
and the opening of anonymous mass graves, the public discussion about victims
lost in the Civil War (Martyrs of Freedom), dominates public debate.
3 About the transition see BERNECKER 1997: p. 213–232, and BERNECKER,
COLLADO SEIDEL 1993.
4 “Una guerra civil no es un acontecimiento conmemorable”, afirma el Gobierno.
In: El País of 18.7.1986, p. 17.
5 ELSTER 2005, KENKMANN 2005.
6 BRINKMANN 2007: p. 9. The following argument is according to this text.
7 The following argument according to AGUILAR FERNÁNDEZ 1997.
8 This concerned only the reconstruction of the nationalist discussions during
the transition. In politics, in the years following 1975 the PNV was much more
willing to cooperate that this discussion shows.
9 For the amnesty following 1975 see AGUILAR 1996.
10 See JULIÁ 2002. See also JULIÁ 2006. The opinion of Santos Juliá, who has
been challenging the “pact of silence” theory for years and always maintains that
since the transition all aspects of the Civil War (including the massive oppres-
sion during the war and in the post-war era) have been debated and recorded in
detail, is severely criticised by ESPINOSA MAESTRE 2007, who emphatically
highlights the historical forgetfulness of the transition and the failure to deal
with the oppressive past.
11 The most famous revisionist is Pío MOA, whose countless works about the Civil
War became bestsellers. A small sample: Contra la mentira. Guerra civil, izquierda,
nacionalistas y jacobinismo, Madrid: Libroslibres, 2003; Los crímenes de la guerra civil
y otras polémicas, Madrid: La Esfera, 2004; Una historia chocante. Los nacionalismos
vasco y catalán en la Historia Contemporánea de España, Madrid: Encuentro, 2004;
Los mitos de la guerra civil, Madrid: La Esfera, 2003. A radical reckoning with
Moa is Alberto REIG TAPIA, Anti Moa, Barcelona: Ed. B, 2006; see also, the
uncovering of countless myths of the Right about the Civil War, REIG TAPIA
2006.
12 As an example of many see MOA 2004.
13 HUMLEBÆK 2004: p. 161, and El País digital of 1st June 1999.
143
Justice and Memory.indb 143 02.11.2009 13:39:14
14 See the good overview of the different phases of the (missing) politics of history
in the democracy by GÁLVEZ BIESCA 2006, that for the last few years mentions
the individual associations “for the reclamation of history”, the historiography
(on Francoist oppression) and the intercultural initiatives (governments, autono-
mies).
15 For uncontrolled murder on both sides at the beginning of the Civil War and
the different types of crimes see ESPINOSA MAESTRE 2006.
16 For local and regional retribution initiatives see EGIDO LEÓN 2006.
17 For more recent literature see the collective review articles of BERNECKER 2003
and 2007. For update on research on the Civil War see JULIÁ 1999.
18 Valencia lanza una Comisión de la Verdad sobre el franquismo, in El País, 10.2.2007,
p. 25.
19 See El proyecto de Ley de Memoria Histórica divide al Congreso, in El País, 14.12.2006,
p. 30f. See also the wording of the draft legislation in El País, 20.4.2007, p. 18.
20 See Esquelas de las dos Españas, in El País, 10.9.2006, p. 28f.
21 A good overview of the missing political past from the transition to date is pro-
vided by RODRIGO 2006.
Bibliography
P. AGUILAR, Memoria y olvido de la Guerra Civil española, Madrid:
Alianza Ed., 1996.
P. AGUILAR FERNÁNDEZ, La Guerra Civil en el discurso nacionalista
vasco. Memorias peculiares para un aprendizaje político diferente, Ma-
drid, 1997.
W. L. BERNECKER, Entre la historia y la memoria: Segunda Repú-
blica, Guerra Civil española y primer franquismo, in Iberoamericana
Nr. 11, 2003, p. 227–238.
W. L. BERNECKER, Represión y terror en el primer franquismo,
in Iberoamericana Nr. 25, 2007, p. 217–228.
W. L. BERNECKER, C. COLLADO SEIDEL (eds.), Spanien nach
Franco. Der Übergang von der Diktatur zur Demokratie 1975–1982.
München: Oldenburg, 1993.
W. L. BERNECKER, Spaniens Geschichte seit dem Bürgerkrieg, München:
Beck, 1997.
J. A. BLANCO RODRÍGUEZ, La historiografía de la Guerra Civil Es-
pañola, in Hispania Nova. Revista de Historia Contemporánea 7, 2007
(http: //hispanianova.rediris.es).
S. BRINKMANN, Katalonien und der spanische Bürgerkrieg. Geschichte
und Erinnerung. Berlin: Edition Tranvía, 2007.
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A. EGIDO LEÓN, La historia y la gestión de la memoria. Apuntes para
un balance, in Hispania Nova. Revista de Historia Contemporánea 6,
2006 (http://hispanianova.rediris.es).
J. ELSTER, Die Akten schließen. Nach dem Ende von Diktaturen, Frank-
furt a. M.: Campus, 2005.
F. ESPINOSA MAESTRE, De salvaciones y olvidos. Reflexiones en torno
a un pasado que no puede pasar, in Hispania Nova. Revista de Historia
Contemporánea 7, 2007 (http://hispanianova.rediris.es).
F. ESPINOSA MAESTRE, La memoria de la represión y la lucha por su
reconocimiento. (En torno a la creación de la Comisión Interministe-
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(http://hispanianova.rediris.es).
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histórica” en España: Una aproximación a los movimientos sociales
por la memoria, in International Journal of Iberian Studies, vol. 19,
Nr. 1, 2006, p. 25–51.
C. HUMLEBÆK, Usos políticos del pasado reciente durante los años de
gobierno del PP, in Historia del Presente, Nr. 3, 2004.
S. JULIÁ, Echar al olvido. Memoria y amnistía en la transición, in Claves
de razón práctica, Nr. 129, 2002, p. 21f.
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rus, 2006.
S. JULIÁ (ed.), Víctimas de la guerra civil, Madrid: Ed. Temas de hoy,
1999.
A. KENKMANN (ed.), Nach Kriegen und Diktaturen: Umgang mit Ver-
gangenheit als internationales Problem. Bilanzen und Perspektiven für
das 21. Jahrhundert. Essen: Klartext, 2005.
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libertad. Víctimas y conmemoración de la Guerra Civil en la España
posbélica (1939–2006), in Ayer 63, 2006, p. 233–255.
P. MOA, 1934: Comienza la guerra civil. El PSOE y la Ezquerra emprenden
la contienda. Madrid: Ed. Áltera, 2004.
Alberto REIG TAPIA, La Cruzada de 1936. Mito y memoria, Madrid:
Alianza, 2006.
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Instrumentalización, in Hispania Nova. Revista de Historia Contem-
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146
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The Polish Debate around Fear by
Jan Tomasz Gross from the Perspective of
the Intermediary Discourse Analysis1
Marek Czyzewski
1. The Analogies Between the Debate Around Jan Tomasz Gross’ Fear in Po-
land in 2008, and the Debate Around Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing
Executioners in Germany in 1996. The Aim of the Analysis
The Polish debate around J.T. Gross’ Fear, which took place at the be-
ginning of 2008, to some extent resembles the discussion concerning
Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners held 12 years earlier
in Germany2. Despite being oftentimes criticised for its historical
inaccuracy, the German edition of Goldhagen’s book turned out to
be socially significant. Of immense importance were Goldhagen’s
meetings with German students, some of which performed a positive
therapeutic function. His book and the discussions directed society’s
attention not towards the anonymous systemic-organisational aspects
of the Holocaust, but towards its corporal dimension. A lot of young
German readers were deeply influenced by Goldhagen’s book and
as a result, an impeded “ability to mourn” was released; the term
Unfähigkeit zu trauern (which may be literally translated as “the lack
of ability to mourn”) was introduced by two German psychoanalysts
– Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich (1967) – with reference to
the German suppression of the collective remembrance of the exter-
mination of the Jews.
At the same time, the opinions of German historians were mostly
negative and their criticism above all focused on scientific deficien-
cies, lack of Goldhagen’s own historical analyses as well as simplified
and confusing explanations referring to German anti-Semitism as an
allegedly basic source for the Holocaust.
More importantly, the question of the author’s ethnicity became ap-
parent (more so in private than in the public sphere) and the reason
might be traced back to the fact that Goldhagen had been perceived
as an American Jew or a Jew per se. His book, similarly to Fear, was
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Justice and Memory.indb 147 02.11.2009 13:39:14
first published in English in the United States. Thus, the image of
Goldhagen as an author was inseparably linked to the ascription of
Jewish identity and it was this aspect of his socially constructed iden-
tity which was made most relevant.3 Emphasising Goldhagen’s Jewish
identity in most cases was not innocent and as a result the typical
“category-bound activities”4 were combined with this particular ethnic
category. The category of a “Jew” (an “American Jew”) implied the
issues of an easy academic and/or financial career, which allegedly
was to be paved by means of a simplified and accusatory interpreta-
tion of the Holocaust.
J.T. Gross’ Fear, referring to anti-Semitic violence on the part of
Poles towards Jews after the Second World War in Poland, was to
perform a therapeutic function in Polish society. Gross and his fol-
lowers repeatedly emphasised this question. Discussing specific cases
of violence, the book was meant to cause a restorative shock and
overcome the Polish version of “the inability to mourn”.
Instead, Gross’ work in Poland was received with criticism by Polish
historians, who focused on the book’s historical fallacies. At the same
time, the Institute of National Remembrance (being a national body)
counteracted without precedence and published Marek J. Chodak-
iewicz’s book, which presented Polish-Jewish postwar relations from
a completely different perspective.
In the public sphere, an open thematisation took place and Jan To-
masz Gross had been ethnically classified as a “Jew” correlated with
the “American Jewish lobby”. The assumption based on the “fact”
that Gross was a “Jew” became the prism through which the book’s
message was being interpreted. The most negative criticism of Gross’
Fear was based mainly on defining the author as a “Jew”, with this
identity being “fixed” and simultaneously made highly relevant.
In such a situation, it is extremely easy to fall into the trap of civili-
sational superiority over the Polish ignorant and provincial attitude or
the alleged omnipresent anti-Semitism. Such an attitude was present
in the left-wing and liberal media, which felt a responsibility to sup-
port and defend Gross against the nationalistic attacks. This situation
shapes the background for my analysis, which does not concentrate
on finding arguments in favour of any of the standpoints, but on
identifying the mechanisms standing behind them. My aim is to find
the source of the debate’s lack of productivity and, to a certain ex-
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tent, its counter efficiency. Thus, it may turn out to be unappealing
to both Gross’ opponents as well as followers. Hopefully, this analysis
will manage to present the shortages of this debate and relate them
to public debates in general.
It should be pointed out that the debate over Fear was abundantly
filled with meta-discursive elements, that is those relating not only
to the book, but to the debate itself, and the participants and their
motives. Classifying Gross as a “Jew” constituted a particularly
problematic aspect of the meta-discursive dimension of the debate,
which oftentimes took radical turns. The function of the national
and conservative polemics may be described as follows: by making
Gross’ ethnicity relevant, the problem raised in his book was made
irrelevant.
2. Concepts Useful for the Analysis
Some concepts should be introduced before the analysis is presented.
Ethnicity will be viewed not as an objective fact, but as a social con-
struct. Thus, it is not important whether one “is” Polish, Jewish or
German, but what sort of ethnic identity is ascribed and how this
ascription is being realised5. Ethnisation can be described as a specific
case of “identity enforcement” (in the sense of Werner Kallmeyer).
The concept of enforcement relates to various communicative practices
“broadening one’s own possibilities and at the same time narrowing
down someone else’s”6. In my analysis this concept applies not only
to conversations but also to other genres in the overall area of com-
munication, including press debates. In the case of ethnisation, the
main “enforcing” function refers to identity being set as a result of
rigid labeling and hence, raising its interpretive relevance (Auslegungs-
relevanz – a term introduced by Alfred Schutz 1971).
The concept of structures of relevance and irrelevance (Strukturen der
Relevanz und Irrelevanz) leads back to the social phenomenology of
Alfred Schutz. In line with this approach defining relevance belongs
to the field of communication in general in the sense of hierarchy of
matters treated as important and unimportant. Schutz differentiates
between: thematic relevance – thematische Relevanz (this particular
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“something”, not “something else” draws our attention); interpretive
relevance – Auslegungsrelevanz (“something” is interpreted in a certain
way); and motivational relevance – Motivationsrelevanz (we undertake
certain actions with relation to “something”). In everyday life, these
types of relevance are dependent on one another and none of them
constitutes a dominant factor. Elaborating on the question of rel-
evance, Schutz goes back to an ancient idea introduced by Carneades.
A person enters a familiar, dimly lit room. In the corner, s/he notices
“something new”, which draws his/her attention (thematic relevance).
The object could be a coiled rope or a snake (interpretive relevance).
As the man wants to sleep in the room, s/he hits the object in order
to find out what it is (motivational relevance). In an interactive situa-
tion, relevance is being defined, negotiated and modified as a result
of mutual adjustments and corrections between the partners of the
interaction.
The following question arises here – how was the structure of rel-
evance constructed in the debate around Fear?
3. Ethnisation of Gross and the Debate Itself as Problematic Aspects of the
Meta-Discursive Utterances in the Debate around Fear
With reference to the debate around Fear, Alfred Schutz’ relevance
concept may be incorporated as follows:
A substantial part of the debate around Fear has been arranged
through a unilateral enforcement of relevance, a way of defining
relevance which clearly diverges from egalitarian reciprocity and the
negotiability of daily routine.
A thematic relevance was pre-established throughout the debate: Fear
did not cause any bewilderment. The book was anticipated and it was
well-known it was going to be published in Polish – for example it
is in this context that Chodakiewicz’s book was issued. Some polem-
ists have been double “prepared” for Gross’ book – those who took a
defensive/rejecting attitude.7 On one hand Chodakiewicz’s book was
published and perceived as a counteroffensive or a counterbalance
(here the defensive/rejecting role of the Institute of National Re-
membrance turned out to be crucial). On the other hand, traditional
anti-Semitic topoi were activated; the theme of the debate was not
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remote or unfamiliar – unvertraut8 – to biased audiences; there were
no such doubts as shown in the example of Carneades – one did not
have to consider whether “something” was a coiled rope or a snake,
one just knew it.
In some media, the situation was clear from the very beginning and
it was dominated by the motivational relevance – an apparent threat
must be eliminated: “the Jews are attacking us” (motivational relevance
enforcement). The dominance of motivational relevance unsettled a
commonsense harmonisation of the three types of relevance.
Motivational relevance was designated by an allegedly self-evident
(“taken for granted”) interpretation (based on anti-Semitic prejudice)
and with no alternatives, which were to be considered in order not to
make a mistake – “it is ‘the Jews’ who are attacking us” (interpretative
relevance enforcement). This structure of relevances, adapted by the
defensive/rejecting camp of the debate, was based on the assump-
tion that the key to an adequate reaction lies in the “fact” that Gross
is a “Jew”, and that this is also his major characteristic as an author
(identity enforcement – “ethnisation” of Gross and in consequence,
“ethnisation” of the debate).
It should be added that Polish/Jewish identities are obviously not
univocal from an ethnic point of view – the Polish-Jewish decent of
Gross seems to be a testimony to this phenomenon. Irrespective of
that, Gross had been unequivocally labeled and this ethnic catego-
risation included a mobilisation of stereotypical “category-bound
activities”: “The Jew Gross” undertakes an “anti-Polish” action. From
this point of view, the publication of Gross’ book gains a discrediting
internal attribution, which is related to the alleged negative intentions
of the author, namely those focused on material profit and the will
to attack Polish society. Thus, the book’s content is made irrelevant
through interpretative relevance enforcement. At the same time,
only occasionally, the direction for self-action was set (the necessity
to oppose the aggression forced by a member of the “Jewish lobby”)
through motivational relevance enforcement. In extreme cases the
author has been completely discredited – with accordance to one of
the patterns of “neutralisation techniques” known as the “condemna-
tion of the condemners”.9
The additional aspect seems to be of particular importance: in
response to the aggressive enforcement of his identity as a “Jew”, a
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defensive enforcement of Gross’ identity as a “Pole” was oftentimes
applied, which in itself is a problematic issue (see below).
Two Varieties of Ethnisation of Gross as a “Jew”
The ethnisation of Gross as a “Jew” has been accomplished in two
ways:
a) “intellectual” variety (partly camouflaged)
The “intellectual” variety was present in the right-wing press, which
referred to Gross’ followers as the “Jewish site” of the dispute or
the “Jewish circles”10. Piotr Semka refers directly to Gross’ ethnicity
only once and he does so in response to the following statement by
Joanna Tokarska-Bakir: “Gross wanted to shout out the whole truth
about the tragedy of his people”. Note that Tokarska-Bakir has never
used this particular sentence in her article11. Semka does, however,
describe Gross’ defenders as the “Jewish site” and the “Jewish circles”
indicating the fact that “it is the Jews’ right to analyse the purity of
intentions relating to such criticism [of Gross]. But it is the critics’
right to demand a fair treatment of these objections and to oppose
their interpretations resulting from fear of recognising Polish crimes.
Gross’ critics want to face their nation’s guilt, without the need to
bend the facts and terminate the discussion on the new occupying
authorities being supported by some Polish Jews.”12
It should be noticed here that it is with reference to Semka’s article
that Seweryn Blumsztajn, a journalist from Gross’ defender, the left-
liberal Gazeta Wyborcza, performs the act of Gross’ “ethnisation” as
a “Pole”.13
Blumsztajn refers to Gross’ Polish descent, that is having a Polish
Catholic mother; being politically active before the emigration in 1968,
and claims that the question posed by Jan Gross does not read: Why
did you do it to us?, but How could we have done it? Blumsztajn reverses
the situation (here, analytical categories will be applied, which are
obviously not used by Blumsztajn in his commentary): according to
him, Gross does not follow a (Jewish) ethnocentrism (characterised by
loyalty towards one’s own alleged ethnic group) as implied by Semka,
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but a (Polish self-critical) “ex-centricity”.14 As Blumsztajn notes, Gross’
historical publications motivated by the Polish self-criticism should
contribute to the collective therapy of the Polish society.
The original proponents of this attitude, Alexander and Margarete
Mitscherlich (1967), discussed the problem of the widespread Ger-
man inability to grieve and mourn over the Holocaust. The authors
claimed that in order to make a further step in the development of a
collective consciousness, it is necessary to mourn over the past inso-
far that it is a burden suppressed from consciousness. A sociological
perspective on this issue has been proposed by Fritz Schütze (1990)
in his concept of fading out – relating to the act of dismissing incon-
venient facts from consciousness. Marek Beylin, the commentator
from Gazeta Wyborcza, argued according to this very spirit in “Jews,
Poles, Fear”.15
It should be stressed that the bona-fide “anti-anti-Semitism” is to some
extent problematic as it does not question the practices of ethnisation
in general but instead introduces a “counter-ethnisation” (“Gross is a
Pole”) while not questioning the confusing and harmful ethnisation
of the fragile and intricate subject of Polish-Jewish identity.
However, despite the objections raised, consideration of the social
definition of ethnic affinity is sometimes needed. It enables the dif-
ferentiation between ethnocentrism and ex-centricity; for example
in the public debate, it is important whether unemployment as a
source of Nazism is considered from the point of view of German
self-justification or Polish understanding, or whether the source of
Islamic terrorism in response to the imperialistic attitude of the U.S.
is interpreted by an Arabian or an American journalist. Such issues,
however, should be differentiated from the scenario in which members
of a political debate discredit another member via the enforcement
of ethnic identity.
b) severe and disgraceful variety
A letter by the local deputy Mr X (the real name has been concealed),
was published in a nationalistic and Catholic Polish newspaper.16 Ad-
dressed to the public prosecutor’s office in Torun, it is permeated
with anti-Semitic rhetoric, for example “in his hypocritical book, Fear:
Anti-Semitism in Poland after the War. The History of Moral Collapse, the
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Jew Jan Tomasz Gross commits two crimes [. . .]. The Jew J.T. Gross
should rather deal with . . .”
This rhetoric has some fatal connotations. First of all: the word “Jew”
put in front of a surname performs a stigmatising function.17 Secondly,
the assertion “Jews lie” combines two stereotypical constructions: a
generalised category of a “Jew” and the type of problematic behav-
ior allegedly characteristic of a “Jew” – “lying” as a “category-bound
activity”. It is worth bearing in mind the long history of anti-Semitic
topos referring to allegedly Jewish inclination towards rejecting the
truth and disseminating lies. A slogan “Der Jude lügt” used by the Nazi
propaganda is one example of this tradition. It should be noticed
here that the question of “Jewish lies” has been exploited for years by
Jerzy Robert Nowak.18 Thirdly, the formulation “The Jew J.T. Gross”
defames Gross as the allegedly prototypical Jew.
Other harsh examples of severe ethnisation include an amalgama-
tion of Gross as a person with “them” as a collective source of threat:
“Jews”, “zydki” (a Polish diminutive form for the word “Jews”, which
has disgraceful and belittling connotations):
– statements used by Professor Wolniewicz at the meeting in the Jesuit
Order basilica in Cracow19:
“They are attacking us, so we have to defend ourselves”, lectured Professor Bogusław
Wolniewicz. “Who is attacking us? The Jews” – this statement caused a thunderous
applause and approval. “You did not let me finish. It was not the right answer”, added
Wolniewicz. The puzzled audience looked around hesitantly. Luckily for them, the
speaker elaborated on his point claiming that the source of evil lay within a certain
group of the American Jews or “those from Brooklyn” as Wolniewicz referred to them.
Not only the Polish Jews but the Poles themselves are willing to endear themselves
to the Jewish lobby. “Poland was always full of renegades!” exclaimed Wolniewicz.
The audience once again applauded loudly.
– posts/comments on the Internet, for example “A fierce protest
against the Jews [zydki] that used to spit on us”.20
As far as radical polemics addressed to Gross are concerned, some
appeals relating to the need of counteraction were issued to the au-
thorities21:
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The Ministry of Foreign Affairs should immediately publish reports based on the
memories of the “honest Jews”, accounting for an enormous commitment on the
part of Poles, who would save the Jews during the war, said Professor Jerzy Robert
Nowak [. . .]. The historian emphasised the need for such a response to J.T. Gross’
Fear, which is full of lies, and of highly selective and negative content.
Ethnisation amongst the recipients of Fear
Another dimension of the debate’s ethnisation relates to the following
two varieties of ethnisation amongst the recipients of Fear:
An aggressive “self-ethnisation” – emphasis on one’s own ethnic-
ity with accordance to the following pattern: “As a Pole, I object”;
For example the aforementioned deputy, X, declares: “As a Pole, I
address the District Public Prosecutor’s Office. . .“, Nasz Dziennik,
12.02.2008.
A reactive “self-ethnisation”, a procedure similar to the previous
one, but having a different function, with accordance to the follow-
ing pattern: “As a Pole, I do not feel offended”; for example Ludwik
Stomma in his column “Strach odrzucony” [“Fear Rejected”] in the
left-liberal weekly Polityka, 2.02.2008:
Let us go back to the hateful critic of his [Gross’] work, which may not have been taken
seriously, but for the thoughtless statement declared by Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz.
What we hear in the statement is an echo of the arguments (expressed involuntarily
as I presume) belonging to the darkest circles of the chauvinistic neo-nationalistic
movement [Pol. “neoendecja”22]: “Poles have been offended”, “Gross insults the Poles”.
I am a Pole myself, which cannot be denied even by manipulators, professional dis-
praisers or pseudo-historians from the Institute of National Remembrance. Basia
and a number of friends of mine are Poles alike. And none of them felt slandered
by Gross. Neither Basia nor myself feel defamed or battered.
Another example is somewhat isolated and therefore even more
valuable for analysis, as it questions the procedures making a Jewish
identity relevant and unequivocal – “then” (after the Second World
War) and “now” (during the debate). The surprisingly subtle article
“Bez Strachu” [“Withour Fear”] by Jerzy Urban was published in his
weekly magazine Nie [No], which often has a vulgar and scandalous
style (Nie, 24.01.2008). The author emphasises the complexity of the
relations between Poles and Jews and their oftentimes pathological
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and aggressive disclosure, that is he identifies the enforcement of
identity relating to the current debate and to the postwar reality as a
problem. Urban’s message is as follows – the current grotesque and
destructive “ethnisation” of the debate has its ominous, historical
anti-type in the post-war pathological “ethnisation” of social reality
(the phenomenon was threatening in a literal, corporal sense), and
people who refer to Gross as a Jew do not go beyond the moral cog-
nition present in the past “ethnisation” of reality. Urban’s sarcastic
and pungent style also draws the reader’s attention. He problematises
the “ethnisation” relating to the current public debate, including the
following categories: “post-Jew” and “Grossist”:
Every single neonationalist [“postendecki nacjonalista”] would let himself/herself be
chopped into pieces, defending the accuracy of Jerzy Robert Nowak’s or Krzysztof
Kąkolewski’s arguments, relating to the alleged fact that it was the Jews themselves
(to Bishop Kaczmarek’s great distress) who committed a self-murder in Kielce in
194623. Anyone having a different attitude towards that event slanders the Polish
nation, which has to withstand the pain-inflicting attacks. It is also assumed that
cosmopolitan liberals, atheists, filo-Semites, post-Jews – or simply friends and edi-
tors of Gazeta Wyborcza – will be going down on Gross. As a non-Aryan Pole and
a fanatical post-communist, the enemy of God and the Polish Pope, I am a Grossist
– quite naturally. Therefore, I am obliged to be thrilled by Fear, irrespective of its
content. The conclusion is simple: in our beloved Poland, people with a distinct
genealogical and political identity do not need to read books.
Urban gives a dramatic autobiographic testimony of what “ethnisa-
tion” meant in a post-war reality (a ”Polish Jew” and a “post-Jew”
– these categories being objects of a schematic “ethnisation”):
I don’t know how Gross describes the post-war reality, but indeed, after the war Jews
and Polish Jews lived in fear. […] It was winter 1946/1947. I was traveling with my
parents by car from Jelenia Góra. The Germans were put on carts together with their
belongings and dropped by a train station – the same picture in Budzanow; indif-
ference also identical. We were going from Jelenia Góra to Łódz. There was night.
Our car was stopped by the partisans. Eagles with crowns were glittering24. Crown
on their hats equalled fear in the car. They asked for the documents and saluted:
“It’s all right. We’re sorry. We are looking for communists and Jews”. How many of
these post-Jews dressed in security forces uniforms and mistreating the heroes of
the underground, were killing their own fear?
The two types of ethnisation (as a “Jew” and a “Pole”) and two types
of self-ethnisation amongst the readers, correspond to the two main
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schematic patterns of media reception relating to the book’s message:
“agitated” (by the book) and “indignant” (with the book). Other op-
tions were not as readable and their presence was limited.
The debates on Polish and Jewish issues are clichéd, which makes
them even more predictable. This aspect is emphasised in the debates
related to Jedwabne and Fear. In both cases, a dichotomy of stand-
points can be observed: on one hand an affirmative attitude towards
Gross’ texts, and towards a “reworking” of the past, and on the other,
a rejecting and defensive one following Andrzej Paczkowski’s termi-
nology. Schematisation and polarisation are particularly strong with
reference to Polish/Jewish debates, and they also make up a wider
range of Polish public debates.25
4. Further Aspects of the Meta-Discursive Features of the Debate around
Fear
The lack of a meta-discursive dimension of discourse may be as detri-
mental as its abundance. “Ethnisation” of the debate relating to Fear
turns out to be a particularly problematic aspect of the superfluous
meta-discursive dimension of the debate. “Personalisation” of this
debate, in fact, related to a radical depersonalisation of Gross as an
individual.
The severe form of “ethnisation” appearing mainly in Nasz Dzien-
nik reactivated clichéd anti-Semitic topoi, which have been known for
hundreds of years: the alleged Jewish irreconcilability, self-interest (in
its new version related to the so-called Holocaust Industry), infamy
and ingratitude (including a deliberate defaming of the image of
Poland), perfidy, lack of dignity, rejecting the truth and disseminating
lies, a worldwide conspiracy and power, and finally the tendency to
relativise their own guilt. What is more, a topos of Judeo-communism
with a considerably shorter history (relating to the alleged close con-
nections between Jews and communism; Pol. “zydokomuna”), became
also apparent.26 With reference to these topoi, a collective appeal to
defense against danger was issued.
Many parts of the debate around Fear were filled with phenomena
not only belonging to the wider discourse of hostility, including a
variety of aggressive linguistic expressions directed towards different
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groups, for example political ones, but also to its particular dimen-
sion – hate speech.27
A large number of meta-discursive statements (a prominent char-
acteristic of the debate on Fear) hindered the debate. Mostly, because
numerous statements made by both sides of the dispute (two of the
key protagonists being Gross’ fierce opponent, Jerzy Robert Nowak
and Gross’s advocate, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, toute proportion gardée),
although allegedly unbiased, in reality turned out to be prejudiced
(either anti-Semitic or “anti-anti-Semitic”), which further deepened
the polarisation.
The opinions of Jan Zaryn, the then director of the academic-
educational department in the Institute of National Remembrance,
expressed in a Catholic program Mi ędzy niebem a ziemią [Between
Heaven and Hell]28 should be emphasised here. Roman Indrzejcz-
ak, a Catholic priest and a chaplain of President Lech Kaczynski,
called on Poles to be self-critical and to reconsider the role of the
Church. In such a situation, a ruthless critique of Gross performed
by Zaryn (“this disgraceful book should be disposed of”, “a literary
boorishness”) might have had a grotesque effect. It was Indrzejczak
who played a mediating role between Gross and society. Zaryn, on
the other hand, contributed to its polarisation.
The debate oftentimes included arguments relating to its unproduc-
tiveness and predictability – for example the polarising effect of the
debate was stated already at the beginning of the debate in an article
“Strach nie przesłoni prawdy” [“Fear Will Not Obscure The Truth”]
by Krzysztof Ogiolda in Nowa Trybuna Opolska from 11.01.2008 and
renewed in a summarising article “Strach, gniew, debata” [“Fear, An-
ger, Debate”], Teresa Bogucka in Gazeta Wyborcza from 23.02.2008.
Numerous signals also highlighted the primitiveness of the debate
as well as its harmfulness and counter-productivity.
The responsibility for the state of affairs was ascribed in many dif-
ferent ways:
a) “Guilt” is ascribed to Gross and his followers (right-wing national-
istic and Catholic attitude):
– “Strach cofnął dialog o całą epokę” [“Fear Moved the Debate to the
Previous Epoch”], Piotr Semka, Rzeczpopolita, 16.01.2008;
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– “Strach utrwali stereotyp o polskich obozach koncentracyjnych”
[“Fear Will Consolidate the Stereotypes on Polish Death Camps”],
Marek J. Chodakiewicz, Super Express, 2.01.2008;
– “Odwaga kardynała Dziwisza” [“The Courage of Cardinal Dziwisz”],
Tomasz Terlikowski, Rzeczpospolita, 18.01.2008.
b) “Guilt” is ascribed to Gross’ opponents as well as to social con-
sciousness, and more specifically to negligence of “Aufarbeitung der
Vergangeheit” that is “coming to terms with the past”, in accordance
with Adorno’s concept (left-wing and liberal standpoint):
– “Strach w Polsce” [“Fear in Poland”], Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Gazeta
Wyborcza, 12.01.2008
– “Strach przed ‘Strachem’” [“Fear against Fear”], Tomasz Wisniewski,
Kurier Poranny, 7.03.2008 (the summary of the debate; its defici-
encies lie in “own blame and the sin of omission”).
Taking into account this attitude, a paradoxical conclusion might
be drawn: attempts to correct historical negligence may worsen the
situation to an even greater extent, thus it may be necessary to change
the methods intended to influence society.29
c) The situation resembles a trap, which cannot be escaped (a left-
wing radical view):
– “W pułapce antysemityzmu” [“In the Trap of Anti-Semitism”],
Adam Budzynski, Trybuna, 16.01.2008;
– “Bez Strachu” [“Without Fear”], Jerzy Urban, Nie, 24.01.2008.
The attempts to question ethnisation, put into practice “then” (after
the war) as well as “now” (during the debate), took place very rarely.
An insightful example referring to this issue was discussed earlier in
this paper: “Without Fear”, Jerzy Urban, Nie, 24.01.2008.
In the debate around Fear, a clear polarisation between two oppos-
ing standpoints took place: the one pole applying the discourse of
anti-Semitic hate speech and the other (“anti-anti-Semitic”) refuting
anti-Semitic arguments by means of the discourse of hostility. At
the same time, there was a considerable lack of intermediary work
aiming at an intermediation of standpoints.30 Meta-discursive state-
ments were, by definition, double and multi-voiced, in the sense of
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Michail Bakhtin, because they abounded in references to somebody
else’s utterances. Nevertheless they most often turned out to be of a
demonstrably one-sided orientation, since the utterances referred to
were transformed in a mocking way, disregarding the heteroglossia of
different grounds.31 A variety of grounds were also missing, although
some exceptions to the rule did occur, for example two programs
with Andrzej Paczkowski (“Radio Channel III Club”, Radio Chan-
nel III, 15.01.2008; and “Fear”, a debate in TVN24, 17.01.2008), in
which he attempted at a intermediary work between Gross and Polish
society. Ireneusz Krzeminski demonstrated a similar skill while be-
ing interviewed by Kamila Baranowska.32 Pawel Machcewicz, in turn,
conducted an academic and impartial meta-analysis of Gross’ work
(“Odcienie czerni” [“The Shades of Black”], Tygodnik Powszechny,
13.01.2008).
5. Conclusions
The concept of intermediary work, here related to the debate around
Fear but also applicable to other public debates, is not an artificial
academic idea. It is the participants of various controversies and
disputes who know the practical application of the term and realise
the intermediary work, although the term is not being used per se.
An intermediary discourse analysis may be applied with reference
to Alfred Schutz’ thesis on common sense and scientific constructs,
where constructs used in social sciences are always of the “second de-
gree”, which are built upon the constructs of the first degree “made
by the actors on the social scene”.33 Arguably, with respect to such
a research attitude one should seek an intermediation in different
dimensions of the analysis. However, uncritical and unconditional
support in favor of any side of the debate should be avoided in this
case. The social mission of the intermediary discourse analysis does
not contribute to taking sides, but rather to the improvement of so-
cial debates in general. As far as research methodology is concerned,
the intermediary discourse analysis locates itself between an ethno
methodological Conversation Analysis (CA) and a Critical Discourse
Analysis (CDA), avoiding the programmatic political indifference of
the former, and the programmatic commitments of the latter.
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With reference to both social engagement and methodological
orientation, the following sociological meta-perspective proposed by
Karl Mannheim34 seems to be informative:
The crisis in thought is not a crisis affecting merely a single intellectual position,
but a crisis of a whole world which has reached a certain stage in its intellectual
development. To see more clearly the confusion into which our social and intel-
lectual life has fallen represents an enrichment rather than a loss. That reason
can penetrate more profoundly into its own structure is not a sign of intellectual
bankruptcy. Nor it is to be regarded as intellectual incompetence on our part when
an extraordinary broadening of our perspective necessitates a thorough-going revi-
sion of our fundamental concepts. Thought is a process determined by actual social
forces, continually questioning its findings and correcting its procedure. (It would
be fatal on that account to refuse to recognize, because of sheer timidity, what has
already become clear.)
The perspective of “intermediary” discourse analysis not only empha-
sises the need for distance as far as the “agitated” and “indignant”
attitudes towards Fear are concerned, it also focuses on the deficien-
cies present in the debate, and relates to the detrimental dynamics
of polarised views. The “intermediary” discourse analysis highlights
the need to apply “intermediary work” with reference to the analysed
controversy and to other existing debates. It encourages the devel-
opment of a distanced approach towards Fear itself and towards the
communicational strategy used by its author and with reference to
the public presence of “strong” standpoints supporting other just
causes.
Fear did not invite public deliberation on Polish anti-Semitism, but
was a conscious act of shock therapy, applied by the author. However,
despite the assumptions of shock therapy, but in accordance with the
rules of opinion formation related to controversial topics, the book’s
reception did not result in a revaluation of the Polish collective re-
membrance. On the contrary, Gross’ work had a polarising effect on
its readers. On one hand, it further convinced those who already
had been “convinced” about Polish self-criticism. On the other, it
was received with resistance and reluctance on the part of the follow-
ers of the defensive attitude. While the first group was and still is a
minority, the latter one always used to and persists to be a majority.
A similar situation takes place with reference to scientific texts
corresponding to Critical Discourse Analysis as well as films and
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other anti-racist or “anti-anti-Semitic” artistic means of expression.
All of them, as may be presumed, convince the already “convinced”,
and the prejudiced – despite the authors’ best intentions – are still
subject to indifference or they might even deepen their prejudice.
Possibly, reactions in accordance with intent occur only amongst the
indecisive readers. Without further research on the productivity and
counter-productivity of the anti-racist and “anti-anti-Semitic” mes-
sages, it is extremely difficult to reach an unambiguous conclusion.
However, it should be mentioned that the results of research on the
reception of “anti-anti-Semitic” and anti-racist messages might lead
to a reconsideration of “anti-anti-Semitic” and anti-racist strategies.
Hypothetically, it is worth considering what would have to happen
in order for Fear to have the opportunity to cause changes in the
Polish collective remembrance. For this purpose, it would be useful
to refer to the “spiral of silence”, a concept used in public opinion
research.35 The concept has been subject to numerous scientific and
political controversies, which are not relevant in this context. To put
it briefly, the mechanism of the “spiral of silence” relates to the fact
that an allegedly minority-oriented opinion (in fact supported by
the majority), under the conforming pressure of the media, indeed
becomes supported by the minority only because its followers change
their minds in fear of isolation. Thus, an opinion initially supported
by the minority, but depicted otherwise by the media (that is as al-
legedly supported by the majority), may become that of the actual
majority.
With reference to Fear in Poland, the “spiral of silence” was not
activated; an anti-Grossist attitude was supported by the majority and
never ceased being popular, whereas a pro-Grossist approach was
and still is supported by the minority. The reasons for this situation
were many. First of all, although the pro-Grossist attitude was highly
supported by the liberal left-wing media, Gross’ opponents never
experienced the fear of isolation. On the contrary, it was the anti-
Grossist approach (against the pro-Grossist one, allegedly imposed
by a superior power), which consolidated them in terms of solidarity
with a wider “imagined community”. Secondly, the pressure exerted
by the media was not consistent. A huge sector supported the more
or less anti-Grossist views and in doing so, strengthened the majori-
ty’s opinion. In other words, Gross’ opponents did not fit into the
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requirements of political correctness. What is more, they rejected
the pro-Grossist attitude, just because it became the manifestation of
political correctness, and in return made use of a typical repertoire
of the ethnisation of the debate and Gross himself.
One of the ways to change public opinion could have been achieved
by the application of the “spiral of silence”, which would have been
more than beneficiary in those circumstances. However, in the harsh
conditions of the debate, Gross needed the support of influential
leaders and public opinion centers, which could have initiated the in-
termediary work between Gross and society. As previously mentioned,
such attempts, although extremely valuable, had been unfortunately
very rare.
Another way of changing the negative attitude was for Gross to
refrain from introducing shock therapy and what followed, the po-
larisation of public opinion. To achieve this, he would have had to
(at least partially) demonstrate the intermediary work himself, at the
same time emphasising the diverse perspectives of the participants
to historical events. It should be noticed here that this was exactly
what Gross had already done once in his previous book Neighbors.
Apart from focusing on Polish anti-Semitism (accusing internal at-
tribution), Gross also carried out a significant sociological analysis
of social anomie caused by war (understanding external attribution).
However, with relation to the debate on Neighbors, the second concept
was not adequately discerned and recognised. Gross was reproached
– erroneously and unjustly – for focusing solely on the causative role
of Polish anti-Semitism associated with the manslaughter in Jedwabne.
A selective reception of Neighbors could have discouraged Gross from
cultivating the multilateral perspective in Fear. Insofar that this was the
case, it was not an advantageous solution. In the light of the experi-
ence gained from the debate on Neighbors, Fear could have induced
greater effort toward the acceptance of the multiple perspectives of
the parties involved. In such a case, the chances of activating the spiral
of silence would have been at least considered (although taking into
account other circumstances, it still would have been uncertain), and
Fear’s advocates would have had a stronger argument as defining the
book as just a gesture of despair.
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Notes
1 This article is based on a German paper entitled “Der polnische Streit um Jan
Tomasz Gross’ Strach aus ‘vermittelnder’ diskursanalytischer Perspektive” which
was presented at the conference “GlobE 2008, Critical Discourse Analysis and
Global Media”, Warsaw, 18–20. September 2008. The German paper is forth-
coming in: A. DUSZAK, J. HOUSE (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th GlobE Conference,
Warsaw.
2 Gross’ book was first published in the United States (GROSS 2006) and only then
issued in Poland (GROSS 2008). The sequence of publications in Goldhagen’s
case was similar: the original English version was followed by its German coun-
terpart (GOLDHAGEN 1996a and 1996b).
3 in the sense of Alfred SCHUTZ 1971.
4 in the sense of Harvey SACKS 1992.
5 Roger BRUBAKER (2004) criticises not only a substantial understanding of so-
cial groups (nations included) and collective attributes (for example relating to a
“national character”), which have been previously questioned by the sociological
analyses of collective (national) identity, but also – most importantly – he scruti-
nises the “identitarian sociology”, which in the meantime has become prevalent.
Instead, he proposes a radical analysis of methods and ways for identity ascrip-
tion.
6 KALLMEYER, SCHMITT 1996: p. 21.
7 The following terms were introduced by Andrzej Paczkowski (2001) with refer-
ence to the debate on Jedwabne: “defensive attitude”, including the “rejecting
defensive attitude”, and the opposing “affirmative attitude”.
8 See: Schutz.
9 SYKES, MATZA 1957.
10 see: the article by Piotr SEMKA “Strach cofnął dialog o całą epokę” [“Fear Moved
the Dialog to the Previous Epoch”], Rzeczpospolita, 16.01.2008.
11 „Strach w Polsce” [“Fear in Poland”] Gazeta Wyborcza, 12.01.2008.
12 A typical “defensive” allusion to the participation of Jews in the post-war com-
munist regime in Poland.
13 „Polski głos Grossa” [“Gross’ Polish Say”], Seweryn BLUMSZTAJN, Gazeta
Wyborcza, 19.01.2008.
14 The categories of “ethnocentrism” and “ex-centricity” (the term adopted from
Helmuth Plessner) are elucidated here as opposing argumentative strategies
referring to problematic behaviors manifested by members of the own and the
other group. In a polarised debate, problematic behaviors (for example related
to crime, violence or demoralisation symptoms) may be explained by means of
(low) internal motives (such as attitudes, inclinations, invariable tendencies) or
external circumstances (such as political, economic or social processes). The
first case refers to the (accusatory) internal attribution, while the latter one to
the (justifying or at least “understanding”) external attribution. Ethnocentrism
may be perceived twofold, as relating to: members of its own group, manifesting
problematic behaviors (the application of justifying or “understanding” exter-
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Justice and Memory.indb 164 02.11.2009 13:39:18
nal attribution – “well, the circumstances were just unfavorable”) or members
of the other group (the application of accusatory internal attribution – “this is
who they are”). Ex-centricity stands in opposition to ethnocentrism and consists
in an inverse double measure: here, the accusatory (and self-critical) attitude is
applied to the problematic behaviors of the members of the own group (“let’s
face it, this is who we are”) and the justifying, sympathetic one to the problematic
behaviors of the members of the other group (“they have to be understood; such
were the circumstances”). For more information on the application of these and
other argumentative strategies in public debates, see: CZYZEWSKI 2005.
15 Gazeta Wyborcza, 12.01.2008.
16 Nasz Dziennik 12.02.2008.
17 Cf. Teun van Dijk’s research on racist discourse in the press, relating to seem-
ingly redundant indications towards the ethnic identity of the perpetrator (so
called overcompleteness), pointing to a latent account on the reasons for which a
certain person committed a crime (VAN DIJK 1991: 185-187); in such contexts
the emphasis may be put on foreign surnames.
18 See: “100 kłamstw J.T. Grossa” oraz “Nowe kłamstwa Grossa” [“100 Lies by J.T.
Gross” and “New Lies by Gross”].
19 “Zydzi nas atakują! Trzeba się bronic” [“The Jews are attacking us! We have to
defend ourselves”], a report by Małgorzata I. NIEMCZYNSKA, Gazeta Wyborcza,
11.02.2008.
20 Onet.pl 14.02.2008.
21 “Dajmy odpór Grossowi” [“Let’s Resist Gross”], Zenon Baranowski, Nasz Dziennik,
12.02.2008 – an account of the meeting with Jerzy Robert Nowak in a theological
seminary in Kielce.
22 “Neoendecja” is an ironic description of the present nationalist and conservative
orientation in Poland, which – as the description suggests – should be perceived
as a revitalisation of the National Democracy, a Polish pre-war nationalist right-
wing political movement.
23 The ironic Polish designation – postendecki – originates from the adjective endecki,
which refers to National Democracy (see the former footnote). Radiomaryjny
(Pol.) is an ironic adjective relating to a nationalist and Catholic radio station
– Radio Maryja (the name refers to St. Mary). Jerzy Robert Nowak and Krzysztof
Kąkolewski, both commentators working for Radio Maryja, are associated with
controversial interpretations of the Kielce pogrom (1946). Bishop Kaczmarek,
who used to be a bishop of Kielce after the WW II, applied anti-Semitic patterns
of argumentation to justify the sources of the Kielce pogrom.
24 The partisans were wearing hats with Polish national emblems twinkling in the
dark.
25 CZYZEWSKI 2001 and 2008.
26 In referring to Joanna Tomczyk, who analysed anti-semitic topoi (appearing in
Nasz Dziennik with reference to the debate on Fear) as part of the project on the
discourse of hostility. See: an unpublished report by Marek CZYZEWSKI et al.
2008. The majority of the topoi were analysed in numerous publications by Ruth
Wodak and her research team relating to post-war anti-Semitism in Austria. See:
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Ruth WODAK et al. (1990a); see also the chapter on “Kategorien” in WODAK
et al. (1990b: 86-111). The research results of Ruth Wodak et al. constituted a
crucial reference point in our own project.
27 For more information on various types of hostility discourse and hate speech
within hostility discourse, see: CZYZEWSKI et al. 2008.
28 broadcasted on Polish Television Channel 1 – TVP 1 – 20.01.2008.
29 see: Paczkowski’s statements in Radio Channel III Club [Pol. Klub Trojki], Polish
Radio Channel III, 15.01.2008.
30 For more information on the concept of intermediary work (Vermittlungsarbeit)
and its categories, see: CZYZEWSKI 2005.
31 BAKHTIN 1971.
32 “Ksiązka Grossa blokuje dialog” [“Gross’ Book Inhibits the Dialog”], Rzeczpos-
polita, 6.02.2008.
33 SCHUTZ 1973: p. 6.
34 1936: pp. 93–94.
35 NOELLE-NEUMANN 1984.
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R. BRUBAKER, Ethnicity without Groups, Cambridge MA: Harvard
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M. CZYZEWSKI, Öffentliche Kommunikation und Rechtsextremismus,
Łódz: University of Łódz Press, 2005.
M. CZYZEWSKI, M. DOMINIAK, J. SŁODKOWSKI, P. SZRAJBER,
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D. GOLDHAGEN, Hitlers willige Vollstrecker. Ganz gewöhnliche Deutsche
und der Holocaust, Munich: Siedler, 1996b.
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A History of the Extermination of a Jewish Town], Sejny: Pogranicze,
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J. T. GROSS, Fear. Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. An Essay in
Historical Interpretation. New York: Random House, 2006.
J. T. GROSS, Strach. Antysemityzm w Polsce tuz po wojnie. Historia moral-
nej zapasci. [Fear. Anti-Semitism in Poland after the War. The History
of Moral Collapse], Kraków: Znak, 2008.
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Gangart. Zur Analyse von Kooperationsformen im Gespräch, in W.
KALLMEYER (Ed.), Gesprächsrhetorik. Rhetorische Verfahren im
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168
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Resolving Antagonistic Tensions
Some Discourse Analytic Reflections on
Verbal Commemorative Practices
Titus Ensink
This volume results from the symposium “Breaking silence or making
a clean break?”. The question in the title presupposes the existence of
several tensions: those between keeping silent and breaking silence,
and those between an unresolved question and the trial to make a
“break” so as to find some resolution. The title also suggests that it
might be necessary to break silence in order to find some resolution.
In this paper I will offer some reflections on the consequences of
these tensions from a discourse analytic perspective.
It is clear that we are dealing with situations that carry a heavy
burden from the past. Violent and unjust events from the past tend
to linger on. The stories of what happened crystallise in collective
narratives.1 These narratives define collective identities and persistent
relationships between communities. Every generation passes their im-
ages and attitudes on to the next: images of the enemy’s cruelty and
inhumanity, images of the violation of one’s own humaneness and
rights. In many cases, an enemy society thus becomes a hereditary
enemy.
In view of the many persistent conflicts worldwide it is useful to
investigate examples where one party tried to resolve at least some of
the burden of the past. Both positive emotions and reactions (admis-
sion of guilt, forgiveness, reconciliation) and negative ones (denial,
guilt, humiliation, revenge, hatred) are possible. It is important to
point out that the realization of negative emotions calls for almost
inevitably violent action, whereas positive emotions call for some form
of communicative action (note that “breaking silence” calls for a form of
communication). Let us look at some examples of communicative ac-
tion aimed at resolving tensions resulting from past violent actions.
In 1970, German Chancellor Brandt visited Warsaw in order to sign
a treaty with the Poles. On that occasion he visited the monument of
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Justice and Memory.indb 169 02.11.2009 13:39:19
the Warsaw Ghetto. In front of the monument, he went down on his
knees. This gesture (by a person seen as the German representative)
was understood as a recognition of guilt and an appeal for forgiveness.
The gesture was criticised in Germany, but was highly appreciated
in Poland.2
In 1984 German Chancellor Kohl and French President Mitterand
stood holding hands at Verdun, commemorating the many deaths as
a result of the fierce battle of Verdun during WW I, thus symbolis-
ing reconciliation between the hereditary enemies, Germany and
France.
In May 1985, German Chancellor Kohl and US President Reagan
made a joint visit to the cemetery at Bitburg in Germany. The visit
was heavily criticised because several SS-soldiers lie buried there. Rea-
gan meant his visit as a reconciliatory gesture toward the Germans.
According to Herf,3 he was completely mistaken:
He [Reagan] said, “We who were enemies are now friends; we who were bitter adver-
saries are now the strongest of allies.” This dangerous half-truth ignored the links
between the United States and those Germans such as Adenauer, Brandt, Reuter,
Heuss, and Schumacher who had been “bitter adversaries” of the Nazis, not of the
Allies. Furthermore, it presented as a great accomplishment one of the most regret-
table aspects of the formation of the Western alliance, namely, the failure to purge
the West German establishment more deeply in the postwar decade.
In August 1994, German President Herzog made a speech in Warsaw
on the occasion of the commemoration of the Warsaw Uprising of
August 1944.4 In the final sentence of his speech he asks the Poles
for forgiveness. The Polish audience started to applaud even before
he had completely uttered that sentence.5 Herzog thus succeeded
in complying with the host’s needs, without ignoring the German
perspective elsewhere in his speech.6 – Herzog made that speech on
a rather extraordinary commemorative occasion where all parties
involved in the events of the Warsaw Uprising were present: the Poles
as both insurgents and victims; Germany as the former enemy; and
the allied forces who had fought against Germany (one of whom,
however, had betrayed the Poles, at least from their perspective).
Representatives of every party spoke on that occasion. Herzog’s ask-
ing for forgiveness (echoing Brandt’s gesture) was very well received.
Remarkably enough, the Poles turned out to be more eager to hear
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an acknowledgement of liability from the Russians (officially their
liberator) than from the Germans.
It is not quite accidental that these examples pertain to Germany,
especially Germany’s Nazi past. It is quite common to consider the
Nazi regime and their actions as the nec plus ultra of human evil,
unparalleled in human history. It’s precisely the heavy burden of
these crimes that forced Germans to ask themselves what that burden
means to their identity: Nazism is part of German history, hence part
of German identity. Is one willing or rather reluctant to acknowledge
that liability? The difficulty and contentiousness of this burden is
the major theme of studies such as Wodak et al. 1990, Buruma 1994,
Wodak et al. 1994, Herf 1997 or Assmann 2006. Willingness to ac-
knowledge liability implies both one’s identity and one’s relation to
others.
The problematic character of this question appears clearly in the
next example, also pertaining to the burden of the Nazi past. On
November 10, 1988, the Chairman of the German parliament, Philipp
Jenninger, addressed the Bundestag on the occasion of the 50th anni-
versary of the “Kristallnacht”, the night of the broken glass. Jenninger felt
forced to resign as Chairman because of the reactions to his speech.
His speech was understood by both his political audience and the
media as expressing an exculpation – and maybe even admiration
– for Hitler’s Nazi regime, and condoning the fact that the Germans
willingly followed that regime. Most media reports worldwide rein-
forced that impression: a leading German politician had gone badly
awry, both politically and morally.7
Closer scrutiny of what Jenninger expressed, however, shows that
in the perception of Jenninger’s speech something went dramati-
cally wrong.8 What the reception of this speech neglected was the
way Jenninger made his intentions clear at the very beginning of his
speech:
Ladies and gentlemen! The Jews in Germany and all over the world commemorate
today the events of fifty years ago. We Germans too commemorate what happened
in our country fifty years ago and it is proper that we do this in both states on Ger-
man soil [. . .]
Yesterday, many of us attended – invited by the Central Council of Jews in Germany
– the commemoration in the Synagogue in Frankfurt am Main. Today, however, we
have gathered in the Bundestag in order to commemorate here in the Parliament
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the pogroms of November 9th and 10th, 1938. Because not the victims, but we, in the
midst of whom the crimes were committed, have to remember and account for them.
We Germans should have a clear understanding about our past, and learn from it
for the political formation of our present and future. The victims, the Jews all over
the world, know all too well the meaning of November 1938 for their suffering to
come. Do we know it as well? (Wissen wir es auch?) [my translation, TE]
In the final question in this quotation (“Do we know it as well?”) Jennin-
ger emphasises “we”: do we Germans know? It is clear that Jenninger
chooses a German perspective on the past events of the Kristallnacht.
And such a perspective is, inevitably, a perpetrator’s perspective. It is
once more clear that this perspective is chosen not because the speaker
wants to defend or condone the perpetrators, but precisely because
he wants to confront them with their past. He continues as follows:
What happened fifty years ago in the midst of Germany had not occurred since the
Middle Ages in any civilised country. And, even worse: the excesses were not the
expression of a however motivated, spontaneous anger of the people, but they were
contrived, initiated and stimulated by the State’s leaders. The ruling Party had – in
the person of its highest representative – put law and order out of work. The State
itself became the organiser of the crimes [. . .]
Later on in his speech Jenninger made some remarks which, consid-
ered superficially, or rather, taken out of context, seem to express
admiration for Hitler or to condone Nazi actions. For example
Did not Hitler realise what Wilhelm II only promised, viz. lead the Germans into
glorious times? Wasn’t he really elected by Providence, a leader such as is given to
a people only once in a thousand years? [. . .]
Did not just recently (eben erst) the leaders of Britain, France and Italy pay a visit to
Hitler in Munich, and helped him to reach one more of these successes?
And as for the Jews: did they not take on a role in the past, so it was said (so hieß es
damals), which didn’t belong to them? Was it not time for them to take restrictions
into account? Didn’t they perhaps deserve it that they were shown the place where
they belonged? And above all: didn’t the propaganda (apart from some wild and
non-serious exaggerations) respond in essential points to the own surmises and
convictions?
In the context of his speech, however, it is fully clear that Jenninger
meant these remarks as the description of the average mindset of Ger-
mans at the time of the Kristallnacht in 1938 (note the formulation
eben erst, just recently: Jenninger refers here to Munich 1938). The
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description of that average mindset, again, is not meant as condoning
but as a form of self-confrontation: “this is how we Germans were
talking in our everyday conversations at that time” (so hieß es damals,
so it was said).
The case of Jenninger’s speech illustrates the difficulty of finding
a proper way to address a painful and shameful past. A newspaper
commented on Jenninger’s speech that it is improper to speak at a
funeral about the intentions of the murderer. But did Jenninger speak
“at a funeral”? At the beginning of his speech he refers to the fact
that the day before there had been a commemorative meeting in the
Synagogue in Frankfurt. In contrast, so he says, today the Germans
have to remember what happened and to account for it: he did not
speak at a funeral, but he confronted the murderers with their ac-
tions, which led to a funeral.
One could interpret this case as a manifestation of the fact that
many more tensions are involved in addressing painful and shameful
events from the past than the ones I mentioned at the very beginning
of this paper:9
1. between memory and amnesia One cannot remember everything,
some events stick to memory, other events are simply forgotten.
This is different, however, with ‘heavy’ events and experiences.
These events and experiences tend to become either an obsession
(something to be remembered all the time, considered more rel-
evant than anything else), or its counterpart, a taboo (something
to be denied, which cannot be remembered because remembering
it involves acknowledging it). And often, one person’s obsession
is another person’s taboo.
2. between identity work and relationship work The past defines one’s
identity to a large extent. This holds true both for individuals and
for communities. Most people, and most communities, tend to
cherish a self-image that is not entirely true, and which is more
positive than the truth would allow. Hence, to admit that one has
made mistakes or, even worse, has committed crimes, is an act
that runs contrary to the tendency to stick to a positive image of
one’s identity. Although true, an admission deteriorates one’s
self-image. But those who suffered from the mistakes or crimes
yearn for the perpetrators’ admission. The tension is the strongest
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when the perpetrators wish to maintain their relationship with
the victims, yet are strongly reluctant to admit guilt.
3. between victimhood and perpetratorhood In a way, it is easier to be a
victim than to be a perpetrator. Being a victim does not burden
one’s conscience, being a perpetrator does. Being a victim entitles
one to receive compensation, being a perpetrator entails having
to pay debts.
4. between choice and inevitability Responsibility is greater, both in the
moral and in the legal sense, when one has acted out of free will.
Actions carried out because one was forced to (by others, by fate)
release the burden of responsibility at least to some extent.
5. between peace and justice Crimes from the past demand, from the
point of view of justice, both excuses and compensation to the
victims. However, that would be too much to ask from perpetra-
tors who are still alive and are still in power. Therefore, in order
to maintain peace, they are often not prosecuted.
6. between past and present Often, there is a great reluctance to go back
to the past altogether: only the present and the future are consid-
ered important. “Life goes on”, “Let the dead bury the dead”, “Let
bygones be bygones”, “What’s done cannot be made undone”.
Commemorative discourse is an inherent attempt to find a way out
of these tensions. Commemorative discourse is representative by its
very nature: it must be uttered by a person in a representative posi-
tion in society (such as a Head of State or Head of Government).
Only incumbents of such a position will be seen and heard to express
the community’s values and identity, or to enter the community’s
external relations on a novel basis (note that the different examples
mentioned above are of this type). This implies that incumbents of
a representative function need to balance the needs from the society
they represent in the way they try to find the way out.
Jenninger chose a one-sided position on the tensions mentioned
above, without paying tribute to the demands from the opposite pole.
Jenninger did the following:
1. he forced a detailed and gruesome memory on his audience (re-
sulting from the leading question “Wissen wir es auch?”; see also
his quotations from murder scenes elsewhere in his speech);
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2. he defined German identity as inextricably linked to the Nazi
past;
3. he chose the perspective of confronting (the descendants of) the
perpetrators by realistically describing the perpetrators’ thoughts
and actions, leaving them no way out, such as considering them-
selves victims of another kind;
4. he described the (German) Nazi actions as planned and deliber-
ate, not as coerced by an alien force.
Therefore, one might say, Jenninger broke silence. But he did not
succeed in making a clean break. Was it his fault, or the fault of his
audience?10
It is possible to look for explanations and evaluations from the point
of view of political science (what were the German political conditions
at that time?) or history (did Jenninger present truthful insights?).
From the point of view of discourse analysis, it is important to look
into three aspects of his speech:
1. the structure of the speech and the way its utterances may or
should be interpreted in view of that structure;
2. the way in which the speaker represents his audience and thus
tries to involve the audience, both in the commemorative activity
and in the commemorated events;
3. the way in which the speech tries to realise the “social practice”
of commemoration and to solve the problems inherent in that
practice; and the way in which these efforts either fit or misfit
the interpretive preferences and expectations among his audience
(or rather: parts of his audience, since the audience is not one
homogeneous entity).
Pertaining to Jenninger’s speech my analysis of these three aspects
is as follows:11
1. The speech is clearly structured, and each step or stage of the
structure may be considered a legitimisation of the next one.
The train of thought developed in Jenninger’s speech may be
paraphrased as consisting of the following steps:
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Ladies and gentlemen,
1. We commemorate here today the ‘Reichskristallnacht’.
2. Hence we, the Germans, in the midst of whom the crimes were committed, have
to understand what happened and to account for it.
3. Therefore, here is a description of the events that happened at that time.
4. These events were possible because the average German mindset at that time was
like this:
5. Hitler was a successful statesman and made Germany prosper, and as for the Jews
it was right that they were curtailed.
6. In view of all this, present day implications are [. . .]
However, the worldwide media’s portrayal of his speech was mostly
as if Jenninger’s speech did not contain the essential fourth step
in the development of the train of thought. As a result, the fifth
step appears as Jenninger’s own point of view. Jenninger’s sixth
step never received any serious attention.
2. In his leading question “do we know it as well?” Jenninger makes
a distinction between perpetrators and victims: he grants that the
victims know everything but wonders whether (the descendants
of) the perpetrators do know it as well (apparently presupposing
that they don’t or don’t want to!). Hence, he speaks both on behalf
of and to (the descendants of) the perpetrators in order to confront
them (“us”!) with their past. Thus, the audience is addressed in
a way they are reluctant to identify with.
3. The “social practice” of commemoration implies that only those
events that we wish or need to remember collectively are commemo-
rated. Commemorating means that we need to find a way to make
manifest what present-day meaning we wish to attribute to the
remembered event (events that no longer bear such meaning are
no longer commemorated). Ideally, we wish that meaning to be
shared by our community (“our own people”) and be acknowl-
edged by the outside world. But here the aforementioned tensions
come into play. In his comparative analysis of two speeches ad-
dressing the German Nazi past, namely Von Weizsäcker on May
8, 1985 and Jenninger in 1988, Kopperschmidt has argued that
Von Weizsäcker chose a perspective that was the optimal possible
consensus within (West-)German relations. As a consequence, Ko-
pperschmidt argues, Von Weizsäcker’s speech contains a standard
of what one can do (in Germany) addressing one’s past. Jenninger
deviated from that standard.12
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In terms of the tensions mentioned above, Von Weizsäcker chose a
position that may be characterised as follows:
1. He acknowledged the duty of remembering without, however,
making the content of the memory fully explicit.
2. He redefined May 8 as a Day of Liberation instead as a day of defeat
to the Germans;
3. He chose the perspective of the victims of the war and their suf-
fering; as for Germany, he acknowledged responsibility but not
guilt;
4. He described Hitler as the ultimate culprit: Germany was ulti-
mately also Hitler’s victim.
Von Weizsäcker broke silence less than Jenninger did. This notwith-
standing (or: therefore!?), he was widely acclaimed.
In comparison to the (German) examples discussed above, I will now
try to show in some examples from the Netherlands the range within
which a successful coping with the past may occur. “Successful” in
this context means either: to express a meaning which has some nov-
elty, yet is readily accepted by the relevant community as a meaning
expressing its accepted identity; or to alter the relationship between
different communities linked by a common history which burdens
their relationship.
I will in particular focus on two speeches delivered by the Dutch Head
of State, Queen Beatrix, a decade ago, in 1994–95:
– Address to the Knesset during the state visit to Israel, March 28,
1995, discussing the four-century-long relationship between the
Dutch and Jews.13
– Dinner speech to the Indonesian Head of State during the state
visit to Indonesia, August 21, 1995, discussing the 400-year-long
relationship between the Netherlands and Indonesia.14
These two speeches were subsequently published (together with two
other speeches, the Christmas radio speech of December 25, 1994,
and the Commemoration of 50 years liberation, May 5, 199515) in one
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small volume: “Voor het behoud van de menselijkheid” (In order to
maintain humaneness). The booklet has a short preface by the then
Dutch Prime Minister:
Now that, this year, we in the Netherlands commemorate half a century of liberation,
and after two meaningful state visits in Israel and Indonesia, it is very valuable to
read, reflect on and retain the speeches by Her Majesty the Queen, as put together
in this edition. W. Kok, Prime Minister
From this preface and from the fact that precisely these speeches were
put together we may infer that the Dutch authorities attach great
interest to the dissemination of these messages in Dutch society.
These speeches show a thematic coherence. The common denomina-
tor of the speeches is the fact that they address questions relating to
Dutch self-evaluation in relation to important and problematic aspects
of Dutch history. In this sense, these four speeches are commemorative
speeches, although only the Commemoration of 50 years of freedom
is a commemorative speech in the proper sense (that is, the occasion
of the speech event is the anniversary of the historical occasion). The
Christmas speech is a moral reflection. The speeches I focus on here
are forms of (international) relationship work (state visit) leading to
questions pertaining to the (shared) past of both communities, the
host and the guest community.
The reason for choosing these speeches from 1994–1995 is the fact
that in these years the Dutch celebrated the 50th anniversary of several
historical events of deep impact. To the Dutch, the German occupation
lasting from May 10, 1940, through May 5, 1945, is an identity-defin-
ing event. The Netherlands was occupied, the Dutch felt suppressed
and victimized. Thus, the regaining of their freedom, independence
and sovereignty was considered so valuable as to define May 5 as a
keystone event. May 5 is Bevrijdingsdag (Liberation Day), apart from
the Queen’s birthday, the only national holiday.
It is even more so than more remote historical events which are
equally of great importance. From 1548 to 1648 the Dutch fought
the “eighty years’ war” against the Spanish, after which the Dutch
republic came into being.16 Although this stage of history is still alive
in the Dutch national anthem (whose text is a revolutionary poem
of that time), there is no national holiday nor is there a regular fes-
tive occasion in commemoration of this event. The same holds true
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for the Napoleonic occupation (1793–1813/181417), or for the Flemish
secession (183018), both of which are of great importance to the state
of the Netherlands, but not of great importance to a generally felt
national identity.
The aforementioned events are related to the foundation of the
state and the gaining of freedom and independence: events associated
with the positive side of one’s identity. Other events in Dutch national
history, however, carry a heavier burden. Before WW II, the Dutch
ruled several colonies: Surinam and the Antilles in Southern America,
and the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). Whereas in 1940
the home country was occupied by the German Army, the Dutch East
Indies were conquered by the Japanese. The Japanese replaced the
Dutch administration and kept most Dutch colonialists imprisoned
in several internment camps. Thus, the Dutch government (which
had fled to London in the UK) neither had executive power over the
Netherlands nor over the East Indies. The home country was liber-
ated in May 1945. Three months later, in August 1945, the Japanese
were defeated in Asia. In the Dutch East Indies, the leader of the
Indonesian Independence Party, Sukarno, used this moment (August
17, 1945) to claim independence and to proclaim the Republic of Indo-
nesia. The Dutch refused to acknowledge Indonesian independence
and used both diplomatic and military means as an attempt to restore
control over the Dutch East Indies. In 1947 and 1948, two short wars
(euphemistically referred to by the Dutch as “politionele acties om de
orde te herstellen” – police actions in order to restore order) were fought
between the Dutch army and the army of the Indonesian Republic. In
fact, the Indonesians fought a guerrilla war from 1945 through 1949.
After more than four years of diplomatic and military struggle, the
Dutch gave in and acknowledged Indonesian independence, transfer-
ring sovereignty on December 27, 1949.
To the Dutch, this part of their history is rather painful. I spell out
this painfulness in the following five remarks:
1. To the Dutch in general, the liberation from the German oc-
cupation counts much more than the liberation from Japanese
occupation. Thus, May 5 is a national holiday; August 17 is a day
on which flagging is allowed. Dutchmen who returned to the
homeland after Indonesian Independence feel discriminated in
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comparison to Dutchmen who suffered from the German occupa-
tion. There have even been debates as to the competitive question
who suffered the most: those who were imprisoned in the German
camps or those in the Japanese camps.
2. The Dutch East Indies were (and present-day Indonesia is) a
multicultural and multi-ethnic archipelago. Between various
groups from different islands exist tensions. During the proc-
ess of decolonization, some groups cooperated with the Dutch
(hence collaborated from the Indonesian point of view). After the
finalization of Independence, these groups (especially Moluc-
cans who fought as soldiers in the Royal Dutch Indian Army) left
Indonesia and moved to the Netherlands where they went on to
live in the hope and expectation of one day being able to return
to their home country, the Molucs. The second generation of the
Moluccans in the Netherlands were tired of waiting and tried to
force the Dutch government by using violence (train hijackings
in 1975 and 1976) to take them back to their home country, which
was of course an impossible demand.
3. In the period of 1945–1949 there were political tensions in the
Netherlands concerning the demand for Indonesian independ-
ence. More than half of the Dutch population was in favor of try-
ing to keep Indonesia under Dutch rule, whereas a large minority
was against it. Roughly speaking, the political right was in favor of
the maintenance of the colony; the left was in favor of releasing
it. This division was never really bridged, as becomes manifest in
several debates. The first debate took place after the publication of
the “Excessennota” (Note on the excesses19) in 1969. Historical research
showed that part of the Dutch military committed atrocities and
war crimes in several parts of the East Indies. The debate about
the Note made the latent division within Dutch society manifest:
one prevalent, mainly leftist, point of view was that colonialism
in general and crimes committed by Dutchmen in particular
were unjustified and are to be condemned. Veterans of the Royal
Dutch Indian Army felt especially betrayed by the leftist view: they
served their country loyally and the view that their actions were
illegitimate was felt as a stab in their backs. Opposed to this view
was the mainly rightist judgment that the Dutch decisions in the
years 1945–1949 were justified and legitimate.
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4. Subsequent debates did not fundamentally change this picture.
In 1993 and 1994, for example, two parliamentary debates took
place about the request for a visa to visit the Netherlands. This
request was made twice by Jan Poncke Princen, a former soldier
of the Royal Dutch Indian Army, who defected in 1948 to the
Indonesian side. Princen embodies the irreconcilable conflict.
To some, he is a traitor deserving capital punishment. His return
to the homeland is unthinkable. To others, he made a difficult
but right decision, choosing the right side, and even continuing
to do so, since he became a human rights activist in Indonesia.
The points of view in both parliamentary debates proved to be
irreconcilable.20 After long and heated debates, the Dutch parlia-
ment chose both times against the granting of a visa to Princen,
so as not to hurt the feelings of “many thousands of veterans of
the Dutch Indian Army”. After his first request (in 1993), Prin-
cen was refused a visa. Despite the position taken by the Dutch
parliament, Princen was granted a visa after the second request (in
1994), so as to enable him to visit his family for a few days during
Christmas. He had to be guarded by the police, and was not granted
the opportunity to speak to the press. Princen’s visit caused the
president of the Dutch Parliament to argue in favor of a “national
debate” on “the way in which the Netherlands treated Indonesia’s
pursuit of independence during the forties”. Some commentators
say that the Netherlands’ struggle pertaining to Indonesia with an
unbewältigte Vergangenheit (unresolved past).21
5. The Dutch prefer historical analysis to drawing political or legal
consequences from that analysis. The “Note on the excesses” was
written by historians who were praised and thanked for their
meticulous work. None of the military involved in the excesses,
however, was ever brought to justice. Neither was the question as
to the political responsibility for the excesses really answered. The
reluctance still prevails.
I will now turn to the speeches by the Dutch Queen.
The speeches have different audiences. The first speech is addressed
to the Israeli parliament, whereas the second one is addressed to the
Indonesian President. Queen Beatrix speaks as the head of state of the
Netherlands, hence as its highest representative. The speeches may be
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characterized as representative speeches: the Queen’s voice is the voice of
the nation, so to speak. Due to the constitutional position of the Dutch
“King” (the constitutional term), her speeches are subject to the Dutch
government’s approval (and even responsibility!). Because of this, she is
not likely to take extreme positions or to address over-sensitive issues in
her speeches (which would make them more newsworthy). On the other
hand, precisely the fact that she is the Head of State warrants media
attention, at least in the Netherlands. Although the Dutch people are
not addressed but represented in these speeches, they may be considered
to be indirectly (and “unratified”) addressed, since the Dutch must
know how they are represented (hence the publication in the booklet
and a direct television broadcast to the home audience).
In order to carry out a discourse analysis of both speeches, it is nec-
essary to look at the communicative problems that need to be solved.
These problems exist on two levels: 1. concerning the relationship
between the Netherlands and the hosting nation; 2. concerning the
way the Netherlands has to be represented. These problems are in
part recognizable in the text of the speeches: if a certain problem
is addressed in the text it is therefore a problem in the relationship
between both countries or communities. But the text itself is not suf-
ficient. Problems may be avoided or kept silent about. It is necessary
to control what problems are actual, for example by looking at par-
liamentary or media debates, or in intellectual debates of historians
and political scientists.
The relationship between the Dutch and the Israelians counts as
friendly. The Netherlands enjoy a positive image in Israel. The speech
is undoubtedly meant to contribute to the positive relationship. Israel,
however, has serious and long-lasting problems, both with its neigh-
bouring countries and with its Palestinian population. The Dutch
officially endorse Israeli policies, but are at the same time critical of
their position concerning Palestine. In the months preceding the
Queen’s state visit, a group of former Dutch Jews who had emigrated
from the Netherlands into Israel started a campaign in order to draw
attention to the fact that, compared to other West European countries,
the smallest proportion of the Jewish population that survived the
war were in the Netherlands.
The relationship between the Netherlands and Indonesia is far more
delicate. This is shown in the fact that it was quite difficult to agree
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on a date for the state visit itself. Because the Indonesians proclaimed
independence on August 17, 1945, the Indonesian national holiday
is on August 17 (similar to May 5 in the Netherlands). In 1995 that
date thus is the 50th anniversary of the Indonesian proclamation.
As early as April 1994, however, the Dutch parliament debated the
issue of the desirable and acceptable date for the planned state visit.
Participation by the Queen in the festive events of August 17, 1995,
could in retrospect be regarded as some form of acknowledgement
of the Indonesian proclamation. By implication, it would render the
activities of the former Dutch East Indian Army illegitimate. The
majority of the parliament was opposed to the Queen’s visit precisely
on that date. A few months later, in January 1995, the Dutch gov-
ernment announced that the beginning of the state visit had been
established for August 21. In a letter to the Parliament the govern-
ment added that the choice for this date did not imply a denial of
the Indonesian proclamation of independence. – Apart from these
Dutch sensitivities, there is the problem of the violation of human
rights in Indonesia itself.
How did the Queen address these problems in both speeches? And how did she
establish a relation with her audience and represent the Dutch on that basis?
There are several features of discourse (or text) indicative of what one
represents. I will focus on one specific feature: the use of first person
pronouns. The Queen seldom uses these pronouns in the singular
form. Whenever she does so, she speaks about herself as a concrete
person visiting this or that place here and now, such as in the first and
final utterances of her Indonesia-address (“It is a great pleasure for
my husband, our son and myself to be your guests here today” and “I
would like to invite you all to raise your glass . . .”), and also one time
in the Israel-address (“This realization makes our presence in your
midst today a special experience. For this my husband and I thank
you sincerely”). The use of the plural forms (“we/us/our”) exhibits a
far larger frequency, and offers more possibilities. These pronouns,
uttered by the Queen, may refer to:
– “me and my family”, for example “For this my husband and I thank
you sincerely. We believe that this solemn reception in the Knesset
is renewed evidence of the special relationship. . .”
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– “the represented nation, we Dutchmen”, for example “We then
spoke of your country as the Dutch East Indies. . .”
– “the communicative partners, you and I here present”, for exam-
ple “The very name of your parliament, Knesset, takes us back to
a distant past.”
– “both in the host and the guest represented nations”, for example
“to raise your glass and drink to your health, Mr President and
Mrs. Suharto, to the continuing friendship between our countries
and our peoples.”
– “we humans in general”, for example “It is a characteristic of our
modern society that we know more and more about what happens
in other countries, are also increasingly interested in them, and
mutually form opinions about what we learn.”
Queen Beatrix began her address to the Knesset as follows [the Queen
addressed both the Knesset and the Indonesian President in English,
so the following quotations are original]:
Mr. Speaker, Members of the Knesset,
The very name of your parliament, Knesset, takes us back to a distant past. As early
as three thousand years ago your forefathers congregated in national assemblies.
Though Israel may be relatively young as a state, the Jewish people can look back on
a very old history. The traces of those early times are present here in many places
and in many forms. Travelling through these biblical lands is therefore like travelling
through time. Jerusalem and Jericho, the river Jordan – these old names are in the
news even today, but also revive for everyone memories of that long and rich past.
These places and the many memories that are associated with them are of particular
significance not only for the Jewish people but also for the Dutch.
Formally addressing the (Speaker and members of the) Knesset,
Beatrix immediately takes the communicative situation (“takes us
back”) as a starting point to link her audience to their historical roots,
thus broadening her state visit from the state of Israel to the Jewish
people. On that basis she describes subsequently the development
between the Jews and the Dutch. She presupposes a common ground
to start from.
The Indonesian address began as follows:
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Mr President,
It is a great pleasure for my husband, our son and myself to be your guests here today.
We are glad to be able to pay an extensive visit at this time to the country that holds
such a special place in the hearts of many Dutchmen. It is already twenty-four years
since my parents preceded us by paying the first Dutch State visit to Indonesia. They
retain fond memories of that occasion. The fact that we have come to Indonesia a
few days after the seventeenth of August, the day on which your country declared its
independence fifty years ago, gives this State visit a special dimension indeed.
The beginning of this address seems much more personal, since the
Queen speaks about herself and her family. There is, however, less
common ground, there is no “us” including both host and guest.
The host is referred to rather formally (“the first Dutch State visit
to Indonesia” instead of “our first visit to your country”). The final
sentence of this quotation seems to express mutual rapport, but the
“special dimension” is rather painful if one realises that the Dutch
refused to (or did not dare to) accept the invitation to be present on
the anniversary itself.
This general picture is reinforced when we look at the use of personal
pronouns in the full text of both addresses.
Reference Israel Indonesia
1. own family 6 4
2. the represented nation 17 6
3. the communicative situation 1 -
4. both represented nations 2 13
5. humanity 4 3
total 30 26
Table 1: Frequency pronouns 1st person plural (“we/us/our”)
The total frequency is hardly different. There is a clear difference, how-
ever, in the frequency of the single categories: category 2 is frequent in
the Israel-address, category 4 in the Indonesia-address. Thus it seems
as if the Queen speaks from a Dutch perspective in Israel and from a
shared mutual perspective in Indonesia. But this picture is misleading.
The low frequency of category 2 in the Indonesia address is the result
of a stylistic choice. In most cases where the Queen refers to the Neth-
erlands or the Dutch perspective, formulations such as “our country”,
“our ancestors”, “our Golden Age”, “our capital”, and “our country’s
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Jewish population” are chosen in the Israel speech. By contrast, in the
Indonesia speech noun phrases are used: “the first Dutchmen”, “in
the Netherlands’s national history”, “considered from the Dutch point
of view”, and even “the Europeans” in cases where only “Dutchmen”
may be meant. Instead of these noun phrases, Beatrix could have used
pronominal formulations (“in our national history”, “considered from
our point of view”, et cetera). In the Indonesia address the Netherlands
and the Dutch perspective are thus no less present, but are presented
in a more formal and detached manner.
The higher frequency of category 4 in the Indonesia address is
due to another cause. In this speech the Queen addresses repeatedly
the shared past between the Netherlands and Indonesia and their
present-day relation. In these cases the Queen uses forms of “we/us”,
as in these fragments:
– The separation of our two countries thus became a lengthy process,
costing much pain and bitter conflict.
– When in nineteen forty-nine the separation of our two countries
was formally sealed, Queen Juliana said, “No longer do we stand
partially opposed to each other”.
– [. . .] to continue our efforts to maintain and improve the good – and
special – relations that now exist between our two countries.
Ironically, the Queen uses more pronouns expressing communality,
when there is less in common.
In contrast, in the Israel speech the Queen presupposes having much
in common, but the communality pertains more to the Netherlands
and the Jews, than to the state of Israel. The formal audience – the
Knesset – is addressed partly as the formal representatives of the host-
ing state, but even more often as the symbolic or moral representative
of the Jews in general. The discrepancy between formal and symbolic
representation of the audience prevents the Queen from using the
pronouns “we/us” in the intended meaning.
In both speeches, the Queen chooses a historical approach. In the
Israel address, the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule in the sixteenth
and seventeenth century is described as modelled on Jewish his-
tory. The Queen then focuses on the historical development of the
relationship between the Dutch and Jews since the seventeenth cen-
tury, when many Spanish and Portuguese Jews immigrated into the
Netherlands, escaping the Inquisition. The relation is considered as
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mutually beneficiary. In this context, the Queen makes the following
central remarks about the Dutch failure to rescue Dutch Jews during
the Second World War:
Most of our Dutch Jews were carried off to concentration camps where they would
eventually meet their death. We know that many of our fellow countrymen put up
courageous – and sometimes successful – resistance, and often, exposing themselves
to mortal danger, stood by their threatened fellow men. [. . .] But we also know that
they were the exceptional ones and that the people of the Netherlands could not
prevent the destruction of their Jewish fellow citizens. Fifty years after the end of
the war we cannot joyfully commemorate the restoration of our freedom without
at the same time asking ourselves in bewilderment and dismay how this could have
happened.
After thus having conceded failure by the Dutch, the Queen addresses
current issues, especially tensions in the Middle East. Here, she turns
the tables: the West European reconciliation after WW II is presented
as an example to the combatants.
When we look in turn at the Indonesian speech we see that the Queen
again offers a historical approach in which the development of the
relationship between the Netherlands and Indonesia is discussed.
Four hundred years ago four small Dutch ships left the roadstead of Texel to set
sail for the East Indies. More than a year later they arrived at Bantam. The crews
of those ships were not the first Europeans to visit this land, but they were the first
Dutchmen. The purpose of their expedition was to break the trade monopoly of
the Portuguese and win a share of the already flourishing and profitable trade in
oriental spices. That impressive voyage under the command of Cornelis de Houtman
is an important event in the Netherlands’ national history.
(Note the remarkable final utterance in this quotation: is the event
not important in Indonesia’s history, and to whom is it impressive
to?) Since Indonesia is a former Dutch colony, the Queen also has to
address the separation between both countries in a rather difficult
process of decolonisation, as described above. The Queen mentions
the Dutch reluctance to accept Indonesia’s claim for independence
in 1945. The Queen expresses then as central remarks “our sorrow”
about the pain that this process cost to many:
The Netherlands was not at first prepared to accept the Indonesian pursuit of com-
plete and immediate independence. The separation of our two countries thus became
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a lengthy process, costing much pain and bitter conflict. When we look back on that
time, which now lies almost fifty years behind us, it deeply saddens us that so many
died in that struggle or have had to bear its scars for the rest of their lives.
It is significant that Queen Beatrix reached rather different effects
with the speeches during her state visits to Israel and Indonesia,
respectively. In the Knesset, she was applauded; the Israeli press
described her speech and her visit as successful and the mutual rela-
tions as enhanced. In the Netherlands, her words about the fate of
the Jewish population provoked reflection and thoughtfulness, as
exemplified in several media discussions.
In Indonesia, her address and visit were coolly received. The In-
donesian government’s speaker answered to Dutch journalists after
the Queen’s speech that in Indonesia it is considered polite not to
put pressure on one’s guests, and thus not to ask for excuses and not
to be annoyed when guests choose not to make excuses. Two weeks
later, the Indonesian Minister of Commerce, addressing Dutch busi-
nessmen, hinted ironically at the Queen’s words when he remarked
that the fact that he came to the Netherlands the same year in which
the Dutch Queen visited Indonesia was a sign of the special relationship
between both countries.
In the comparison of the two central remarks quoted above from both
speeches two points must be noticed:
1. In the speech to the Knesset Dutch failure is admitted in a rather
straightforward way.
2. In the speech to the Knesset Beatrix draws a division in the popu-
lation she represents: “. . . they were the exceptional ones and . . .
the people of the Netherlands could not prevent the destruction
of their Jewish fellow citizens.” The majority of the represented
people are criticised, only a small minority acted in a just and
respectable way.
Precisely these two points are omitted in the Indonesian speech: there
is no admission of Dutch failure, and there is no trace of internal
division. One possible explanation is to suppose that the Queen did
not make similar statements because she (or rather: the Dutch govern-
ment) was convinced of the moral and historical correctness of what
she expressed. Another (arguably more plausible) explanation is to
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suppose that she refrained from making similar statements because of
her position as a representative speaker.22 Representative speakers want
to express a sense of unity within the population they represent, in
order to represent at all. If there is no such sense of unity, then at
least the speaker has to ask whether s/he is able to express a position
that is minimally acceptable.
Exactly this difference accounts for the Queen’s difference of expres-
sion. What the Queen does in the Israel speech fits in the other speeches
from the booklet in which they were published. I quote a small fragment
from both speeches in order to illustrate their similar tenor:
The sharp picture of right and wrong – which now so often determines our judgment
about the war – is based on hindsight. Then everything was less clear. Resistance was
not general: most of the people chose to go on living as normally as possible in order
to survive. Their eyes looked sometimes in another direction when in clear daylight
dark events happened. [Christmas radio speech; Dutch original, my translation – TE]
The war meant unimaginable sorrow; a world of fear and pain, of cold, hunger and
starvation. People were facing far reaching choices and questions of life and death.
It should not be forgotten how weak the heart can be in such distress. The memo-
ries of those days are after half a century sometimes too much black and white. In
order to create a right picture one should not conceal that next to courageous acting,
passivity and active support of the oppressor occurred. [Commemoration 50 year
Liberation; Dutch original, my translation – TE]
In these fragments the Queens attempts an intervention in Dutch
public discourse according to which the Dutch acted as a brave and
resistant people against the German oppressor.23 One might say that
this is the prevailing collective narrative24 of the Dutch concerning the
past of 1940–45. This general picture is too favourable. Hence, the
Queen’s intervention aims at counterbalancing Dutch smugness and
conceit, by offering more nuanced descriptions and – in the case of
the speech to the Knesset – by acknowledging responsibility. Beatrix
could intervene this way, because in the Netherlands there exists no
generally defended national self-picture: there are no lobby or pressure
groups identifying with a specific position. The Israel speech had the
effect of provoking a discussion in which the admission of the rather
negative side of one’s self-image was readily accepted.
On the other hand, there are outspoken opinions within Dutch
society (and related lobby or pressure groups) about Dutch colonial
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history. One point of view is that of the old colonists and members
of the Dutch colonial army who fought for their country. This point
of view is in general backed by the politically conservative part of
the population. The other point of view, expressed by more leftist
or liberal writers and politicians, is that of anti-colonialism. Both
points of view are mutually exclusive. There is no open and ongo-
ing debate within Dutch society about these perspectives. Whenever
there is a debate, it is a fierce and irreconcilable one, as shown in
the debates about Poncke Princen’s visa requests described above.
Once in a while, when there is an occasion, both parties expose their
respective points of view, without really debating. Within this context,
the Queen chose a feasible expression, but did not really manage to
satisfy any part of society. She did not take sides. Moreover, she did
not alter the existing relationship between the Dutch and Indonesia
in a favorable way.
In the first part of this paper some examples were discussed of Ger-
man representative politicians addressing the German past. Some
representatives succeeded (Brandt, Kohl & Mitterand, von Weizsäcker,
Herzog); some failed (Kohl & Reagan, Jenninger). Is there a com-
mon denominator to these examples? Von Weizäcker succeeded in
finding an acceptable and innovative perspective (the Germans were
liberated on May 8, 1945), yet avoiding its implication that the Germans
were not responsible for the Nazi regime. Brandt’s gesture was well
received by Polish victims, and although Germans initially criticized
him for conceding too much, the appreciation for his gesture grew in
the aftermath. In these and similar cases the representative made an
innovative step in which a step toward the (former) victim is combined
with at least some concession regarding the extent of perpetratorhood
of one’s own identity. The failure of Kohl and Reagan at Bitburg
should be explained on the same basis: their joint visit was meant as
a reconciliatory step, but this step was (rightly) considered a recon-
ciliation with the wrong party.25 Jenninger’s failure is different: he
made an innovative step which was too wide for his audience to accept
at once. He expressed German perpetratorhood more explicitly and
with less restraint than any other German representative politician
before or after him had. Furthermore, his step seemed (at least at first
sight) to be more concerned with perpetratorhood than with seeking
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an advance to the victims. His audience chose to misunderstand his
address in a direction opposite to its intention.
The burden of the Dutch past is undoubtedly less heavy than the
German past. But a burden remains a burden until one is relieved.
Queen Beatrix conceded in Israel something her own society was not
eager to admit. Her address is thus similar to the examples discussed
above in the sense that she made an innovative step conceding respon-
sibility of one’s own community. On the other hand, that step was
not very contentious, so it was readily accepted within Dutch society.
In Indonesia, the Queen chose to keep to middle ground. Sadness is
expressed about what has happened, but the question who is to what
extent responsible for what happened is not addressed. Hence, the
community she represents is not forced to change their self-image,
neither their own conscience nor their relation with the other party are
changed for the better: they fossilize and rigidify. It takes always some
courage on the part of the representative to be innovative and change
both the self-image in conformity with the difficult truth and the
relationship with the former enemy or victim toward reconciliation.
Notes
1 Cf. WERTSCH 2002.
2 Cf. KRZEMIŃSKI 2000; ENSINK and SAUER 2003b: 86–89; GIESEN 2004:
132–135.
3 1997: p. 354.
4 ENSINK and SAUER 2003a.
5 ENSINK and SAUER 2003b: p. 63.
6 ENSINK and SAUER 2003b: p. 72–86.
7 LASCHET and MALANGRÉ 1989.
8 ENSINK 1992.
9 See also ENSINK and SAUER 2003a: pp. 1–6.
10 Cf. BURUMA 1994: p. 261.
11 ENSINK 1992.
12 KOPPERSCHMIDT 1989; HERF 1997: pp. 354–359 argues along similar lines.
13 See ENSINK 1996, also containing the full text, and SAUER 1996.
14 See ENSINK 1999, also containing the full text.
15 See SAUER 1999.
16 PARKER 1977.
17 See KOSSMAN 1978: pp. 65 ff.
18 KOSSMAN 1978: 151 ff.
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19 BANK 1995.
20 ENSINK and SAUER 2000.
21 See for example VAN LIEMPT 1994: p. 11.
22 See ENSINK 1996.
23 Cf. also SAUER 1996.
24 WERTSCH 2002.
25 Cf. HERF 1997.
Bibliography
A. ASSMANN, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur
und Geschichtspolitik. München: Beck, 2006.
T.Th.M. BANK, De excessennota. Nota betreffende het archiefonderzoek
naar de gegevens omtrent excessen in Indonesië begaan door Nederlandse
militairen in de periode 1945–1950, Den Haag: SDU, ²1995.
I. BURUMA, The wages of guilt. Memories of war in Germany and Japan,
London: Jonathan Cape, 1994.
T. ENSINK, Jenninger. De ontvangst van een Duitse rede in Nederland.
Een tekstwetenschappelijke en communicatie-wetenschappelijke analyse.
Amsterdam: Thesis, 1992.
T. ENSINK, The footing of a royal address: An analysis of representativeness
in political speech, exemplified in Queen Beatrix’ Address to the Knesset
on March 28, 1995, in Current issues in language and society 3 (3),
1996, pp. 205–232.
T. ENSINK, Epideiktik mit fehlendem Konsens. Die Tischrede der nieder-
ländischen Königin Beatrix beim Staatsbesuch in Indonesien im August
1995, in J. KOPPERSCHMIDT and H. SCHANZE (eds.), Fest und
Festrhetorik, München: Fink, 1999, pp. 75–101.
T. ENSINK and C. SAUER, Die Mühen der Ebene und die unbewältigte
Kolonialzeit. Ganz gewöhnlicher Parlamentarismus in Den Haag, in
Armin BURKHARDT and Kornelia PAPE (eds.), Sprache des
deutschen Parlamentarismus. Studien zu 150 Jahren parlamentar-
ischer Kommunikation, Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000,
pp. 357–387.
T. ENSINK and C. SAUER (eds.), The Art of Commemoration. Fifty Years
after the Warsaw Uprising. Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and
Culture (DAPSAC 7), Amsterdam–Philadelphia: John Benjamins,
2003a.
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T. ENSINK and C. SAUER [2003b], The search for acceptable perspectives.
German President Roman Herzog commemorates the Warsaw Uprising,
in ENSINK and SAUER 2003a, pp. 57–94.
B. GIESEN, Triumph and trauma. Boulder & London: Paradigm,
2004.
J. HERF, Divided memory. The Nazi past in the two Germanys. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.
J. KOPPERSCHMIDT, Öffentliche Rede in Deutschland, in Muttersprache
99, 1989, pp. 213–230
E.H. KOSSMAN, The low countries 1780–1940 Oxford: Clarendon,
1978.
A. KRZEMIŃSKI, 2000, Der Kniefall. Warschau als Erinnerungsort
deutsch-polnischer Geschichte, in Merkur 619, 2000, pp. 1077–1088.
A. LASCHET and H. MALANGRÉ, Philipp Jenninger: Rede und Reak-
tion, Aachen–Koblenz: Einhard & Rheinischer Merkur, 1989.
G. PARKER, The Dutch Revolt, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
C. SAUER, Echoes from abroad – Speeches for the domestic audience: Queen
Beatrix’ Address to the Israeli Parliament, in Current issues in language
and society 3 (3), 1996, pp. 233–267.
C. SAUER, Lobrede auf die befreiten Niederlande. Königin Beatrix am 5.
Mai 1995 im “Ridderzaal” in Den Haag, in J. KOPPERSCHMIDT
and H. SCHANZE (eds.), Fest und Festrede, München: Fink, 1999,
pp. 313–343.
A. VAN LIEMPT, Een mooi woord voor oorlog. Ruzie, roddel en achterdocht
op weg naar de Indonesië-oorlog, Den Haag: SDU, 1994.
J.V. WERTSCH, Voices of collective remembering, Cambridge: C.U.P.,
2002.
R. WODAK, P. NOWAK, J. PELIKAN, H. GRUBER, R. DE CILLIA
and R. MITTEN, “Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter!” Diskurshistor-
ische Studien zum Nachkriegsantisemitismus, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
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Vergangenheiten. Öffentliches Gedenken in österreichischen und deutschen
Medien, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994.
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Justice and Memory.indb 194 02.11.2009 13:39:26
Restitution: Yes, but . . .1
Rudolf de Cillia and Ruth Wodak
As part of two research projects on the discursive construction of
national identity,2 we analysed two large corpora centred on the com-
memorative years 1995 and 2005. These data sets comprised both
public discourse (political speeches, media texts, TV debates) and
semi-public discourse (focus groups, interviews). One of the many
aspects that we investigated was how the diverse speakers discursively
constructed their shared history. Among the issues that arose in this
respect was whether and to what extent, 50 or 60 years respectively
after the end of the Second World War, the Austrian State is (still)
responsible for the restitution of stolen property and for “compen-
sating”3 victims of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime. This
question was rarely addressed by the politicians in our data, and
was only discussed in the focus groups after being introduced by
the moderator. Nevertheless, seen against the historical context, we
felt this question was extremely important, especially because some
politicians did attempt to use the debate on “Aryanised” property
and possible restitution for different political ends, and in differ-
ent ways. For example, during the Viennese city council elections in
2001, the Freedom Party (FPÖ) and the then Carinthian Governor
Jörg Haider launched numerous attacks against the President of the
Jewish Community in Vienna, Ariel Muzikant. He used these to draw
parallels between the “Aryanisation” of Jewish property in Austria
with the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia
after the Second World War. Haider tried, by means of ad hominem
arguments, to criminalise Muzikant and thereby to put restitution
in general in a bad light.4
The views on the restitution of stolen Jewish property are thus
accompanied by a number of contradictions: insights into past in-
justices are limited by means of decontextualised and inappropriate
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Justice and Memory.indb 195 02.11.2009 13:39:26
comparisons and equations; every step in the “right” direction (that is
towards “compensating” for the harm done) is in a way “matched” by
increases in contributions (pensions, et cetera) for Wehrmacht soldiers
or their families, so that “all sides” are treated “fairly”; and attempts
to foster a positive image abroad are undermined by explicitly anti-
Semitic statements. The overarching leitmotif remains unchanged,
namely that all Austrians were victims. However, victims of which
perpetrators, when, where, and why, are distinctions that are made
far too seldom5 and lead to the overarching questions addressed in
this volume; that is how to cope with traumatic pasts – and more
specifically, how Austrians and the Austrian elites have confronted
war crimes of Austrians in World War II, the collaboration with Nazi
perpetrators, issues such as participation in war crimes, or – in general
– the tabooing of past – sensitive – events. In this way, our focus on
the discussion of “restitution” serves as a “symptom” of the much
more general patterns which can be found in the Austrian society
since 1945 (see also chapters by Anton Pelinka, Walter Manoschek,
and Martin Reisigl, in this volume).
Parliamentary debates on the “National Fund for Victims of National Social-
ism”
One opportunity for politicians to utter their views on this topic was
the 1995 parliamentary debate on the institution of the “National
Fund for Victims of National Socialism”. This fund was intended to
finance “services for people who were persecuted by the Nazi regime
for political reasons, due to their ethnicity, religion, nationality or
sexual orientation, on health grounds or because they were accused
of being so-called antisocials”.6 The leader of the parliamentary So-
cial Democratic Party (SPÖ) described the attempts to “compensate”
the victims as “a gesture [. . .] tied to concrete help [. . .] for those
who really need it [. . .], in other words for those, who are in need
of actual support.”7 The Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) parliamen-
tary leader in turn included outstanding pension payments in the
“compensation”.8
In the National Council meeting of June 1st, 1995, the FPÖ member
of parliament Harald Ofner demanded that not only the “millions
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of direct victims [. . .], in particular our Jewish fellow citizens in
Austria” should be “compensated”. Rather, he wished to extend the
right to restitution to what he called “millions of indirect victims
[. . .], in particular the past Austrians [Altösterreicher] in the former
dominions of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy”.9 He justified this by
saying that “it must, from the point of view of those affected, always
be the case that a victim will always be a victim, regardless of who,
when and where perpetrated evil against the people in question”.10
The FPÖ group also suggested an amendment along these lines, and
party chairman Jörg Haider demanded in his address to the National
Council “that all those of good intent should reach out their hands
to each other – over all the trenches and beyond all the graves”.11
By equating the unequatable, these argumentation patterns create
parallels between completely different groups, which consolidate
into a single victims’ collective, a huge community of victims. In the
2005 political speeches, only the “needy” should be “compensated”.
According to Ruth Beckermann, “having been a victim at the time
is not enough.” Rather, “those who could rebuild their lives after
surviving [. . .] are stripped of their victim status, because they cor-
respond more to the envied, hated image of the industrious Jew than
to what is apparently the only acceptable image of Jews: as the eternal
victims.”12
“Restitution” in political speeches from 1995
In the political speeches accompanying the commemorative events
of 1995 and 1996, Nazi crimes and the question of “making up” are
rarely mentioned before Austrian publics. However, President Klestil
did express his regret in a speech to the Knesset in 1994 “that some
of the worst followers of the Nazi dictatorship were Austrians”. He
also commented on the Austrian “compensation policy”:
We know that for a long time we did not do enough, and also not the right thing,
to improve the lot of the survivors of the Jewish tragedy and the descendants of the
victims. And that we have for too long avoided acknowledging those Jewish Austrians,
who at that time had to leave the country, demeaned and embittered.
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Apart from speeches before an international audience, and in the
commemorative address to the National Assembly on April 27th,
1995, the topic is not mentioned in the numerous speeches of the
then president. In the commemorative address, Klestil thematises
Austrian guilt during the Nazi regime, and points out that Austria
has only belatedly started dealing with several questions: why Na-
tional Socialism was given so much support even “among us”; why
200,000 Jewish fellow citizens were persecuted and driven away, and
why 65,000 were killed; why many Roma and Sinti faced the same
fate; why there was no military and only limited political resistance;
and why tens of thousands of Austrians could disappear without a
trace in prisons and concentration camps, out of which so many did
not return. However, the mitigating formulations, in particular the
“absence of the perpetrators” in all the statements, border on trivi-
alisation of the topic.
In contrast, Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky’s statements on the
topic mark a clear change in the issue of to what extent Austrians were
active participants in the crimes of National Socialism. He explicitly
addressed the question of responsibility for the crimes not only in
the commemorative address to the Federal Assembly on April 27th,
1995, but also in his speech in the Mauthausen concentration camp.
This followed from his earlier speech at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem on June 9th, 1993, where he was being awarded an honor-
ary doctorate, and in his declaration to the National Council on July
8th, 1991, in Vienna:
Much has happened in the past years to, as far as is possible, compensate [sic] for
the damage that has been done, to ameliorate the suffering that has been caused.
There is still much to be done, and the Federal Government will continue to do eve-
rything in its power to help those who have not, or not sufficiently, been addressed
by the previous measures, or whose moral or material requirements have thus far
not been considered.
In general, however, when the commemorative speeches of 1995
and 1996 thematise restitution in the Second Republic, the speak-
ers sometimes gloss over past failures and use the topic for positive
self-presentation, or attempt to justify past inaction or the lack of
progress to date.13
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2001: Restitution – for what?
As mentioned above, the FPÖ instrumentalised the issue of restitu-
tion in the Viennese city council elections in 2001. The following
quotations illustrate the FPÖ politician Jörg Haider’s attempts to
put restitution in a bad light by criminalising Ariel Muzikant, the
President of the Jewish Community in Vienna.14 They are given in
chronological order from January 21st to March 22nd, 2001:
Report about the FPÖ party meeting on January 21st, 2001 in the
newspaper Der Standard:
„We have other problems than always having to negotiate how we must compensate,”
Haider said, “it has to end sometime.”
Mr Muzikant will only be satisfied when he has been repaid the 600 million Schilling
debt that he incurred in Vienna.
Haider on February 21st, 2001, at the launch of the election campaign
in Oberlaa:
[The Mayor of Vienna Michael] Häupl has an election strategist called Greenberg
[loud laughter]. He had him flown in from the East Coast! Dear friends, you have
a choice between spin doctor Greenberg from the East Coast, or the Wienerherz
[‘Viennese heart/soul’].
We don’t need calls from the East Coast. That’s just about enough. It’s about another
part of history now, about compensation for those expelled from their homes [die
Heimatvertriebenen].
Haider on February 28th, 2001, during the so-called Ash Wednesday
speech:
That Mr Muzikant: I can’t understand how someone called Ariel15 can have so much
dirt stuck to him [so viel Dreck am Steckn haben kann] . . . I don’t understand it, but I
think . . . he will say something about that tomorrow, won’t he . . . but I’m not very
worried, on these questions...
Interview with Haider in the weekly magazine News on March 14th,
2001:
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I commented on his [Muzikant’s] role vis-à-vis Austria during the EU sanctions. I
reserve the right to make further comments.
Added to that, he has certainly taken advantage of his political connections to sort
out his business affairs.
And what’s more, that he has around 600 million Schillings debt with the Jewish
Community, and has stabbed Austria and Washington in the back.
I don’t really see why the taxpayer should pay just a single Schilling for Mr Muz-
ikant’s sloppy accounting.
Interview on ZIB 2 (a daily news and current affairs TV programme)
on March 16th, 2001:
IT: Now, you are talking about a necessary discussion that has to be held. In your
commentary for tomorrow’s daily Die Presse you wrote that it was a joke that you
made about Dr Muzikant, on the occasion of the speech at Ried im Innkreis. So
what exactly did you mean by that?
JH: It was a humorous play on words – and I think that is totally acceptable in poli-
tics. But the deeper issue should not be kept secret, and that is simply the criticism
of Mr Muzikant, who in a difficult phase for this republic has not shown himself to
be a good Austrian, but rather in newspaper interviews and in press conferences,
in TV statements, but also in reports to the Jewish World Congress, has pretended
that Jewish fellow citizens in Austrian were endangered, and it has gone so far that
they have to leave the country. And that I find rather strange from someone who,
of whom we know that he moved here and for whom Austria has become an open
and peaceful home. And that he then makes such unjustified and unfair statements
about this country.
IT: What you describe as a humorous play on words, others describe as a clearly
anti-Semitic statement – and it’s not the first time that you so to speak have drawn
on the subcutaneous effect of your personal approach to Jewish names. Do you do
this deliberately to present this, this contrast, so the East Coast and the Wienerherz
[“Viennese heart/soul”]. Is that – do you do these things deliberately?
JH: Yes, but it has – it cannot really be forbidden to use a geographically precise
term. You know that.
IT: Yes, but Dr Haider, you know what you transmit along with this message.
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In the remainder of this section, we describe various anti-Semitic
stereotypes used by politicians that call into question the restitution
of stolen Jewish property. This process started with the party meet-
ing on January 22nd, 2001. In the statements made on this occasion,
Muzikant is accused of accumulating debts, and of using the “com-
pensation” to serve his own interests (that is settling his debts), at least
in part. At the same time, restitution as a whole is devalued, as a not
so important “problem”. This theme is continued during the election
launch, where Haider rails against the supposed influence of the “East
Coast” on both Mayor Häupl and his party, as well as on the restitution
negotiations. In this speech the murder of Jews is juxtaposed with
“compensation” for the exiled Sudeten Germans. On March 8th, 2001,
Muzikant is again accused of criminal activities, something which is
also taken up in the News interview on March 14, 2001.
This whole first argumentative chain is designed to criminalise Ariel
Muzikant, and thereby to put his role in the restitution negotiations
into a bad light. The ultimate aim, however, seems to be to call into
question restitution for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and to
draw parallels with the exiling of the Sudeten Germans.
The second argumentative theme concerns the identification of
differences between Austrian citizens: those with a “true Viennese
heart” against those who let themselves be influenced by the “East
Coast” (supposedly representing the powerful Jewish lobby in New
York). This division is found first in the election campaign in Vienna.
Michael Häupl’s advisor, Stanley Greenberg, is above all characterised
as a Jew, who now works for the SPÖ as a “spin doctor”. Characterising
a person solely based on their identity as “a Jew” is something which
is only ever done to activate anti-Semitic ideologies; in this case, it is
totally immaterial for Greenberg’s work as a campaign strategist. Jews
are thus contrasted with “real” Austrians. These statements also seem
to trivialise and obfuscate the Nazi regime: emigration, immigration
and returning are evidently seen as a “voluntary” decision, not caused
by the Holocaust and the murder of Jews. Justificatory discourse thus
takes its shape.
Haider’s accusations are described as factual “criticisms”. The
prevalent topos used in the third argument is thus “why can we not
criticise Jews?” (It has of course to be made clear that name-calling
and stereotyping have nothing to do with legitimate criticism). The
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reasons for the so-called criticism are thus that Muzikant has given
Austria “a bad name”, is a “traitor” who has “declared war against
a democratically elected government”. Muzikant is therefore “not
a good Austrian”. This draws on the anti-Semitic stereotype of the
“betrayer of the fatherland”.
The fourth leitmotif in Haider’s justificatory discourse relates
to Muzikant’s “motives”: first to settle the debts that he apparently
accrued through criminal means; second, that he is “full of hate”,
“vindictive” and greedy for recognition. This also evokes a well-known
anti-Semitic stereotype: the vindictive Jew (the saying from the Old
Testament “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is often – errone-
ously – quoted in relation to this).
These different themes show how frequently Jörg Haider makes
use of anti-Semitic stereotypes in 2001, and how the 2001 Viennese
election campaign is linked with the debate on restitution. The de-
valuation of restitution is apparent through parallels being drawn on
the one hand, and the criminalisation of one of the key figures on the
other. The defamatory and ultimately racist depiction of Muzikant,
and through him of Austrian Jews, did not bring any extra votes in
the Viennese elections, but discursive constructions gain their own
momentum. Polarisation, questions about the validity of restitution
and an anti-Semitic atmosphere were certainly fostered by Haider’s
statements.
2005: Restitution as a way to relieve emotional and material suffering
Past and future measures towards so-called “compensation” were also
not a big part of the 2005 political speeches. When they were men-
tioned, the way they were portrayed and evaluated corresponded with
established political positions. The then leader of the Green Party,
Alexander van der Bellen, described “behaviour towards surviving
emigrants” as one of the “shabby aspects” of Austrian history in his
speech to parliament during the opening of the so-called “Gedanken-
jahr” (“commemorative year/year of memory”) on January 14th, 2005.
However, he did not specify what exactly constitutes this “behaviour”,
and he demanded only that the situation should be subject to “a close
look”. State Secretary Franz Morak treated this topic in somewhat
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more detail (probably not coincidentally in a speech to the UN). He
expressed his regret for Austria’s failure to meet its long overdue in-
ternational obligations, and highlighted the ÖVP–FPÖ government’s
attempts to address the situation. This can be seen as an example of
the aforementioned effort to create a positive image abroad.
Mr President, the Nazi regime not only perpetrated crimes against humanity on a
never-before-seen scale, it is also responsible for the largest organised looting of all
times. Only in the past years have we begun to realise the enormous extent of the
material losses that the victims of the National Socialist persecution had to bear.
[. . .] Only after many decades did we become aware that everything possible was
not being done, and that there were still gaps and inadequacies in the restitution
and reparation efforts. To rectify this situation, the Austrian Government has taken
extensive steps and we are optimistic that these efforts, which are the responsibility
of all political parties and the whole Austrian population, will result in at least a
certain measure of justice for the victims of National Socialism. This comes late
– too late for so many.
Then Federal Chancellor Schüssel, whose government passed the
“Settlement fund law” in 2001 (see above), and who established the
General Settlement Fund, described the actions of his government
as “successful” in his speech of January 15th, 2005:
Only very late have we managed, after first attempts in the early years, to provide a
contribution towards the relief of emotional and material suffering.
Both ÖVP speakers claim that the restitution payments come very late
– “too late for many”. The speakers are referring to the time before
the establishment of the General Settlement Fund in their period in
office. However, they could just as easily have been referring to the
period after the establishment of the fund, since at the time of the
speeches no payments had been made. At the time, some survivors
were still waiting without avail for their promised symbolic “contribu-
tion towards the relief of emotional and material suffering”. Even in
2008 only half the payments had been made, and many of the survi-
vors had passed away in the intervening period. It is sometimes hard
to avoid the impression that – as was the case in 1945/46 – things are
being “drawn out” not only by coincidence.16
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Semi-public discourse in the 1995 focus groups: “Well I’d say – morally yes,
financially no”
Official hegemonic attitudes towards “compensation” in political
speeches are not necessarily reflected in semi-public discourse. To
investigate these attitudes, focus groups interviews were held in both
1995 and 2006. In 1995, criticism of the inadequate levels of “com-
pensation” for victims of National Socialism, and also of the failure
to properly deal with the past, occurred in all seven focus groups in
five Austrian regional states. Around one third of the participants
expressed a firm conviction that Austria was still responsible for the
victims of National Socialism at the time of the interviews: Austria was
seen as having moral and material obligations, and in any case there
was a legal right for victims, not least because this kind of injustice
would never come under any statue of limitations. Other participants
stated that although there was a “duty to compensate” victims, the
important thing from the present perspective was that history should
never repeat itself, that “something like this should never happen
again”. However, even the argument that material reparations were
actually beneath (their/our) dignity was put forward.
A further step in shifting responsibility follows the typical “yes-but”
argumentative pattern, and is introduced by one participant with the
phrase “morally yes, but financially?”
Well I say morally yes, financially no – what can I do if my grandfather or father
[. . .] if he was in some – with some – he was certainly not with them voluntarily
– but I don’t see why our generation or – the generation after us – should still pay
financial compensation.
The emphasis on differences between generations (grandparents and
current) is noticeable here. Another participant supports the argument
that the “duty to compensate” should be limited because Austria is
well-known for helping where help is needed:
so like I said good contacts to this country and when people are needy there, help
where it is needed – places where maybe in the meantime a lot of money has been
gathered one does not feel morally – and now he wants to collect capital from it I
would say – we don’t have to do it there.
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It is noteworthy that here, and in general in discussion of the Nazi
period, the topic has become such a taboo that the terms “Jew” or
“Israel” rarely occur. The principal victims of Nazi crimes are vaguely
referred to as “that country” or “those people”. Additionally, the final
utterance of the above contribution draws implicitly on the ancient
and established anti-Semitic stereotype of “Jewish prosperity”.
A fifth of the participants clearly rejected the notion of a “duty to
compensate”. For example, one interviewee from Burgenland stated
that “we already had to pay enough after the State Treaty. We had to
deliver oil for I don’t know which (occupying xxxx) we had to give
up heaps already. I don’t know how long this should continue”. He
follows this by equating all victims and drawing parallels between
them, before excluding Jewish victims of National Socialism from
the category of Austrians:
well I would say / well we have to (actually differently) do everything consistently.
If we count there were enough Austrians in the concentration camp / and / and
(returners) and they get nothing and some children of (xxxx) (get nothing). Well I
don’t think that’s right.
On two occasions, participants who do recognise Austria’s responsi-
bilities in this area raise the issue of “compensation” for the exiled
Sudeten Germans. This strategy of drawing parallels is also found
in many of the FPÖ speeches (see above).
What I would maybe also find important would be that we / in many countries in
Europe they have still not dealt with the past, so that also / when I look at Italy
– where the Neofascists are sitting in the parliament again – and actually that isn’t
talked about either - - or in Czech Republic where then in / in / in the course of
freeing the Czech Republic from the Nazis the Sudeten Germans were driven away
and there is no talk of reparations there.
In summary, in the focus group discussions held in 1995, the under-
standings of “compensation” and the laws pertaining to victims of
National Socialism were somewhat distorted. A small proportion of
the participants even held the view that descendents of the victims,
especially those “abroad”, sought to profit from the “compensation”.
This corresponds to the well-known anti-Semitic stereotype of the
“avaricious and money-grubbing Jew”. These attitudes vary widely
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in the focus groups based on the age, class and educational back-
ground of the participants. A further finding is that the boundaries
between different groups of victims (concentration camp victims,
“civilians” harmed by the war, fallen Wehrmacht soldiers, exiled
“ethnic Germans”, etc.) are blurred. Sometimes a highly artificial
distinction between the victims of National Socialism and “Austrians”
is constructed, and thus Austrians Jews are turned into just “Jews”.
They are discursively stripped of their Austrian citizenship, much
as was the case legally when racist laws (for example the Nuremberg
Laws) were instituted during the Nazi regime. On the question of
“compensation”, although some participants fully acknowledged
Austria’s responsibilities, half the participants in some way endorsed
the following view: “Co-responsibility and compensation yes, but not
material and financial, only moral”.
2005: “How far back should we go? Should it be the Thirty Years’ War?
As part of our investigation into the commemorative events of 2005,
we held two further focus group interviews in Vienna in early 2006.
One took place in a senior citizens’ centre, the other in a grammar
school. Both groups could be characterised as rather left-of-centre po-
litically. Like in the 1995 focus groups, we raised the issue of Austria’s
“duty to compensate” the victims of the National Socialist regime 60
years after the end of the war.
The group of senior citizens may have had a rather atypical composi-
tion for their generation, since two of the participants were themselves
victims of National Socialism. One participant, a retired journalist,
had to break off his school education and was not allowed to pursue
higher education, and commented on this as follows: “I might have
become something, I’m happy with what I became.” Another partici-
pant, an artist, had to flee Austrian in 1938 since she was Jewish, and
could not therefore take up a scholarship she was due to receive at
the Music Academy. She also expressed regret that she had not been
able to receive the education that was rightfully hers (“my career was
destroyed”). The two groups expressed very different views on the
issue of “compensation” for injustices and property stolen during the
Nazi regime. The senior citizens almost all expressed the opinion that
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restitution was still necessary and justified. As the retired journalist
said: “As long as the demands are justified”. Only one woman, who
was two at the end of the war, expressed her ambivalence. She agreed
that there should “well, partly be compensation, but I wonder, if out
of the time when I was an infant, two years old, some time one has
to stop, well, that is what I think about that.”
The aforementioned artist recounted (“me as a victim . . .”) that she
came to Vienna in 1945 and was offered a ridiculously low amount
of money for her flat, which she rejected, and a pension for seven
years. She had to top up the rest of her pension herself. Despite this
history, she was not entirely sure whether it would not be better to
end the discussion: “And I do say sometimes it is enough now – one
always talks about compensation and horrid things, but maybe it is
good though – to keep it in view for the new, the third generation.”
The journalist reported that he had been issued a restitution pay-
ment from the “National Fund” without having applied for it, and
that it pained him that an ÖVP-FPÖ government had managed this
when Social Democratic governments had failed to do so for so many
decades. He relates this to attempts to improve the government’s im-
age abroad, after international criticism, and states that he thought
the “duty to compensate” remained as long as there were legitimate
claims. Also, he thought the issue would resolve itself over time, and
that the government had largely fulfilled its responsibilities. Another
participant responded to this by saying that when a survivor is found,
there should be an immediate payment and not a long, drawn-out
process, while a third felt that there should be payments as long as
there were inheritance laws. It seems she meant by this that the in-
heritors of those who profited from property theft should also be
liable. The typical argumentation pattern found in discussions on this
topic, that “there has to be an end at some point”, was only alluded
to once in this group, in combination with the assertion that there
were some survivors who might illegitimately seek “compensation”.
In the group of school pupils, the discussion progressed on far more
ambivalent lines. On the one hand, a somewhat idiosyncratic trade
unionist and critic of globalisation firmly supported the restitution
process. One pupil described “Aryanisation” as “theft” – using the
infamous Klimt paintings as an example. Two other participants were
also in favour of restitution, and one draws parallels with Germans
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in the Czech Republic or Austrians in Bohemia and Moravia after
the Second World War. For these groups, however, he felt it was not
so important that their property should be returned:
And it is exactly the same thing with for example the Germans who remained in the
Czech Republic, were also thrown out after the Second World War. And and and well
also Austrians in Bohemia and Moravia and so on, there were also all thrown out
and with them it for example is not so important for me that they get their things
back necessarily . . .
However, a long discussion along the lines of the “Yes, but . . .” pat-
tern soon followed, mostly dominated by one participant who stated
the following:
Yes so in a certain way it is of course true that the / that it is principally always prop-
erty again, and that it actually / well of course a claim on it, to have it back, but only
first, as X said, if they haven’t needed it in the past sixty years, why do they need
it now, if it’s in a museum anyway, and another point is, I mean, in Switzerland, I
don’t know how many Jews had their bank accounts there, and they all belong to
some Swiss people now, and they aren’t small sums of money, they are very large
sums, and they were of course also not returned.
This argument is also repeatedly used by other participants: they
ask why pictures like Klimt’s Adele should be returned, when “they”
[sic!] had no need for them in the past decades. The comparison with
Swiss bank accounts that have also not been returned is also often ac-
companied by the argument that the money had already been passed
on to the next generation (with the implication that the beneficiaries
could not possibly be asked to give back their inheritance).
One participant is initially favourably inclined towards restitution,
but then abruptly changes the subject and draws parallels (in the
form of a question to the others) to the possible return of Palestinian
territories by Israel. His hesitant delivery indicates uncertainty about
the topic:
Well I also think, they should generally be compensated, um, and I want to briefly
mention here the topic Palestine, Israel, what you all think well, it is also / it is
also the case that, um, Israel / how many years ago was that? Was founded there,
in Palestine, and now/ and now there is again the / yeah, it’s approximately / is
approximately this period, yes, um, now there’s the question again, should/ who
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does this country belong to now for example. And, um, should the Israelis give back
land to the Palestinians or not, and / because they did live there before, what do
you think about this?
Subsequently, the discussion reaches the question of whether there
should not be an end at some point, again very carefully constructed
as a question to the group. This is also accompanied by an instance
of hyperbole – asking whether the Thirty Years’ War should form
the limit of how far back restitution should go. The return of South
Tyrol to Austria is also brought into play.
Well, that’s exactly my question, how far back should we go? Should the / should it
be only the Second World War? Should it be the First? Should it / should it be the
Thirty Years’ War? How / How many wars should we make reparations for?
Only one pupil, himself from a Jewish family opposed these dehistori-
cised and inaccurate parallels. He stated that one could not compare
Sudeten Germans with Jews, and that the Czechs had not murdered
six million Sudeten Germans.
Yes, but I think that / you can’t compare the Sudeten Germans who were driven out,
with the Jews who were driven out. I mean, Sudeten Germans became victims when
they lost their property, but Jews were already victims before that. There were not
six million Sudeten Germans murdered by the Jews, or even by the Czechs.
Finally, it is noteworthy that there were clear differences between the
two groups in 2006 despite the rather critical and left-wing orientation
of both groups. The younger generation is mostly rather restrictive in
their understanding of the limits of restitution, although they do not
openly oppose “compensation” as such. These sceptical positions are
carefully packaged in questions, but in the end untenable parallels are
drawn, and the argument that nothing need be returned because it
has not been needed up to now by the victims is earnestly put forward
– an obvious fallacy of constructing a false causality (post hoc – propter
hoc). Because of the restricted amount of data, it is impossible to give
a definitive answer to the question of how similar the patterns found
in semi-public discourse are to those found in public discourse and
media texts. However, it is also impossible to reject the notion that
insidious right-wing propaganda may have been recontextualised,
disseminated and have found much resonance. On the whole, the
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semi-public discourse shows more pointed formulations than those
found in public, quasi-ritualised discourse on “compensation”.
Concluding remarks
Public, hegemonic, and especially semi-public discourse on the issue
of restitution in Austria in the last 15 years frequently employs the
argumentation pattern “yes, but . . .” Politicians rarely thematise this
issue during commemorative events, and when they do it is usually
on occasions where the issue might have particular significance (for
example commemoration events at the Mauthausen concentration
camp, an address to the Hebrew University by Chancellor Franz
Vranitzky upon receipt of an honorary doctorate on June 9th, 1993,
a speech to the UN by State Secretary Franz Morak on January 24th,
2005). Austria’s responsibility for restitution may be acknowledged
on these occasions, but the speeches are invariably used for positive
self-presentation and to justify the decades-long periods of inaction.
One exception is the instrumentalisation of restitution in the Vien-
nese elections in 2001 by the FPÖ. Here, the speakers attempted to
criminalise the president of the Jewish Community, Ariel Muzikant,
to put restitution as a whole in a bad light, again an obvious fallacy
of equating the non-equitable and a metonymic device of positioning
the current president of the Jewish community Muzikant as pars pro
toto with past Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust.
The focus group discussions held in the years 1995 and 2006 present
a cross-section of semi-public discourse on restitution in Aus tria.
A group of senior citizens in 2006 shows a marked difference to
all the other groups: two of the participants describe themselves as
victims of National Socialism. Our analysis of the focus group data
has illustrated that only a minority of the participants unequivocally
supports the principle that stolen property should be restored in all
cases. The majority, however, does not usually explicitly reject the
idea; rather, they employ argumentative patterns and strategies, and
many fallacies that relativise Austrian responsibility by drawing paral-
lels between different historical events, even if these parallels are not
warranted. They also bring in absurd arguments to reject the idea
of material, financial restitution (“morally yes, but . . .”, “they” have
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not “needed” it up to now, . . .). It is particularly astonishing – and
worrying – that a group of generally progressive youths interviewed
in 2006 should, despite the 2005 events dedicated to commemoration
and reflection (the “Gedankenjahr”) use such relativising and trivial-
ising strategies when discussing the restitution of stolen property
and of Nazi crimes. Parallels are drawn with “compensation” for
the Sudeten Germans, with a failure to “deal with the past” in other
countries, with the policies of Israel regarding Palestine. Disguised
as a question about how far back we should go, this group indirectly
seeks an “end to the debate” and constructs a vague homogeneous
group of “victims” without asking the relevant question of: who was
a victim when, where, and why?
Notes
1 We thank Johnny Unger for translating our paper. This paper draws on, and
elaborates DE CILLIA, WODAK 2008 which was published in a catalogue ac-
companying the exhibition curated by Alexandra Reininghaus, Recollecting. Raub
und Restitution. This exhibition thematised the “Aryanisation” of Jewish goods
1938.
2 WODAK, DE CILLIA et al. 1998; WODAK, DE CILLIA, REISIGL, LIEBHART
1999 [2009], DE CILLIA and WODAK 2009.
3 The term “Wiedergutmachung”, meaning “compensation” or literally “making good
again”, must be seen as a cynical euphemism, which ultimately serves only to easy
guilty consciences by seeming to promise something completely unattainable.
4 See PELINKA, WODAK 2002; WODAK, REISIGL 2002.
5 See HEER, MANOSCHEK et al. 2003, 2008.
6 See Falter, 15.6.1995, p. 9.
7 Minutes of the 40th session of the National Council of the Republic of Austria,
p. 62.
8 See BAILER 1995.
9 Minutes of the 40th session of the National Council of the Republic of Austria,
p. 56.
10 ibid, p. 56.
11 ibid, p. 69.
12 BECKERMANN 1995.
13 See KNIGHT 1988.
14 All the quotations in context can be found in WODAK, REISIGL 2002; see also
WODAK 2007.
15 Note that “Ariel” is a well-known detergent/cleaning agent in Austria.
16 See KNIGHT 1988.
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Bibliography
B. BAILER, Die unwürdige Diskussion über den NS-Opfer-Fonds,
in Kurier, 1.6.1995.
R. BECKERMANN, Die Würde des Opferkollektivs, in Die Gemeinde,
16. Juni 1995.
R. DE CILLIA, R. WODAK (Eds.), Gedenken im „Gedankenjahr“. Zur
diskursiven Konstruktion österreichischer Identitäten im Jubiläumsjahr
2005, Wien–Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2009.
R. DE CILLIA, R. WODAK, Restitution: Ja, aber . . ., in A. REINING-
HAUS (ed.), Recollecting. Raub und Restitution, Wien: Passagen
Verlag, 2009, p. 243–258.
H. HEER, W. MANOSCHEK, A. POLLAK, R. WODAK (eds.), Wie
Geschichte gemacht wird. Zur Konstruktion von Erinnerungen an We-
hrmacht und Zweiten Weltkrieg, Wien: Czernin, 2003.
H. HEER, W. MANOSCHEK, A. POLLAK, R. WODAK (eds.), The
Discursive Construction of History. Remembering the Wehrmacht’s War
of Annihilation, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
R. KNIGHT, Ich bin dafür, die Sache in die Länge zu ziehen. Die Wort-
protokolle der österreichischen Bundesregierung von 1945–1952 über die
Entschädigung der Juden, Frankfurt/M.: Athenäum, 1988.
A. PELINKA, R. WODAK (eds.), „Dreck am Stecken”. Politik der Aus-
grenzung. Wien: Czernin, 2002.
M. REISIGL, R. WODAK, Discourse and Discrimination, London:
Routledge, 2001.
R. WODAK, M. REISIGL, „Wenn einer Ariel heisst . . .“, in A. PELIN-
KA, R. WODAK 2002, p. 134–172.
R. WODAK, R. DE CILLIA, M. REISIGL, K. LIEBHART, K. HOF-
STÄTTER, M. KARGL, Zur diskursiven Konstruktion nationaler
Identität, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1998.
R. WODAK, R. DE CILLIA, M. REISIGL, K. LIEBHART, The dis-
cursive construction of national identities, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
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and Cognition 1 (3), 2007, p. 203–225.
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Spoken Silence – Bridging Breaks.
The Discursive Construction of Historical
Continuities and Turning Points in Austrian
Commemorative Speeches by Rhetorical Tropes
Martin Reisigl
1. Introduction
The two oxymora and alliterations in the title of my contribution get
to the heart of the phenomenon that politicians – as orators of politi-
cal speeches – at times eloquently, hide and bridge incising historical
breaks. They do this for the purpose of a specific identity polity,
linguistically constructing and representing historical continuity. In
their narratives of a national history, they compose a political (for
example national) identity with the help of the narrative principle
of concordance1, integrating various incongruities, fractures and dif-
ferences into a coherent and temporally unified sequence of related
actions, processes and events, although this counterfactual integrative
unity contradicts “historical truth”, which – to a large extent – relates
to historical breaks and upheavals as well.2
Amongst the many means that serve the narrative demand of
concordance and facilitate the discursive construction of historical
continuity, as well as of historical change, we can identify a series
of content-related rhetorical figures traditionally called “tropes”.
Tropes, such as metaphors, metonymies and synecdoches, are not just
rhetorical adornments but rather function as elementary cognitive
principles which – often unconsciously – shape and structure human
perception and thinking.
In the present text, attention will be especially directed to rhetorical
tropes that are employed for the linguistic establishment of person-
related, temporal and spatial continuity. Particular interest will be
paid to the “synecdoche” trope. In the given context, I examine and
illustrate the relevance of various synecdoches (especially temporal
synecdoches) for the rhetorical construction of historical continuities
and bridges that silence historical ruptures. The empirical focus will
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be on Austrian commemorative speeches given on the occasion of the
official observation of the foundation of the Republic of Austria in
November 1918. Most of the analysed pieces of text will be taken selec-
tively from speeches given during “Joint Commemorative Sittings of
the Austrian National and Federal Council” (Gemeinsame Festsitzungen
des österreichischen National- und Bundesrates). It is the aim of the article
to demonstrate the analytical scope of the tropological concept of the
synecdoche for political language use and to make critical political
presuppositions, which often remain unquestioned, transparent.
One of these presuppositions is the implication that the Republic of
Austria existed uninterruptedly from its foundation in November 12,
1918, until the moment of commemoration. This presupposition is
verbalised through a temporal “rounding-up synecdoche” (all years
from 1918 until the moment of speaking stand for most of the years),
which rhetorically tapes over the tragic historical breaks of the 1930s
and 1940s, thus creating an image of Austria with a permanent re-
publican type of state and form of government.
In addition to my focus on figures that rhetorically superimpose
historical continuities over historical fractures, various tropes refer-
ring to radical historical changes and breaks (for example the natu-
ralising metaphor of catastrophe) come into the field of analytical
view as well.
The article is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on
general functions of rhetorical tropes and especially synecdoches.
The second part discusses striking passages of the commemorative
speeches and identifies rhetorical means employed in these speech
fragments in order to construct historical continuity and change. I
will conclude with some critical remarks on the most problematic dis-
cursive strategies of constructing historical continuities and turning
points in the commemorative speeches and on how the anniversary
could be remembered more adequately in future.
2. Functions of rhetorical tropes in political discourses, with special attention
to synecdoches
Tropes are figures of speech that involve a turn of meaning, that is
to say, a linguistic transference from one conceptual sphere to an-
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other.3 Metaphors, metonymies and synecdoches are among the most
important tropes. A metaphor is a turn of meaning that establishes a
similarity between two different semantic domains. A metonymy is a
turn of meaning that is based on a shift which involves two semanti-
cally (and materially, causally, or cognitively) neighbouring fields
of reference: a name of a referent stands for the name of another
referent, which semantically (abstractly or concretely) borders on the
referent of the name. A synecdoche, finally, is a turn of meaning that
involves a shift within one and the same semantic field, in the sense
that a term is represented by another term, the extension of which
is either semantically narrower or semantically wider.4
As rhetorical means of political persuasion aiming to construct, re-
produce, represent, transform and destruct political “reality”, tropes
fulfil numerous functions.
Regarding the representational function of language, tropes facili-
tate (a) the construction of political facts, for example via container
metaphors or allegories like the house or ship metaphor/allegory
referring to a political unity such as a state, (b) the reduction of
complexities by simplistic categorisation and imaginary representa-
tion of political “reality”, for example via spatial metaphors such as
“inside” versus “outside” or “top/above” versus “bottom/down”, (c)
the vivifying, personification and illustration of abstract or vague
political ideas, for example via anthropomorphising and animalising
metaphors, (d) the selective highlighting of particular qualities of
political entities or “reality” sectors, for example via particularising
synecdoches, and (e) the obscuring or hiding of specific political
aspects, actors or actions, for example via metonymies that represent
persons by place names.5
Within the realms of the interpersonal function of language, tropes
are utilised (a) to promote the identification with political actors
(for example leaders, parties, states or nations) as well as with their
political aims and ideologies, for example via the metaphor of the
centre relating to a particular nation state within a union of states,
(b) to promote in-group solidarity, for example via family or kinship
metaphors referring to the imagined community of a nation or of
politically united nations, (c) to support out-group segregation and
discrimination, for example via spatial metaphors implying strict
frontiers or deprecating animalising metaphors like parasite, rat and
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Justice and Memory.indb 215 02.11.2009 13:39:28
vermin referring to “outgroups”, (d) to generate a feeling of secu-
rity by suggesting stability and order, for example via construction
metaphors like the fortress referring to a state or union of states such
as the EU, (e) to spread a feeling of insecurity by suggesting chaos,
disorder, danger and threat, for example via flood or inundation
metaphors referring to immigrants, (f) to justify or de-legitimise
specific political actions or their omission, for example via metaphors
of gain or price relating to the consequences of a specific action or
omission of action, and (g) to mobilise political adherents to perform
particular actions, for example via inciting militarising metaphors
and dehumanising metaphors relating to “the enemy”.6
2.1 Synecdoches
Synecdoches are – as already explained – turns of meaning within one
and the same semantic field: a term is represented by another term,
the extension of which is either semantically broader or semantically
narrower.7
According to the direction of representation, particularising syn-
ecdoches are distinguished from singularising synecdoches.8
The particularising synecdoche consists of a semantically wider concept
representing a semantically narrower concept. Three main subtypes of
particularising synecdoches are (1) pars pro toto, that is the part stands
for the whole (“Bush [representing the US-Americans] will not win
the war in Afghanistan.”); (2) singularis pro plurale, that is the singular
stands for the plural (“The Austrian is lachrymose and querulous.”);
and (3) species pro genus, that is the species stands for the genus (“He
spends his last penny on books [‘penny’ stands for ‘money’]”).
The generalising synecdoche is composed of a semantically wider
concept that stands for a semantically narrower concept. Three main
subtypes of these synecdoches are (4) totum pro parte, that is the whole
stands for the part (“Italy will be excluded from the games for corrup-
tion” [this synecdoche is also a metonymy]); (5) pluralis pro singulare,
that is the plural stands for the singular (“We [representing a single
person] do not agree with this proposal.”); and (6) genus pro specie, that
is the genus stands for the species (“Humanity has to make a greater
effort to solve all these problems.”).
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Both particularising and generalising synecdoches often function
as a means of referential incorporation and assimilation. They fre-
quently serve stereotypical generalisation and play a fundamental role
in polity, policy and politics, to begin with party names that selectively
highlight striking traits of the party.9 The American rhetorician
Kenneth Burke stated already 40 years ago that every act of social
representation and every theory of political representation relies on
a synecdochic relationship.10
The table11 on the following page illustrates how the tropological
concept of the synecdoche can formally be sub-specified beyond the
existing differentiations.
The question of whether and how a political system of representa-
tion assumes a democratic structure or not is controlled by various
provisions. Systems of political representation are regulated by rules
that control who is entitled to be a political representative and who
decides on the question of who will be a representative (active and pas-
sive right to vote), by a procedure of politically enabling somebody to
be a representative (direct or indirect democracy), by measures that fix
the conditions under which the relationship of representation is, can
or must be dissolved or confirmed (representation for a set time), and
by conventions that define the way in which representatives are com-
mitted to those who are represented (free or imperative mandate).
Political systems are dynamically shaped into various layers of politi-
cal representation and inclusion: Depending on the political system,
the highest level of political representation is reserved for impera-
tors, kings and queens (monarchy), states’ presidents and chancel-
lors (republic and democracy) or dictators (totalitarian dictatorship).
Depending on the level of super- or subordination and inclusion,
one and the same politician represents more or less persons, citizens
or groups of voters. That is to say: On a lower level of inclusion, a
politician (for example a party leader) may represent all members
or a majority of a specific group or political organisation, while she
or he just represents a minority on a higher level of the system. This
dynamics of variable degrees of representation and all the factors just
mentioned should be considered in a tropological model of political
representation.12
These basic observations on the significance of rhetorical tropes,
and especially synecdoches, in polity, policy and politics lead to the
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x represents y
persons
all
most
one
many
some/several
all
most
some/several
many
one particularising
all synecdoches
most
many
some/several
one
all
many
most
some/several
one
most
many generalising
all
some/several synecdoches
one
objects
everything
most of it
one thing
much/a lot
something
everything
most of it
something
much/a lot
one thing
particularising
everything synecdoches
most of it
much/a lot
something
one thing
everything
much/a lot
most of it
something
one thing
most of it
much/a lot generalising
everything
something synecdoches
one thing
Justice and Memory.indb 218 02.11.2009 13:39:29
main part of the present article, in which I discuss the employment
of rhetorical tropes in the construction of historical continuities and
turning points.
3. The discursive construction of historical continuities and tur ning points
in commemorative speeches given on the occasion of the foundation of the
Republic of Austria in November 1918
In the following, I will just draw attention to particular segments of the
“republican” Austrian commemorative speeches and cannot do justice
to these speeches by analysing their entire contents and structures,
since such a study would easily fill a whole book. A second precau-
tionary remark has to be made for the readers. The specific political
occasion on which most of these speeches about the foundation of
the Austrian Republic were given – after 1945 – implies a historical
overall scope that is much broader than the years of Austro-fascism and
National Socialist dictatorship. The time of National Socialism is one
of several historical periods these speeches deal with or can deal with.
Thus, there are groups of Austrian commemorative speeches – such
as speeches commemorating the “Anschluss in 1938”, the end of the
World War II and especially the liberation of Nazi victims imprisoned
in concentration camps – that focus more on the topic of National
Socialism. However, the speeches in question delivered after 1945 can
be expected to relate to National Socialism at least to a certain extent.
Furthermore, it can be assumed that these speeches make the Austro-
fascist dictatorship a subject of discussion – a dark period in history
which interrupted the republican history of Austria for several years
in addition to the National Socialist break. It is especially these two
assumptions which deserve to be investigated more closely.
1928 (10th anniversary)
After World War I, the Habsburg Empire declined over several weeks.
In autumn 1918, the political disintegration led to the foundation of
the small and primarily German speaking state “Deutschösterreich” as
a democratic republic, although most of the politicians of the newly
formed state had mixed feelings about the question of political
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independence from other German speaking parts of Europe. This
ambivalence flowed into a law that defined the new state, which the
Allies did not allow to become a part of a greater German state. The
declaration of the new Austrian republic on November 12 in 1918 was
accompanied by riots that left two persons dead and injured many
more. This violence related to the forced prevention of protesting
communists from entering the house of parliament in order to ar-
ticulate their demand for a socialist republic governed by workers’
councils.13
In April 1919, the 12th November was established as a “state holiday”
(“Staatsfeiertag”), but during the following years, official festivities
developed only hesitantly on the respective anniversaries. The date
did not become a day of public commemorative demonstration of
political consent, cohesion and unity.14
In autumn 1928, ten years after the foundation of the Republic of
Austria, the first State Chancellor of the First Austrian Republic,
Karl Renner, narrates in retrospect the political developments after
the First World War as follows:
(1) When all the German representatives of the old Austria came together for the
constitutive National Assembly, they nominated me as first State Chancellor. Amidst
the revolutionary storms of the collapse, the task fell upon me to establish a new
state order over the ruins of the old one; and achieving this, avoiding any destruc-
tion, any human sacrifice and in the greatest harmony possible for all citizens, was
my endeavour. Therefore, I united bourgeois citizens, farmers and workers into
a coalition government, in order to banish the Bolshevik danger impending from
both Hungary and Bavaria and also to return inner peace to the country as soon as
possible. [. . .]
In the midst of permanent inner disturbances and external threat, in spite of the
enormous aggravations caused by the material and mental consequences of the World
War, the entire economic, social and intellectual life of our people was renewed in
the short period of two years.
What has made these extraordinary achievements possible? The parties were brought
together by a government devoted to the people’s freedom and people’s welfare and
filled with the spirit of understanding and collaboration.15
The naturalising metaphor of “the revolutionary storms of the col-
lapse” and the metaphor of the “ruins of the old state order” here
serve as rhetorical, tropological means of representing the historical
break and change after the First World War. In the second paragraph
of this quotation, Renner presents the comprehensive reconfiguration
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of the Austrian economic, social and intellectual life after the War in
the linguistic form of a factual narrative, which suggests – by gram-
matical mode and tense (indicative and simple past) – a successful
political renewal in just two years. This view was far too optimistic
and wishful thinking. Only a few years after Renner’s speech, the
Austro-fascists were to take over power and abolish the democratic
Republic of Austria, substituting an authoritarian corporate state for
it and, only ten years after these words, the political developments
led to the “Anschluss” in March 1938. As a consequence, no official
political commemoration of the foundation of the Austrian Republic
took place in November 1938.
The 12th of November was democratically commemorated for the
last time in 1932. In 1933, the authoritarian regime banned social-
democratic demonstrations on the anniversary of the foundation of
the Republic. Nevertheless, the Social Democrats organised a “walk”
on 12 November, during which Karl Renner and more than two hun-
dred other Social Democrats were arrested. In 1934, the Austro-fascist
decree issued on 27 April fixed the 1st of May as the day on which the
proclamation of the constitution of the corporate state (Ständestaat)
should officially be commemorated. At the same time, 12 November
was abolished as the “state’s holiday”. Four days after this decree, on
1 May, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß proclaimed the Austro-fascist
constitution, which remained in force until the National Socialists
incorporated Austria into the Third Reich.16
As will be shown in the following, it is the Austro-fascist interruption
of the republican history of Austria, as well as the prolongation of
this interruption by the National Socialist dictatorship from March
1938 until April 1945, which are frequently silenced or back-grounded
with the help of temporal synecdoches and other tropes in most of
the respective “republican” commemorative speeches delivered after
1945.
1948 (30th anniversary)
Three years after the end of World War II, on the occasion of the 30th
anniversary, it is once again Renner who – now as the first President
of the Second Austrian Republic – highly poetically looks back on the
tragic history of the First Republic and the successful re-foundation of
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the Republic in 1945. In a radio speech, Renner rhetorically endows
continuity with the help of an allegory based on the personification
of the republican form of state and government:
(2) Born in the painful birth pangs of a world war and, after a few years of a tenacious
fight for existence, buried alive together with others under the boots of a conqueror,
after a Second World War, resurrected from bodily exhaustion and mental aberra-
tion, our Republic has energetically worked its way up to new life in the short span
of barely four years.
It is here again and, even more: difficult experiences have purified it, clarified its
thinking and made its will unerring. We are proud to have [. . .] established a de-
mocracy of indisputable purity in our country.
Therefore, the Republic of Austria does not present itself without justified self-as-
surance as celebrant of the jubilee, and it desires nothing more than the end of being
left before the gates of the palace of world peace with the desire of entrance.
The Austrian knocks on these gates, not like a beggar, but in the awareness that it
is unjust to make him wait any longer [. . .].
Truly, the four major powers have sat in judgement on us long enough, they have
recognised that a Republic that was buried alive could not be guilty, they have made
sure of the fact that we ourselves have judged – and will continue to judge – all the
unfortunate single persons who were accomplices to the crimes that happened. And
no power in the world can deny that we possess the force and skill to rule ourselves,
no person of insight can consider it to be wise confining in its strait room a long-
cured body to the observation of four orderlies – and major powers, at that – for
many years.
We feel it in every muscle and nerve: the Republic of Austria is healthy; it, therefore,
wants to engage freely in the community of free peoples, to pacifically collaborate
in this and, in this way, joyfully care for itself.17
In this flowery piece of text, Renner utilises various metaphors to
represent historical change, to bridge historical breaks and to exon-
erate Austrians from the guilt of participating in National Socialist
crimes. The metaphor of birth both presupposes change (a new,
innocent creature is delivered) and continuity (this creature, the Austrian
Republic, lives its life). The metaphorical or allegoric personification
presupposes the continuity of a human life. This life – in our case
the “life” of the Republic – bridges historical breaks. The Republic
did not die, but was buried alive. The metaphor of being buried
alive under the boots of the National Socialist conqueror creates an
impression of passivity and victimisation for the Austrians and has an
exculpating argumentative function. This metaphor implicitly carries
the argumentation scheme called “topos of heteronomy”.18
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The living metaphor prevails in the overall-allegoric structure of
the quotation. Two metaphors that can also be subsumed under the
allegory are the metaphors of illness, mental aberration, recovering,
orderlies and health. These metaphors also have an exonerating
quality, since they presuppose that the Austrian Republic was sick,
a patient, and thus had to suffer. Obviously, such a pathologising
metaphorical representation shifts the accountability, or most of it,
to a disease-causing agent.
Interestingly, the exonerating metaphor of recovery was also utilised
in 1948 by Leopold Kunschak, the then president of the National
Council. In his commemorative speech given at the joint sitting of
the National and Federal Assembly on 12 November, Kunschak ut-
tered:
(3) In the last three years, the liberated Republic has articulated a recovery of will
to life and vitality, which lets us hope most firmly that – if the liberated Austria
becomes a free Austria – this latter will flow into an era of new felicitous life. After
thirty years of existence of the Republic of Austria, you, Mister President [that is
Karl Renner, M.R.], stand – like a strong guarantor – as the highest official at the
head of the mightily up-and-coming Republic.19
Here we note that Kunschak presupposes that the Republic had
existed for thirty years, ignoring that there was not republican state
form and government in Austria from 1934 to 1945. I will come back
to this synecdochic rounding up, which rhetorically creates continuity
and bridges or gets over the historical breaks, in a moment.
1968 (50th anniversary)
In 1958, there was no official commemoration in parliament of the
40th anniversary of the proclamation of the Austrian Republic. Ten
years later, in 1968, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the
passing of the Act on the Austrian Democratic Republic, the then
President Franz Jonas, quite clearly explains:
(4) The Republic of Austria has lived under abnormal state and constitutional con-
ditions for almost half of its 50 years of existence – 22 entire years passed from the
elimination of the National Council in March 1933 until the re-establishment of full
sovereignty in the year 1955.20
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Here again, we find a personified Austrian Republic that lives a life.
Despite his explicit reference to the abnormal 22 years, Jonas seems
to presuppose the continuous existence when he speaks of the “50-
jährigen Bestand”. The President also verbalises this presupposition
in the following quotation from his speech, where he presents the
Austrian status quo of the year 1968 highly positively. He imagines
– once more – an anthropomorphic republic, when he utters:
(5) On the occasion of its celebration of 50 years of existence, our Republic stands
on firm feet. It is founded on the Austrian people’s commitment to their democratic
homeland [Heimat, M.R], which was upheld and proven in the most grievous times;
it is based on the country’s efficient economy, the research spirit of its scholars and
artists and the healthy élan of its striving youth.21
Although Jonas’ first rhetorical aim is the positive self-presentation
of Austria and the Austrian Republic, he also approaches the top-
ics of civil war, Austro-fascism and National Socialism in a rather
justifying way, although he explicitly, metalinguistically, pronounces
himself against the silence:
(6) We do not want to, and must not, remain silent about the tragic events of the year
1934. They meant the end of democracy and led to an additional alienation between
the authoritarian government and the people. This inner conflict and the devastating
economic crisis paralysed the force of resistance against National Socialism. Then,
there was an inevitable consequence inherent in the further developments. The
violent occupation by the Third Reich, the loss of the state existence, the integra-
tion into the National Socialist machinery of war, the march into the concentration
camps and prisons, the compulsion to participate in a senseless and criminal war of
conquest, which our people never wanted, were the bitter stations of an Austrian way
of the cross, which then lead to the gravest catastrophe of our history.22
Here, Jonas constructs a compulsory causal chain of events that led
to the National Socialist dictatorship in Austria. He grammatically
backgrounds the involved social actors – both perpetrators and victims
– through a series of impersonal nominalizations (“force of resist-
ance”, “occupation”, “loss”, “integration”, “march”, “compulsion
of participation”). As far as his argumentation is concerned, Jonas
employs – besides the causal topos or, strictly speaking, fallacy of co-
erciveness and inevitability – the fallacy of victims and the fallacy of
heteronomy. The victimisation is, among others, rhetorically intensi-
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fied by the religious metaphor of “Austrian stations of the cross” and
by the quasi-naturalising metaphor of the “gravest catastrophe”.
After the exonerating sequence about the dark sides of the Austrian
past, Jonas continues the positive self-presentation. With the help of
the naturalising metaphor of “reanimation”, he deduces from “the
painful common examinations and experiences” a “new, unusual
force” propelling the “start of an Austrian reanimation process”:
(7) This new force was awakened through the common painful examinations and
experiences in the dark years of the dictatorship that was foreign to country and
people alike. [. . .] The rebirth of Austria in April 1945 was initiated by an act of
political and human greatness. A path of cooperation, transcending the trenches of
the tragic past, was followed for the sake of the future of Austria.23
In this case we can, once more, identify the fallacy of heteronomy that
shifts the Austrian responsibility to the German National Socialists.
Apart from that, we recognise a reconciliatory militarist metaphor
that has become very popular in commemorative speeches given in
Austria in the last decades: the metaphor of the cooperation “tran-
scending the trenches”, which establishes or represents social and
political cohesion.
In the same commemorative parliamentary sitting, the President
of the National Council, Alfred Maleta, addressed the foundation of
the democratic Republic of Austria as one of the “most significant
turning points (tiefste Zäsuren) in the thousand year history of our
people”. Maleta evokes the Austrian millenary myth relating to the
first naming of the toponym “ostarrichi” in a deed of donation dat-
ing from 99624. In addition to the civil war and the National Socialist
cruelties, he derives the genesis of Austrian self-esteem essentially
from the abolishment of the Austrian state and official toponymic
substitution of “Ostmark” for “Austria”.
(8) Two events in this long historical process have had an especially positive influ-
ence on the political development of the state; they are the deplorable civil wars of
the year 1934 and the extinction of the state in 1938. In the volleys of machine gun
fire on the streets and in the concentration camps and jails, the Austrian recognised
that, despite all its deficiencies, democracy is the most mature and most human form
of state. And, in particular, the total extinction of the state, even of the name of
Austria, was probably the most important cause for the Austrians to become aware
of their self-esteem and independence.25
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1978 (60th anniversary)
In 1978, the 60th anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic was
commemorated. In the joint parliamentary sitting, the then President
of the National Council Anton Benya briefly referred to the histori-
cal developments on the basis of the personificatory metaphor of a
republican life story. After delineating the developments of the 1930s
and 1940s, he concludes his observations positively with the topos of
historia magistra vitae, which often has a mitigating quality. The topos
of “history teaching lessons” frequently shifts the focus from the vic-
tims to the “we-group” that has supposedly learnt from history26:
(9) [. . .] despite various confidential contacts between Social Democrats and Christian
Social politicians, it was not possible to construct a united front of defence; therefore
the occupation of Austria by Hitler-Germany that occurred in March 1938 sealed
the fate of the First Republic definitely.
With this started the most terrible and saddest time in the 60 years history of our
Republic, during which the cruelties of a totalitarian regime added to our country’s
loss of independence and the horrors of the war.
When the question of whether human beings learn anything from history is repeatedly
asked by politicians and historians, the development of the Second Republic, in my
view, allows us to give a positive answer, since many developments in the second half
of the 60-year history of the life of our Republic can be understood as being lessons,
well learnt, from the errors and aberrations of the First Republic.27
In view of the second part of the main title of my contribution I should
remark that Benya twice explicitly employs the metaphor of bridge
builders or building bridges with respect to the question of how to
establish social, political and interpersonal cohesion in Austria. The
passages containing the bridge metaphor are quoted as examples 10
and 11. In the quotation under 10, we can also identify the topos of
learning and the metaphors of birth and cradle, from time to time
utilised to endow a historical turning point with positive, exculpat-
ing connotations, since a newborn is blameless, sweet and in need of
help. In 11, Benya integrates the metaphor of building bridges into
an optative demand:
(10) The spirit of reconciliation and tolerance stood at the cradle of the Second Re-
public. The master builders of the Second Republic, among them, Dr Karl Renner
once again, as well as Figl, Schärf, Raab, Böhm, Kunschak and Seitz, had learnt,
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from painful experience, the art of building bridges in the political, functional and
human respect.28
(11) May the eventful fate of the Republic be an exhortation to avoid aberrations
and construct bridges between the individual persons and groups of society, who all
declare their support for this state.29
Of all the political orators on the anniversary, President Rudolf
Kirchschläger is the clearest and most concrete with respect to the
question of what happened to the Austrian Republic and its official
designation in 1934, when the Austro-fascists introduced the “Federal
State of Austria” instead of “Democratic Republic of Austria” and
abolished the 12th of November as the “state’s holiday”:
(12) Whoever ponders the six decades of Austrian history, cannot omit the years
which, in 1933, led to the end of the parliamentary democracy and also to the so-called
“Federal State of Austria” in 1934, the agencies of which both discarded the name
“Republic of Austria” and abolished the 12th of November as the state’s holiday.30
However, despite this relative clarity, at a certain point in his speech,
Kirchschläger also presupposed the continuous existence of the Re-
public, when he congratulated the representatives of the National
and Federal Council “on the day of the sixty-year existence of our
Republic”.31
1993 (75th anniversary)
Coming to the commemorative speeches given on 12 November 1993,
we find several text segments that can critically be referred to for the
demonstration of the analytical scope of the tropological concept of
the synecdoche in the study of political language use.
With respect to the question of political representation within the
system of parliamentary democracy, the former president of the Aus-
trian National Council, Heinz Fischer, in his speech, determines the
synecdochic relationship among the whole and its parts as follows:
(13) Ladies and gentlemen! The different parties are not only indispensable parts of
the whole in the parliamentary democracy, but also majority and minority, govern-
ment and opposition. The more clarification of this point and other sensitive areas
of our political structures we provide, the better and more convincing we will be
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able to respond to criticism and reproaches to policy, politicians and parties, which
– by the way – are not exclusively a phenomenon of the present.32
Here, Fischer characterises the individual parties, as well as the
majority, minority, government and opposition, from a democratic
perspective as being parts of a political whole. By declaring not just
the majority to be a vital part of the whole, but also the minority
and opposition, Fischer supports an integrative understanding of
democracy that acknowledges a differentiated synecdochic view which
also recognises the political importance of numerically small parts.
Fischer points out the difficulty of a purely synecdochic representa-
tion when, in another sequence of his speech, he argues:
(14) It is obvious that parliament and parties are no more faultless than the sum of
the citizens of this country. However, my claim is that the political parties, which have
the difficult function of summarising a multitude of different particular standpoints
as alternatives for voting, cannot suit everybody ex definitione, and scarcely should do
so, because they are just a part of the whole but, in sum, they represent indispensable
elements of the pluralistic democracy.33
The former Austrian Chancellor, Franz Vranitzky, utilised a remark-
able temporal synecdoche within the same parliamentary commemo-
rative sitting. It is the specific generalising synecdoche in which the
naming of the whole period stands for the major part of the period.
Vranitzky generously takes the whole period of 75 years from 1918 to
1993 to represent the 64 (or 63) years of the actual existence of the
Republic of Austria; that is to say, the years of the First Republic from
November 1918 until May 1934 (strictly speaking: until March 1933,
when the National Assembly met for the last time) and the years of
the Second Republic from April 1945 until November 1993:
(15) Indeed, there are quite a number of things resulting from the 75 years of its
republican history up to now that have to be taken into consideration – particularly
for the future of our country: [. . .]34
Interestingly, this type of temporal synecdoche was less frequently
uttered in commemorative speeches during the first decades after
the Second World War because, in these decades, the memory of
the Nazi dictatorship and the Austro-fascist period was still too vivid
(although often not verbalised). Thus, the historical breaks of the
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1930s and the 1940s could not be ignored and rhetorically covered
over with the ease observed in the 1990s, when the historical distance
from the two pitch black periods was far greater and, therefore, the
“magic of round numbers” could more easily unfold its force, thus
serving the principles of a “nationalist dilatation of time”35 and
“temporal smoothing”.
The just mentioned temporal synecdoche used by Vranitzky in
his speech in 1993 functions as a hyperbolical, magnifying rhetori-
cal means that increases the importance of the specific occasion of
commemoration; that is to say, the proclamation of the Republic 75
years before in 1918. This quantitative exaggeration, this rounding
up, discursively constructs a continuity of existence of the republican
type of state and form of government and thus bridges all historical
political breaks.
It is quite remarkable that Franz Vranitzky commits this objection-
able temporal rounding up, in view of the fact that he is praised to the
skies for having been the first Austrian politician to officially admit,
before the National Assembly on 8 July 1991, the guilt of Austrians
for National Socialist crimes – even though we must observe that his
admission of guilt, which in the meantime has acquired canonical
status, was linguistically quite mitigated.36
However, in the very same speech, Vranitzky – in his endeavour to
construct historical continuity – absolutely paradoxically presumes
to state:
(16) [. . .] on a day like today we should also not forget this: Of the 75 years of its
existence, this Republic was not a democracy for twelve years, from 1933 to 1945.
For seven long years, years of terror, suppression and bondage, the name “Austria”
even completely disappeared from the map.37
Despite all his criticism, the former chancellor, here, presupposes
the existence of the Republic for the years from 1933 until 1945 as
well. The positive political flag-word “republic” even survives the
twelve years of the Austro-fascist and National Socialist dictatorship.
Vranitzky even commits the same fault of synecdochic generalisation
once more in his speech of 12 November 1993, when he asserts:
(17) One of these big challenges, the Republic of Austria is facing in the 75th year of
its existence, is the project of Europe.38
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Not all speakers upheld this strange “idea of continuity”; in the com-
memorative sitting in November 1993. The former Austrian president,
Thomas Klestil, finds direct words against the temporal rounding
up. He claims:
(18) [. . .] it is undisputed that the Republic of Austria was born 75 years ago today,
but nobody will seriously claim that 75 years of the Republic really lie behind us. For
this, we are lacking the 17 years of National Socialism, of the war and the occupation,
thus the loss of external freedom between 1938 and 1955. The five preceding years
of internal lack of freedom under an antidemocratic-authoritarian leadership also
contributed in a tragic manner to the loss of our independence.39
In this quotation, Klestil rhetorically employs the personifying meta-
phor of birth and the metaphor of “lying behind us”. However, Klestil
commits another remarkable synecdochic slip in this passage, which is
quite usual for politicians of the Austrian People’s Party: In Klestil’s
view of Austrian history, the five years of Austro-fascist repression
between March 1933 and March 1938 are not unequivocally excluded
from the years of a republican existence, although Klestil refers to
the “internal lack of freedom” during these years.
1998 (80th anniversary)
All in all, we notice a regress after Kirchschläger’s speech in 1978
with respect to the concrete mentioning of the abolishment of the
republican name, but progress with respect to the question of mak-
ing National Socialism and Austrian National Socialist perpetrators a
concrete subject of the commemorative speeches. This development
can also be observed in the speech given by the then President of the
Federal Council, Alfred Gerstl, on 12 November, 1998:
(19) Today, we are still in danger of just seeing the most prominent perpetrators and
their victims when considering the events of March 1938. The silent majority, which
was neither perpetrator nor victim, formed the frameworks of the specific Austrian
collaboration with the National Socialist power. [. . .]
For far too long, the victim thesis, of having been occupied in the year 1938, made
a post-1945 policy possible that deprived the murdered, plundered and mercilessly
persecuted of what human rights demand: justice! The suffering cannot be compen-
sated for and, in no way, “made good again” [“wiedergutmachen”, M.R.]. But, justice
is the indispensable basis for a life worthy of a human being.40
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Nevertheless, a slightly mitigating tone is also inherent in Gerstl’s
statement where he stresses the aspect of collaboration. This emphasis
on the collaboration is reminiscent of the use of “sociative forma-
tions”, that is to say, of words such as “Mitschuld” (“joint guilt”), “joint
responsibility”, “complicity” and the verb “take part in”, lexical items
very often used by Austrian politicians with respect to National Social-
ism instead of simply and, in my view, morally correctly, speaking of
“guilt” and “responsibility”. Such “sociative formations” always imply
that there is a main guilt and a minor guilt. This wording clearly has
a relativising effect.
What prevails in all commemorative speeches on the foundation of
the Austrian Republic in the last decades is the positive “collective”
self-presentation in spite of references to negative aspects of the
Austrian history. The strategic rhetorical potential of the dark sides
of history for positive national self-presentation was also discovered
by Heinz Fischer. In 1998, Heinz Fischer, the then President of the
National Council, explicitly refers to the topos of comparison as a
strategy of positive self-presentation, when claiming that it should be
allowed to contrast the First Republic and the first years of the Second
Republic with the last four or five decades of the Second Republic:
(20) On the 80th birthday, it must be also permitted to refer to the many positive sides
of our balance sheet, which become particularly apparent if we compare the first 30
or 40 years of our Republic with the last 40, 50 years of our history.41
Here, Fischer offers an unclear temporal boundary resulting from the
ambivalence about the question of whether the period of occupation
by the four allied powers from 1945 to 1955 should be added to the
“bad” or the “good” decades of the Austrian history. This oscillation
can be interpreted as a result of multi-addressing. Apart from this,
we can observe with regard to Fischer that he does not make Austro-
fascism a subject of his speech in 1998, that he briefly mentions the
anti-Jewish pogroms in November 1938 (at this point, Fischer argues
that the mitigating term “Reichskristallnacht“ should be replaced by
the more adequate term “Reichspogromnacht”), and that he refers to
omissions and delays with respect to questions of dealing with the
National Socialist past and of restitution after 1945 in Austria, at-
tributing these omissions, besides political and historical factors, to
psychological reasons of an incapability to sorrow, speak and accuse,
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Justice and Memory.indb 231 02.11.2009 13:39:31
even on the part of former Nazi victims who became politicians after
World War II, for example Jochmann, Figl, Migsch, Olah, Lackner
and Gorbach.42
In the following piece of speech, the then President Thomas Klestil
refers to six breaks and turning points in the years from 1918 until
1998. Evoking the Austrian millenary myth, Klestil points out that,
during the previous 80 years, more breaks and caesuras had occurred
than in any other period in the “thousand year’s history” of Austria:
(21) In these 80 years between 1918 and 1998 there have surely been more breaks and
caesuras than in any other period of our thousand-year history:
There was the radical break in the year 1918 when, following the lost World War,
the small alpine republic with 6 million people remained as the remnants of the
Danube Republic [. . .].
There were the terrible breaks of the years 1927 and 1934 when the First Republic
resolved into irreconcilable camps that combated against each other bloodily until
democracy perished as well.
There was the year 1938, when Austria was extinguished as a state, when hundreds
of thousands disappeared in extermination camps, died in the war and hail of bomb-
ing, and innumerable persons were expelled.
And then came the so decisive turning point, when Austria was resurrected from
the ruins. [. . .]
And there was, of course, the so important caesura of the year 1955, when Austria
regained its freedom of action in foreign affairs through the State Treaty. This firm
foundation permitted the clear consciousness of Europe to grow that was expressed
so impressively in the national referendum on our becoming a member of the EU.
Finally, there was also another turning point, which changed our position in Europe:
I am speaking about the autumn of 1989, when the Cold War finished and the Iron
Curtain was cut through on our borders. [. . .]43
This enumeratio actually encompasses the major historical breaks
from 1918 until 1998. If we put aside that Klestil’s vocabulary veils the
National Socialist crimes and perpetrators behind the euphemistic
paraphrase “hundreds of thousands disappeared in extermination
camps” and that Klestil does not overtly refer to the years of Austro-
fascist domination, the list can, in my view, be considered as a handy
overview of important points that could become the subject of a con-
temporary commemorative speech on the occasion of the foundation
of the Austrian Republic.
Before focussing on the most recent Austrian commemoration of
the Republic’s foundation in November 2008, two remarks have to be
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made on person-related synecdoches that can repeatedly be identified
in the commemorative speeches in question:
(1) Diachronically speaking, particularising partes pro toto such as “the
Austrian“ – we had one example for this type of synecdoche in
Renner’s speech in 1948 – have become rarer in the commemora-
tive speeches in the last decades. One reason for this rhetorical
change is that it has become far more common knowledge among
politicians that such “collective anthroponymic singulars” usually
convey hastily generalising stereotypes. Thus, such particularis-
ing synecdoches are being replaced by other rhetorical tropes,
especially by metonymies which are based on toponyms (such
as “Austria”, “Germany”). However, such metonymies also often
contain a problematic generalisation and function not just as
metonymies, but also as generalising synecdoches.
(2) A second person-related synecdoche and metonymy have to be
mentioned here that have the rhetorical effect of constructing
personal and temporal continuity over a long period of time. The
synecdoche can be termed as “historically expanded we”, and the
respective metonymy as “historical we” – in analogy to the linguis-
tic concept of “historical present”. The metonymic “historical we”
refers to people who died a long time ago or suggests that the
actual speaker participated in historical processes that happened
before the speaker was even born. Such a “we” is often realised as
“national we”, if the community of reference is imagined as the
“own nation”. Instead, the synecdoche denominated “historically
expanded we” does not exclude the speaker if we look closely at
the historical point of reference of the respective utterance. When
Rudolf Kirchschläger, in his commemorative speech given in 1978,
speaks of the reparations “we had to pay after the First World
War”, the “we” helps to create a huge Austrian collective and to
bridge a long period of time. From a tropological point of view
the question arises whether Kirchschläger realised a “historically
expanded” or a “historical we”. Kirchschläger himself was born
in 1915. He was three years old in 1918 and did not have to pay
reparations himself. Nevertheless, this “we” used by Kirchschläger
is not a clear case of a metonymic “historical we”, but could be
seen as a “historically expanded we”, because a young child can
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Justice and Memory.indb 233 02.11.2009 13:39:32
also suffer from the reparations paid by the generation of her or
his parents.
2008 (90th anniversary)
The question of how the 90th anniversary of the foundation of the
Austrian Republic is commemorated in November 2008 remains.
The highest political representatives such as President Heinz Fischer,
Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer and President of the National Assem-
bly Barbara Pramer hardly stand out positively from their oratorical
predecessors in 1998 with respect to the dealing with Austro-fascism
and National Socialism in their speeches. But one speech of a non-
politician has to be highlighted: the speech by Johanna Rachinger,
Director General of the Austrian National Library, who was invited to
speak as the final official orator in the Joint Commemorative Sitting
of the National and Federal Assembly on 12 November 2008. Rachinger
stressed the deep historical caesura between the First and the Second
Austrian Republic:
(22) History founds identity. In order to know who we are, we must know where we
come from. As Robert Menasse once stated, anniversaries easily get into the elegiac
atmosphere of funerals. Nothing but good things are allowed to be affirmed about
the celebrated. However, a great chance could also lie in 2008, which is a year of
multiple commemorations, namely the chance to reach a new self-understanding
of our present through a critical analysis and re-evaluation of our past. “90 Years of
the Republic of Austria” – we all know that in this several inaccuracies immediately
resonate, as for at least for seven years there was neither a republic nor a sovereign
state at all. And since the abolition of the parliament in March 1933 and the con-
stitution of the Austro-fascist corporate state in May 1934, there was no democratic
Austria any longer. This temporary abolition of an autonomous democratic Austrian
state and the entanglement into National Socialist wrong and blame mark a deep
caesura between the First and the Second Republic and determine our political self-
understanding and national identity until today. Differently from other European
nation states, the two dates of birth of the present democratic Austria – one of the
First and the other of the Second – are rather characterised by crises of identity,
by self-doubts and half-truths than by a euphoric, established national idea. But
the Austrian characteristic and strength probably lies especially in this, namely the
insight that cultural identity is something which does not simply fall into one’s lap,
but has to be found in a ponderous process of self-reflection.44
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Justice and Memory.indb 234 02.11.2009 13:39:32
Here, the orator explicitly refers to the inexactitude of the synec-
dochic claim expressed in the commemorative motto: “90 Years of
Republic of Austria”. Rachinger exposes the historical breaks that
are rhetorically covered up by the temporal synecdoche. Rachinger
follows Menasse (who is among the public intellectuals who criticise
Austrian politicians most loudly for their tendency to relativize the
Austro-fascist past) and removes a long-lasting blind spot in the public
Austrian commemoration. In doing so, she also critically reflects on
a meta-level on the democratic scope, rules and limits of different
interpretations of historical truth:
(23) And it is probably no coincidence that particularly the opinions regarding the
assessment of the epoch of the corporate state strongly diverge up to now, depending
on the political camp. On the one hand, there still continues the attempt to justify
the Austro-fascism as if it were a harmless Austrian variant of fascism, the declared
aim of which was to defend the independence of Austria from Hitler Germany until
the end. On the other hand, it must clearly be stated that Engelbert Dollfuß dissoci-
ated himself from the model of a democratic republic wilfully and purposefully with
the corporate state constitution from 1 May 1934, and erected a one-party dictator-
ship that he himself called fascist. In this, it becomes apparent for us today that the
interpretation and evaluation of history has a lot to do with one’s own formation of
identity and one’s own self-perception and – therefore – leads to different results
depending on the political group. This leeway for different interpretations of history
is not negative per se; it must rather have its place in a consolidated democracy. Both
the freedom of scientific research and the personal freedom of speech are basic values
which come into play here. But it is also clear that there are limits, that the leeway
towards history is only possible within the framework of a fundamental consent, a
consent which forms the basis for the existence of a society. To define the limits of
a respective interpretation of history is a sensible task for every society. Considering
the National Socialist epoch we undoubtedly meet with such a limitation on free-
dom of speech. A principally positive representation of the NS period, associated
with a denial of its crimes is outside a basic social consent towards history today. A
fundamental distancing from the crimes of National Socialism must be a common
ideological basis of all political parties in Austria today. And every attempt, even the
smallest, to abandon this consent must be branded as a political scandal. In reverse,
there remains a noticeable disquiet wherever the state fixes the historical truth by
law. State power can too easily be abused for the repression of unpleasant discussion
and for the violent establishment of a questionable official image of history.45
Comparably clear statements about the Austro-fascist period which
abruptly terminated the First Republic have not been uttered before
during the Joint Commemorative Sittings of the National and Fed-
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Justice and Memory.indb 235 02.11.2009 13:39:32
eral Council on the occasion of the anniversary of the foundation of
the Austrian Republic. We will see in the future whether Rachinger
managed to set commemorative standards with her speech.
4. Conclusions and some advice
We can summarise that in the first decades after 1945, political ora-
tors commemorating the proclamation of the Austrian Republic in
November 1918 scarcely refer to the National Socialist crimes and
even less to Austro-fascist cruelties, but neither do they tend towards
constructing synecdochic “rounding up” bridges as often as their
political successors. If they mention National Socialism, they recur-
rently represent it metaphorically as a sort of natural catastrophe
suffered by the Austrians, and as a non-Austrian, foreign imposition
(topos or fallacy of heteronomy). Repeatedly, the metaphor of birth is
utilised in order to imply Austrian innocence with respect to National
Socialist brutalities. Austro-fascism is hardly ever made a subject of
the speeches until recently. Especially in the 1990s, politicians start
to mention less abstractly some of the Austrian Nazi crimes but, at
the same time, they increasingly resort to the rhetorical strategy of
the temporal rounding up.
As for future anniversaries, Johanna Rachinger’s speech could be
indicative with respect to her avoidance of bridging incisive historical
breaks and suggesting historical continuity by rhetorical tropes, and
with respect to her unambiguous reference to Austro-fascism and
National Socialism. The wish list of a speech critic advising future
• If possible, political orators should attempt to date historical turn-
political orators in Austria could include the following points:
ing points that become the subject of their speeches clearly and
• If possible, political orators should name historical breaks as
unequivocally.
breaks and not bridge them by using persuasive rhetorical figures,
although there is no doubt that nobody can do without tropes in
• Politicians commemorating the foundation of the Austrian Republic
their language, since nowhere is there a language free of tropes.
should explicitly refer to the substitution of the name “federal state”
for “democratic republic” in 1934 under the authoritarian Austro-
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Justice and Memory.indb 236 02.11.2009 13:39:32
fascist regime. It still seems difficult for many politicians to speak
about the clear end of the First Republic. There is a lack of clarity in
respect of this far-reaching historical break, which can even be found
in various books by historians and political scientists: Often, the year
1938 is indicated as the concrete date of the end of the First Republic.
Sometimes, 1934 is meant to be the year in which the First Republic
was abolished. Occasionally, both dates ambiguously alternate in one
and the same piece of text. In contrast to these ambiguous representa-
tions, the abolition of the republican constitution and its replacement
by the Austro-fascist constitution in 1934 should unequivocally be
•
mentioned in the respective commemorative speeches.
Negative aspects of the Austrian history should not be utilised for
•
the purpose of positive rhetorical self-presentation.
Social actors, both perpetrators and victims, should not be disguised
behind abstract formulations (for example metonymies), nominali-
•
sations and passivations.
The use of the mitigating sociative formations (“Mitschuld”, “Mitver-
antwortung”) should be avoided. Instead, politicians should simply
speak of “guilt” and “responsibility” when referring to Nationalist
•
Socialist crimes committed by Austrians.
The temporal rounding-up synecdoche should be avoided. The
foundation of the Republic in 1918 can, and should be, commemo-
rated without falsely presupposing a continuative existence.
Notes
1 RICŒUR 1996: p. 173.
2 I would like to thank Robert McInnes and Paul Sarazin for correcting my Eng-
lish.
3 REISIGL 2006: p. 597.
4 For more details see, among others, REISIGL 2006: pp. 599 ff.
5 See ibid.: p. 598.
6 See ibid.: pp. 598 ff., where the trope of metonymy is explained and illustrated
as well.
7 Cf. PLETT 2001: pp. 92-94, LAUSBERG 1990: pp. 295-298; MORIER 1989:
pp. 1159-1175, ZIMMERMANN 1990 and GRODDECK 1995: pp. 205-220.
8 Cf. PLETT 2001: pp. 92-94, see also REISIGL 2006: p. 602.
9 See PALONEN 1995.
10 BURKE 1969: p. 508.
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Justice and Memory.indb 237 02.11.2009 13:39:38
11 Also reproduced in REISIGL 2003: p. 253.
12 See ibid.: pp. 252–258.
13 See KÖSTENBERGER 2008: p. 610.
14 See ibid.: pp. 612–619.
15 Quoted in JOCHUM, OLBORT 1998: pp. 17 ff.
16 See KÖSTENBERGER 2008: pp. 618 f.
17 Renner’s radio speech is quoted in ÖSTERREICHISCHE BUNDESREGIERUNG
1950: p. 87.
18 Renner employs this exculpating argumentation scheme again and again in his
speeches.
19 Quoted in ÖSTERREICHISCHE BUNDESREGIERUNG 1948: pp. 1f.
20 Quoted in ÖSTERREICHISCHE STAATSDRUCKEREI 1968: p. 10.
21 Quoted in ibid.: p. 10.
22 Quoted in ibid.: p. 8.
23 Quoted in ibid.: p. 8.
24 See Reisigl 2007.
25 Quoted in ÖSTERREICHISCHE STAATSDRUCKEREI 1968: p. 4.
26 See WODAK, DE CILLIA, REISIGL, LIEBHART 2009: pp. 85f.
27 Quoted in ÖSTERREICHISCHE STAATSDRUCKEREI 1978: p. 6.
28 Quoted in ibid.: p. 6.
29 Quoted in ibid.: p. 8.
30 Quoted in ibid.: p. 10.
31 Quoted in ibid.: p. 12.
32 Quoted in ÖSTERREICHISCHE STAATSDRUCKEREI 1993: p. 11.
33 Quoted in ibid.: p. 11.
34 Quoted in ibid.: p. 14.
35 BURGER 1996: p. 40.
36 See WODAK, DE CILLIA, REISIGL, LIEBHART 2009: p. 80.
37 Quoted in ÖSTERREICHISCHE STAATSDRUCKEREI 1993: p. 14.
38 Quoted in ibid.: p. 14.
39 Quoted in ibid.: p. 17.
40 Quoted in ÖSTERREICHISCHE STAATSDRUCKEREI 1998: p. 6.
41 Quoted in ibid.: p. 15.
42 Ibid.: p. 14.
43 Quoted in ibid.: p. 20.
44 Translation of the German transcript from the video recording of the speech
broadcasted live on the Austrian state television ORF on 12 November 2008.
45 Translation of the German transcript from the video recording of the speech
broadcasted live on the Austrian state television ORF on 12 November 2008.
238
Justice and Memory.indb 238 02.11.2009 13:39:38
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1998.
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Sprache im Konflikt. Zur Rolle der Sprache in sozialen, politischen und
militärischen Auseinandersetzungen, Berlin–New York: de Gruyter,
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9th edition 2001.
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in O. PANAGL, H. STÜRMER (eds.), Politische Konzepte und ver-
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Images of the “Other” and
Danish Politics of the Past:
Anti-Semitism, Xenophobia and the
Dream of Homogeneity
Thorsten Wagner
I. Cartoons and Violence – an Abrupt Awakening
Seen against the backdrop of the traumas of 20th century European
history, Denmark seems to stand out as having been spared most of
the civic strife and the catastrophes of the past century. It overcame
this period of wars, dictatorships and social upheavals with relative
integrity and stability. For many years, though, the Danish narrative
of the period of World War II was – in spite of its heterogeneous
character – nevertheless most often dominated by a combination of
a sense of victimisation and a pride in the heroic resistance against
Nazi politics of persecution. The presumably few exceptions, the
Nazi sympathizers and collaborators, were easily singled out and
stigmatised as traitors and criminals.1
The predominance of this benign understanding of recent Danish
history has been challenged in a growing degree over recent years. But
it seems as if it took the violent protests in the wake of the Cartoon
Crisis in 2006 to shake Danish self-confidence, and thus to mark a
turning point and foster new questions about the past and present
of Danish society. The anger of Arab and Muslim demonstrators
and the destroyed embassies provided the set of images that came
to symbolise a belated revision of the long-standing perception and
self-perception of Denmark that had been underway for years. A
nation that had been either overlooked or celebrated as a benign,
cute dwarf and a role model for civic courage and social justice, now
“suddenly” seemed to stick out as an object of hatred, siding with
the presumable “villains” of international politics such as the US or
Israel. In a domestic Danish context, for some the Dannebrog burning
next to the Israeli and American flags became a wake-up call, a source
241
Justice and Memory.indb 241 02.11.2009 13:39:39
of confusion, discomfort, and irritation, questioning the somewhat
dull self-indulgence of the small nation.
Even if one chooses neither to interpret the publication of the
cartoons of the prophet Mohammed as a heroic fight for the free-
dom of speech and against Islamic domination of the world, nor as
a (presumably) illegitimate attack on religious feelings or a symbol
of demonising the Muslim minority in Denmark, the Cartoon Crisis
brought certain issues to the fore that had implications reaching far
beyond the context of day-to-day politics: issues of perceptions and
self-perceptions, issues of ethnic/cultural homogeneity and diversity,
and especially also the issue of the sweet dream of Danish – and by
extension Scandinavian – exceptionalism.
This essay focuses on the question, what impact the issues of defin-
ing the national community in terms of cultural and ethnic homo-
geneity have had on the hegemonic culture of memory in Denmark,
especially regarding World War II and the Holocaust. How does anti-
Semitism figure in this equation? And what implications does this web
of issues about coming to terms with diversity have for present-day
ideological and political conflicts on the “integration” of immigrants?
As a starting-point, the question has to be addressed which traumatic
pasts actually did play a role in Danish history. Taking it from there,
the issue of Jewish/Non-Jewish relations in Denmark will be used as
a case study of Danish politics of the past.
II. Danish Traumatic Pasts?
How does Denmark remember its past? Which past is commemo-
rated? Are there traumatic pasts that are remembered and have
consequences for the present? The most conspicuous aspect about
the more recent Danish national historical experience seems to be
the absence of traumas: No massive civil strife, no huge numbers of
casualties, almost no material destruction of Danish cities or territo-
rial losses were caused by the wars of the 20th century. Danish society
made it through the turmoil of the first half of the century without
been torn between perpetrators and victims, oppressors and perse-
cuted minorities. But of course there is a large trauma in modern
Danish history, and it has a name: Germany.
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Justice and Memory.indb 242 02.11.2009 13:39:39
Dybbøl and the Consequences
The trauma Germany became especially relevant since the 19th cen-
tury: Though Denmark’s status as a major player in regional politics
– the composite state of Denmark-Norway controlling large parts
of Northern Europe from the North Cape to the Elbe, including
Atlantic territories such as Greenland and the Faroe Islands – had
already been substantially reduced by the loss of Norway in 1814, the
most significant symbolic date is the year 1864. In the aftermath of
the defeat at Dybbøl, the Danish King lost his control over the Duch-
ies of Schleswig and Holstein, and the Danish Commonwealth ap-
proximately 1/3 of its population and of its territory – constituting
the most modern and industrialized part. Left with the still less eco-
nomically developed and primarily agricultural parts and truncated
in terms of economic potential and political power, the urban elites
of Denmark were substantially weakened. Their national aspirations
had been frustrated massively, and the burgeoning new dominant
class of small-holding farmers wound up to be the dominant group
in redefining national identity and politics.2
Appeasing Germany
Their interpretations of history and their concepts of society set the
stage for a non-confrontationist, non-belligerent foreign policy that
dominated the truncated new nation state of Denmark, embedded
in a self-perception of ethnic and cultural homogeneity, as the multi-
cultural and multi-ethnic character of the composite state had been
lost. The trauma of defeat, culminating in Bismarck’s annexation of
the Duchies a few years later, generated an element of irredentism
within the Danish body politic, an eagerness to support the Danish
minority in the occupied territories and to achieve a border revision.
But even these aspirations were overruled by the existential threat
that Prussia, and soon the new-founded German Empire meant to the
very existence of an independent Danish state. Germanic, romanticist
notions of Scandinavia and the “North”, intertwined with an element
of economic and military expansionism seemed to question the raison
d’être of the Danish Kingdom as an independent entity. Enforced by
the “realpolitik” of power politics of the imperialist era of European
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history, Denmark sought to keep close to its British trade partners,
but even after the “Reunification” of Northern Schleswig with the
Kingdom in 1920 as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty and its
politics of referenda, the Danish elites saw no reason to challenge
the big neighbour to the South.
The Occupation
Thus, with Denmark’s fairly pacifist and non-belligerent foreign
policy, on April 9th 1940, the stage was set for the re-enacting or at
least re-activating of the trauma of 1864: On the day of Operation
Weserübung, there neither was a political will nor a military option of
substantial resistance, and the fighting ceased after only a few hours.
Conquered with ease, the Danish government and elites established
the ramifications of a rather exceptional “peaceful occupation”: the
illusion of continued independence was bought with a significant
degree of political, administrative, and especially economic collabo-
ration.
While primarily the political and religious minorities suffered from
persecution (especially the Communists) or from fear of the same
(the Danish Jewish Community), only a marginal segment of the
Danish population, mostly on the fringes of the political spectrum,
perceived the collective humiliation and national shame as a sufficient
reason for active resistance activities – at least as long as the German
war machinery was successful. The majority, however, was quietist
and passive – be it for tactical reasons (fearing a collapse of the fairly
gentle occupation regime) or out of personal interest in safeguard-
ing their profiteering as farmers or entrepreneurs. In the long run,
though, and with the receding attractiveness of collaborationism, the
German occupation of Denmark ended up being experienced as a
hitherto unknown trauma for national identity, and in 1945 the vast
majority literally or mentally joined the ranks of the Freedom Fighters
of the resistance movement. The previous divisiveness now created a
desperate need for patriotic memories, and after a surprisingly short
period of political conflict, a consensual reading of the immediate
past attained hegemonic status soon after the end of the war: Though
choosing different modes of objecting to Nazi power, the vast majority
of Danes supposedly had been part of the resistance fight – whether
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they had sought to appease Berlin by limited “cooperation” or had
salvaged the pride of the nation by actively fighting the occupiers.
The Domestic Dimension: The “Danish Path” to Modernity
This strong urge for a shared – even if very selective – memory of
the occupation period, covering up real conflicts of interest and radi-
cally different modes of behaviour, had its equivalent in the domestic
arena. The dominant narrative of Danish foreign policy, emphasis-
ing the need to appease the external threat, was interwoven with a
hegemonic interpretation of Denmark’s way into the modern world:
The Danish path to modernisation, democracy, and industrialisation
obviously did create certain social tensions and conflicts. But after
all, these were presumably dealt with within a paradigm of peaceful
settlements and smooth compromises. Several preconditions and nar-
rative components are part of this image of Danish modernisation.
First of all, the emphasis is on the broad and early success of the Ref-
ormation in Denmark. The soon to be achieved predominance of the
Lutheran church prevented confessional strife and religious-cultural
cleavages. Secondly, the comparably early and thorough establishment
of absolutist rule in the mid-17th century destroyed the aspirations
of the landed aristocracy for power and influence early on. Thirdly,
the concept and self-representation of a “benevolent”, father-like
monarch enabled the regime to claim the credit for the comprehen-
sive agrarian reforms of the late 18th century. These reforms solved
pressing land use issues and, thus, paved the way for a stable lower
middle class of small-holding, landowning farmers participating in
national politics and constituting the backbone of a political move-
ment that was able to enforce a system of mass education and succes-
sive economic and political democratisation. This provided the basis
for Grundloven: The constitution of 1848/49 established the system
of constitutional monarchy without revolution and bloodshed. And
finally, industrialisation came late, but proceeded fairly smoothly and
without major crises, reined in by class compromises and a thorough
democratization of society, letting the Danish Workers’ Movement,
its reformist unions and its Social Democratic Party inherit the he-
gemonic power that had been achieved some decades earlier by the
liberal movement of the small-holders and urban intellectuals.3
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Room for Diversity? The Danish Path and the Jewish Question
This hegemonic paradigm of memory obviously glosses over those
aspects of Danish history that do not fit the concept of peaceful and
harmonious development. Thus, it marginalises the conflicts of in-
terest that were part and parcel of the mentioned agrarian reforms,
as much as it tends to ignore the fact that the first Danish-German
War of 1848–50 actually rather has to be described as a civil war,
with different political and ethnic-cultural factions within the Dan-
ish Commonwealth clashing with each other. First and foremost,
though, it is interwoven with the dream of cultural homogeneity and
therefore it touches on the linchpin, if not even the Achilles heel of
the liberal ideologies and policies of the European bourgeoisie: the
Jewish Question. The political project of a society of equal citizens
implied the issue, whether equality and civic rights were to be granted
only to white, male (land-owning?) Europeans – and by extension it
brought up the issue, whether male, middle-class Jews could be part
of this citizenry.
III. Anti-Semitism in Denmark: the litmus test of a successful democracy?
1. Conventional truisms: Anti-Semitism as a non-Danish phenomenon
To many observers, the most salient event in the history of the Jews
of Denmark was their successful attempt to escape the Nazi roundup
action of October 1943. As hundreds of non-Jewish Danes assisted
them, this rescue operation over the Øresund added to the trium-
phalist narrative of successful integration that dominates the per-
ception of Danish-Jewish history. This narrative, augmented by the
sense of gratitude displayed by many Danish Jews for the rejection
of anti-Semitism, has helped to view Danish Jews as the exceptional
case of the European-Jewish experience.
To be sure, if one views this history in the light of a European
comparative perspective, pre-emancipation privileges were more
extensive and the process of Danish-Jewish acculturation and social
integration in the course of the nineteenth century went smoother
than in many other countries. No comprehensive and pervasive sys-
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tem of preconditions – in terms of a quid pro quo of assimilation
for equal rights – was established, the emancipation legislation of the
early 19th century was neither procrastinated nor rescinded, and no
political, let alone violent anti-Semitic movement developed. But these
aspects of the Jewish experience in Denmark have become crystallised
into a version of Danish nation-building that is highly selective and
benevolent, for example overlooking the underlying demands for a
successive relinquishing of one’s cultural distinctiveness and alterity
as a group.4 Within the framework of an international discourse on
the rise and fall, the blossoming and destruction of European Jewry,
this historical image of the Danish “exception” has served as the
antithesis to the notion of the project of a modern European Jewish
existence doomed to fail. The only dissertation on Danish-Jewish
history published so far, Nathan Bamberger’s Viking Jews, traced this
presumably exceptional phenomenon throughout modern Danish his-
tory and concluded: “In the admirable history of Danish Jewry, one
cannot overlook the Danes’ strong humanistic values, their sense of
decency, and their care for all citizens.”5 In some cases, this has been
reinforced by the rise of the Holocaust paradigm in the interpreta-
tion of the history of World War II and the 20th century in general.
Organisations such as “Thanks to Scandinavia” promote the Danish
commitment to human dignity and ethical values in World War II
as a role model for moral behavior today by stating: “The selfless
and heroic effort of the Scandinavian people through the dark days
of Nazi Terror is a shining example of humanity and hope for now
and tomorrow.”6 In addition, books such as Moral Courage Under Stress
and The Test of a Democracy, attest to this glorification of the Danish
past in a Jewish perspective.7 Over the last two decades, especially in
the collective memory of American Jews, Denmark has become the
light in the darkness in a Nazi-dominated Europe bogged down by the
collaborators’ active complicity and the bystanders’ indifference.
This dominating perception of Denmark as a Righteous Nation
– even honored as such by Yad Vashem – is intertwined with a specific
understanding of the history of Danish-Jewish relations.
Frequently, scholars, journalists, and other intellectuals have pre-
sented “October 1943” as proof of the irrelevance or even absence
of anti-Jewish resentment in modern Danish society. Similar to the
case of England, anti-Semitism is understood to be an essentially un-
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Danish phenomenon. The roots of this concept are manifold: Danes
are supposedly carrying an innate immunity against Jew-hatred – an
immunity that either is defined in an essentialist way, by pointing to
the humane and tolerant national character of the Danish people,
or in historical terms, by referring to a specifically smooth “Danish
Path” into a democratic, pluralistic, modern society. Furthermore,
dubbing anti-Semitism as an import – a German import – without
autochthonous roots and traditions, helped to reinforce this notion of
immunity. Finally, reference is often made to the specific nature of the
Jewish community in Denmark, its “invisibility,” caused by the small
number of Jews and their high degree of acculturation and integra-
tion. The successful story of integration and the notion of innate tol-
erance have contributed to dramatic lacunae of critical research both
in terms of Danish-Jewish history and the history of anti-Semitism in
Denmark.8 There is no need to investigate an issue that is perceived
to be non-existent. Furthermore, the interpretative confinement
of the concept of anti-Semitism as un-Danish has frequently been
accompanied by an often implicit comparative perspective that rein-
forced the notion of immunity. If German racial anti-Semitism and
systematic genocide provide the standard of comparison, one may
perceive other xenophobic and anti-Jewish stereotypes as marginal.
Single unequivocal expressions of anti-Semitism are, therefore, dis-
missed as irrelevant exceptions rather than investigating the origins,
traditions and functions of these concepts and exploring the ways
in which they have been instrumental in construing individual and
collective identities by defining the Jew as “the other”.9
2. Neglected Perspectives
This specific narrative of Danish and Danish-Jewish history implies
toning down the more problematic issues of nationalism and integra-
tion in the Danish case. Some of these issues illustrate crucial aspects
of Danish self-perception and concepts of community under scrutiny
here, though.
An example of this is the “Literary Feud”, the flurry of pamphlets
and articles that for many months discussed the status of the Jews in
Danish society in the wake of the state’s economic disaster of 1813.
Not only did a significant number of authors hold Jews responsible for
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the bankruptcy – quite a few among them described Jews as parasitic
and alien to the Danish nation. Such conclusions implicitly defined
the Danish nation in religiously Christian and ethnocentric terms.
While Enlightenment figures that had dominated the discourse on
the “Jewish Question” of earlier decades had underlined the need for
“civic betterment and regeneration,” they still had upheld the basic
principle of perfectibility. But with the gradual marginalisation of
these positions, the intense public debate of these years brought at-
titudes to the fore that presumed the impossibility of Jews becoming
Danes.10 In the decades to follow, Romanticist intellectuals rose to be-
come the dominating opinion makers. Thus, it comes as no surprise
that the only non-German territory to which the HepHep pogroms
of 1819 spread to was Denmark. In the capital as well as in a number
of towns in the province, the well-calculated and partly intentionally
provoked violence of the alleged “mob” turned against Jews and their
property. In 1830, this outbreak of anti-Jewish, anti-emancipationist
violence with ideological, political and economic underpinnings was
repeated on a smaller scale.
In the 1830s and 1840s, the Estate Assemblies finally discussed the
question of complete Jewish emancipation. Many deputies voiced
strong opinions against granting further rights to Jews, and rural
clerics, often depicted as the avant-garde of democratisation and
liberal values, rejected Jewish integration and legal equality on a
combination of ethnicist and religious grounds: Jews could never
become Danes because the core of being Danish was a profession of
Christianity and the essence of being Jewish was to belong to a nation
alien to the Danish people.
For the time being, the government made no further progress in
terms of Jewish emancipation. In fact, one of the most influential
contemporaries, Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, the poet, politi-
cian, and patron saint of a supposedly tolerant and civic version of
nationalism and arguably the most important Danish theologian,
spoke out publicly against Jewish emancipation on similar ethnicist
and religious grounds. In general, Grundtvig had a hard time finding
arguments against further Jewish rights, which would not be all too
self-contradictory. Nevertheless, he favored a policy that would deny
Jews suffrage and prevent their eligibility by prohibiting them land
ownership, the prerequisite for all suffrage rights. Furthermore, when
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Meïr Goldschmidt, the illustrious Danish-Jewish writer, participated
in the heated debate over Schleswig in 1848–49, Grundtvig denied
him the right to contribute to a discussion on an issue of such eminent
national importance, since he – being a Jew – was and always would
remain a guest in Denmark.11
After full emancipation was achieved with the constitution of 1849,
the successful democratisation of Danish society and its economic
stability in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century
did provide the prerequisites for a society fairly capable of integrating
both the Jewish community as well as the few other immigrant com-
munities. However, this did not imply any kind of immunity against
racism, neither in a historical perspective nor in regard to present
problems and debates. Not only did it repeatedly become clear that
the high degree of ethnic homogeneity of the Danish population
proved to imply its own trappings: a homogeneity reinforced by the
all but monopoly of the Lutheran “State Church”. Furthermore,
traditions of xenophobia and racism can be traced back to a defini-
tion of Danishness that amalgamated ethnic and religious criteria:
In this context, intellectuals and writers had repeatedly provided the
key arguments by mobilising the resistance against an extension of
Jewish rights or even explicitly arguing against Jewish emancipation
on religious grounds. Grundtvig constituted a key figure in this line
of tradition, providing a link between the discourses of the eighteenth
and the early twentieth century. One may view his ambiguous stand
on the issue of inclusion and exclusion as emblematic of the history
of Danish-Jewish relations.
In the late 1870s, Hans Lassen Martensen, Zealand’s (and by ex-
tension, Copenhagen’s) bishop, in his widely disseminated Christian
Ethics, did not display much interest in observant Judaism.12 His
obsession was rather with modern, assimilated and emancipated
Jews, constituting the primary force undermining the concept of the
Christian nation state. According to Martensen, the Jews had joined
forces with individualistic hedonism, materialistic capitalism, radical
skepticism and anticlerical liberalism, and now they were taking the
lead in a forceful attempt to destroy the organically grown Christian
state. Martensens keywords were dissolution and destruction, and
the means for this purpose was supposedly the Jews’ influence in the
economy, in the press and in politics. For him, the government had
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made a mistake granting emancipation to the Jews and now the former
guests had turned into despotic rulers. Both lines of reasoning had a
significant influence on the debates in Denmark after World War I.
As Martensen dismissed traditional Judaism as a set of meaningless
rituals, at the same time he identified an urban, upper-middle class
culture that was hostile to the Christian establishment in the Jewish
free-thinker Georg Brandes. Thus by bracketing modern Judaism
with secular Copenhagen and modern culture, he had linked the
crucial topoi of the interwar period.13
In spite of the slow integration of East European Jews who immi-
grated since the turn of the century, the speed with which the Jews
of the Kingdom had climbed the social ladder and had gained ac-
ceptance was remarkable. In 1931, their average annual income was
twice as high as the national average, though with a strong internal
differentiation. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Danes per-
ceived the Jews of the Kingdom increasingly as compatriots. But in
contrast to the post-1945 view of Danish history that portrayed anti-
Semitism as irrelevant, anti-Semitism did play an important role in
Danish society. This becomes clear, when the changing images of
“the Jew” and their political implications in the course of historical
events are examined: from the perception of the Jewish Question as
being imminent and urgent after World War I, to the reactions to the
challenge of Nazi Germany, and finally to the dilemmas of occupa-
tion itself.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, conservative authors
often pointed to the Jewish Question as being pressing and highly
problematic. Their views were also shared by nationalist movements
reacting to the immigration of Eastern European Jews to Denmark
and the alleged participation of a disproportionate number of Jews
in the Russian Revolution. After the Nazi rise to power, the refugee
problem became an issue in Denmark, as political and economic
considerations as well as anti-Semitic attitudes guided politicians,
diplomats, and bureaucrats. For example, the government’s memo-
randa and drafts for its refugee policy often contained anti-Jewish
stereotypes. In addition, diplomats as well as police officers regularly
voiced harsh anti-Jewish arguments against immigration.
Furthermore, the reaction to Nazi anti-Jewish discrimination and
violence in Germany is quite telling: frequently, statements are to be
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found that show a high degree of understanding for the Nazi book-
burning, as the Jews supposedly had a much too large, detrimental,
and morally corrosive effect on German society, or that describe the
so-called Reichskristallnacht as the result of a “stupid crime” commit-
ted by Herschel Grünspan. The negative climax of this discourse in
Danish society is marked by the op-ed in the moderate right-wing
newspaper Jyllands-Posten the day after the November Pogrom of
1938, justifying it as a legitimate act of German self-defense against
Jewish power. Most importantly, though, was the assumption that a
higher number of Jews in Denmark, or a higher degree of visibility in
Danish society would create a “Jewish Problem” in Denmark as well.
This discursive pattern reveals the underlying anti-Semitic concept
of community: Danish Jews can be “tolerated” to some degree – as
long as they comply with the demands of the hegemonic majority
discourse for “invisibility”, that is for abandoning ethnical and/or
cultural distinctiveness.
3. Recent Debates and New Research
Some of these aspects of the Danish Past have started to become part
of the academic discourse on history and of the politics of memory in
Denmark. More recent research pursued by a younger generation of
Danish scholars has begun to question the narrative of heroic human-
ism that would imply immunity against fascism and anti-Semitism.
For example, Lone Rünitz’s investigation of the government’s restric-
tive refugee policy in the interwar period14 and the Danish Center
for Holocaust and Genocide Studies’s study of German and Aus-
trian Jewish immigrants who attempted to seek refuge in Denmark
are just two examples of this more critical research.15 In addition,
Michael Mogensen has examined the anti-Semitic attitudes prevalent
among the members of the Danish exile community in Sweden,16
and together with Rasmus Kreth, has produced the first thorough
research on the rescue operation itself.17 Mogensen and Kreth have
stressed the importance of the Swedes’ willingness to help and of the
intentional passivity of key German authorities. In addition to this,
their research has highlighted the less flattering fact that the much-
celebrated Danish fishermen sailing the Jews to the safe shores of
Sweden frequently demanded exorbitant payments which in no way
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was justifiable by reference to their personal risk and often legitimised
by anti-Semitic references to Jewish wealth. Furthermore, Sofie Bak
has published an introductory survey of the representations of the
rescue operation in Danish post-war historiography and memorial
culture.18 In addition, her work on Danish anti-Semitic movements in
the early twentieth century is groundbreaking.19 In the framework of
these attempts of reevaluation, a more critical view of the policy of
collaboration has developed. “Cooperation” that implied the accept-
ance and implementation of limited discriminatory measures against
Danish Jews actually did lead to an offer by the Danish authorities to
intern Danish Jews in September 1943 in an attempt to prevent the
SS and Gestapo from pursuing a round-up.
In addition to this, I have argued elsewhere that though an aggres-
sive racial anti-Semitism only found little support in milieus affiliated
with the Lutheran Church, negative stereotypes both about Jews and
Judaism nevertheless were widespread and constituted core elements
of identity formation and group formation in these milieus. The
weakness of racial anti-Semitism did not at all prevent anti-Jewish
stereotypes from being disseminated and influential even in the face
of Nazism. While anti-Semitism found no home in symbolic poli-
tics, legislation or jurisdiction, it did receive sympathy in regard to
administrative practice and political debates. Anti-Semitic attitudes
were in no way delegitimised on a wholesale basis before the German
occupation of the country and before the “Final Solution” began to
cast its shadow on Denmark. The rescue of Danish Jewry in October
1943 notwithstanding, negative perceptions and attitudes towards
Jews and Judaism played a conspicuous role in Danish society in the
first half of the twentieth century. Danish politicians, theologians and
journalists contributed significantly to this by relating the reflection
on Jewish issues to anti-pluralist missionary ambitions or anti-modern-
ist and anti-capitalist discourses. Only when the turn of events forced
them to frame these issues in terms of the dilemma of collaboration
versus resistance and the specific challenge involved for the Church,
categories such as the protection of human rights or ethnic and cul-
tural diversity gained ground. Thus, traditions of anti-Judaism and
varying modes of consent with modern anti-Semitic concepts were
not delegitimised as such before the occupation and the rescue action
– as an act of national resistance – enforced a process of rethinking in
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milieus affiliated with the Church. Only then, the episcopal protest
against the Judenaktion grew into a consensual expression of popular
contempt for the occupation regime. In turn, existing anti-Jewish
attitudes did not become a hindrance to the national project of pro-
tecting the Danish Jews – as Danes – from persecution and death.20
4. Old and New Forms of Anti-Semitic Discourse
But nevertheless, this critical revision of Danish history has by far not
grown into a new consensus or base for Danish political discourse, on
the contrary: In 1999, the nationalist-conservative publishing house
Tidehverv, run by Jesper Langballe and Søren Krarup, right-wing
theologians and clerics, republished Martin Luther’s On the Jews and
their Lies. Langballe and Krarup are also both highly influential mem-
bers of parliament for the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti), a
populist radical right-wing party that constitutes the parliamentary
basis of the present center-right government. In the introduction,
the editors stress the work’s “contemporary relevance” in affirmative
terms without any critical commentary, while employing anti-Jewish
traditions to legitimise their xenophobic populist agenda. In light of
the enduring positive image of Danish-Jewish history, this republica-
tion – and even more the fact that it did not provoke any academic
protest, let alone public outcry – indicates that this positive perception
deserves more scrutiny.
Recently, however, a series of newspaper articles that focused on
Krarup and his anti-Jewish rhetoric sparked public criticism of these
tendencies. Repeatedly, Krarup has attempted to exculpate Harald
Nielsen, a writer who welcomed Nazi anti-Semitic legislation and
favoured the introduction of the Jewish star. Krarup has also sympa-
thised with Nielsen´s attack on the Danish-Jewish liberal politician,
writer and literary scholar Georg Brandes by stating, “Because of his
Jewish blood he felt no reverence towards or intimate connection with
the country’s past.”21 Krarup reacted to allegations of anti-Semitism
by emphasizing his rejection of racism and racial anti-Semitism as
ideologies incommensurate with a Christian worldview. He also
emphasised that his family had fought in the national-conservative
resistance against the Nazi occupiers in Denmark. Through his ref-
erence to Christian convictions and nationalist orientations, Krarup
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positioned himself in line with key dimensions of Danish memory
culture.
At the other end of the political spectrum, the historian and jour-
nalist Bent Blüdnikow and other writers have in a series of articles
and essays starting in the early 1990s attacked the political Left for
voicing anti-capitalist and anti-Israel attitudes with clearly anti-Semitic
undertones. The epitome of this trend was most probably the Ble-
kinge Street gang, named after its hide-out – a group of homegrown
radical leftist supporters of the PFLP and other Palestinian terrorist
groups, practicing fundraising by means of bank robbery and not
shying away from lethal violence. Phenomena like these were, to be
sure, rooted in a widespread atmosphere of anti-Israel and, by ex-
tension mostly anti-Jewish attitudes pervading the radical academic
and student milieu of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Blüdnikow frequently
polarised public opinion with his polemics, but achieved to unveil
the tacit acquiescence with anti-Jewish violence at the bottom of this
radical intellectualism.
5. The Wider Context: Revising the Benign Images of the Past
In other fields of research, there also has been interplay between “re-
visionist” scholarship and the changing political discourse on history
and memory.22 Issues pertaining to the period of the occupation by
Nazi Germany in particular have sparked a series of controversies. One
strand of research has undermined the concept of heroic victimhood,
emphasising the aspects of economic cooperation and profiteering
during the war (especially regarding the agricultural sector, the arms
industry, or Danish migrant workers in the German industry),23 or
other kinds of active collaboration, such as the thousands of young
Danes volunteering for the Waffen-SS.24 Another strand has decon-
structed the idealisation of Danish society as being a role model of
humanism and social justice, by highlighting the hypocritical witch-
hunt against women that had (sexual) relations with German soldiers
or against sympathisers of the Nazi regime,25 or by uncovering the fate
of those 250.000 German refugees that ended up in Denmark at the
end of the war, of whom more than 14.000 died because the health
authorities, the medical associations, and even the Danish Red Cross
refused to provide them with medical treatment. Half of these 14.000
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were under the age of five.26 Some of these debates have reached a very
broad audience, especially those touching on the legally and morally
dubious executions of informers and collaborators in the final years
of the occupation and immediately after the end of the war.27 The
success of the movie Flammen og Citronen (Flame and Citron) by Ole
Christian Madsen (2008) on the resistance group of Holger Danske
and its at times arbitrary killings, is a case in point, popularising this
complex and highly ambiguous chapter of Danish history.
On the other hand, there has been a systematic endeavour by the
center-right government under Anders Fogh-Rasmussen (2001–2009)
to support a re-evaluation of the history of the occupation period as
well as the Cold War. Critics have seen this as an attempt to gener-
ate a version of the Danish past more in tune with the ideological
ramifications of government politics. In order to reinstall a sense of
national pride, it is argued, a reckoning with what often is dubbed
“leftist defeatism and pacifism” is necessary, and the unwillingness of
a parliamentary majority in the 1970s and 1980s to cooperate closely
with NATO has been libeled as another leftist flirt with Soviet totali-
tarianism.
In this view, the non-belligerence of Danish interwar politics is
blamed for the humiliating defeat of 1940. A massive resistance
against the Nazi invasion and occupation would have been the only
morally justifiable option. In this vein, “Never again April 9th!” becomes
the legitimisation for a radical change from neutrality and passivity
to an active foreign policy – history is used to justify the relatively
substantial Danish military involvement in the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq.
Simultaneous with these contradictory trends, the study and pres-
entation of the history of Danish Jewry and the Holocaust have in
recent years been institutionalised with the establishment of the
Danish Jewish Museum and the Danish Center (now: Department) for
Holocaust and Genocide Studies. But both cases of institutionalisa-
tion have proven highly ambivalent: The DCHF, instrumental in the
extremely important critical re-evaluation of the restrictive Danish
immigration policy, was hampered by a very broad focus of genocide
studies and genocide prevention. It never attempted to reach beyond
a certain superficial and temporary trendiness to actually establish a
comprehensive and academically ambitious research agenda of Danish
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Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, and has been almost dismantled
as a research institution only a few years after its establishment.28
The Danish Jewish Museum also has had its difficulties with de-
veloping the full critical potential of Danish Jewish history, such
as a focus on the willingness to adapt and the preservation of ho-
mogeneity as preconditions for benevolent inclusion. It has been
hampered by its architect’s concept of architectural and historical
representation: “The organising principle of the Danish Jewish Mu-
seum is the concept of Mitzvah itself in its deep ethical meaning as
a commandment, resolve and a fundamental good deed.”29 Daniel
Libeskind’s approach, highlighting the good story, thus only reinforced
the concept of Danish exceptionalism. Furthermore, the anti-immi-
grant right-wing in Danish politics knew how to instrumentalise the
Museum by arguing that this successful story of Jewish integration
via assimilation would prove why the social inclusion of Muslim im-
migrants who seem unwilling to give up their distinctive culture is
not recommendable.
IV. Conclusion
In a society with few historical traumas of war and mass killings, the
Danish culture of memory is intertwined with the concept of Dan-
ishness in modern times: Due to the national narrative of successful
integration of Danish Jews and their heroic rescue from Nazi perse-
cution, a critical investigation of the relationship between Jews and
Non-Jews in 19th and 20th century Danish society has been neglected
until recently. In many ways, we are only beginning to explore the
dissemination and function of anti-Semitic patterns of perception,
interpretation, and behaviour in Danish society. More than likely,
future studies will be less flattering than the long-cherished self-in-
dulging perceptions of a peaceful and humanistic nation.
This would imply a rewriting of Danish history “from the margins”.
The liberal democratic political culture that informed the forma-
tion of the Danish nation state did not do so without exclusionist
practices. On the contrary, it implied a rejection of cultural or eth-
nic heterogeneity. Instead of exonerating Danish anti-Semitism by
self-serving comparisons, a fresh view on Danish-Jewish relations in
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Justice and Memory.indb 257 02.11.2009 13:39:41
modern times promises new insights into the development of Danish
national identity, oscillating between inclusion and exclusion.
Even in the second half of the twentieth century, this fundamental
ambiguity has not lost its impact on the discourses on Jews and Juda-
ism. In spite of a growing diversification and secularisation of society,
the anti-pluralistic dream of an ethnically and culturally homogene-
ous Danish national community lives on. This becomes visible both
in the xenophobic and Islamophobic character of the immigration
and integration debate as well as in an unholy alliance of residual
elements of conventional anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiments.
Notes
1 Cf. the works of the prolific scholar of the Danish National Socialist movement,
John T. LAURIDSEN, especially Dansk Nazisme: 1930–45 og derefter, Copenhagen:
Gyldendal, 2002. Lauridsen, who is research director at the Royal Library in Co-
penhagen, has repeatedly emphasized how the self-righteous and moralistic legal
and political reckoning with the Danish Nazi Party had a significant substituting
function of circumventing a more thorough soul-searching among the elites and
large groups within Danish society collaborating with Nazi Germany.
2 Cf. the stimulating argument presented by ØSTERGÅRD 1996.
3 Cf. the seminal article by BREGNSBO 1996.
4 Thus, Poul BORCHSENIUS writes about Denmark’s “særstilling i historien om
jødisk emancipation” (exceptional status in the history of Jewish emancipation)
in the classical Historien om de danske jøder, Copenhagen: Fremad, 1968, p. 52.
5 BAMBERGER 1990: p. 16.
6 www.thankstoscandinavia.org
7 GOLDBERGER 1987 and YAHIL 1969.
8 Bent Blüdnikow has since the early 1980s been one of the early but few pioneers
of research on Danish Jewish history, and over the last years, the numerous
works of Martin Schwarz Lausten (on the relations of the Church and the Jewish
Community) and Morten Thing (on Eastern European Jewish immigration) have
contributed significantly to reduce this deficit. But as there still are substantial
lacunae to be filled, we have established a research group on Scandinavian-Jew-
ish history and literature at the Department for Scandinavian Studies of the
Humboldt University.
9 KUSHNER 1999. See also KUSHNER 1989.
10 WAGNER: pp. 85–99.
11 KRAGH 1971: p. 23.
12 Cf. my biographical sketch: WAGNER 2009.
13 It was published in German as well: MARTENSEN: §§ 45–50, especially §48.
258
Justice and Memory.indb 258 02.11.2009 13:39:43
14 Cf. RÜNITZ 2000.
15 The results of this research project have recently been published in a series of pub-
lications: RÜNITZ 2005; KIRCHHOFF 2005; BANKE 2005; VILHJÁLMSSON
2005.
16 See MOGENSEN 2000.
17 See KRETH, MOGENSEN 1995.
18 BAK 2001.
19 BAK 2004. Her findings confirm my research presented in WAGNER 2003,
pp. 149–168.
20 WAGNER 2007.
21 KRARUP 1960: p. 101.
22 Cf. as a comprehensive study: BRYLD, WARRING 1998.
23 NISSEN 2005; LUND 2005; ANDERSEN 2003.
24 CHRISTENSEN, POULSEN, SCHARFF SMITH 2006.
25 WARRING 1994.
26 LYLLOFF 2006.
27 KNUDSEN 2001.
28 By now, the staff mainly consists of (former) students organizing the educational
program for the annual Danish Holocaust Commemoration Day.
29 http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/projects/show-all/danish-jewish-museum.
Bibliography
S. ANDERSEN, Danmark i det tyske storrum – Dansk økonomisk tilpasning
til Tysklands nyordning af Europa 1940–41, Copenhagen: Lindhardt
og Ringhof, 2003.
C. S. BANKE, Demokratiets skyggesigde. Flygtninge og menneskerettigh-
eder. Danmark før Holocaust, Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag,
2005.
N. BAMBERGER, The Viking Jews. A History of the Jews of Denmark,
NY: Soncino, ²1990.
S. L. BAK, Dansk Antisemitisme 1930–1945, Copenhagen: Aschehoug,
2004.
S. L. BAK, Jødeaktionen oktober 1943. Forestillinger i offentlighed og forskn-
ing, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2001.
M. BREGNSBO, Den danske vej. Om traditionen for den danske konsen-
skultur, in Historie 29, 1996, pp. 311–327.
C. BRYLD, A. WARRING, Besættelsestiden som kollektiv erindring. His-
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Roskilde Universitetsforlag 1998.
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C . B. CHRISTENSEN, N. B. POULSEN, P. SCHARFF SMITH,
Under hagekors og Dannebrog. Danskere i Waffen-SS 1940–45, Copen-
hagen: Aschehoug 2006.
L. GOLDBERGER (ed.), The Rescue of the Danish Jews: Moral Courage
under Stress, NY: New York University Press, 1987.
H. KIRCHHOFF, „Et menneske uden pas er ikke noget menneske“. Danmark
i den internationale flygtningepolitik 1933–1939, Odense: Syddansk
Universitetsforlag, 2005.
T. V. KRAGH, Grundtvigs syn på Israel, Copenhagen: Dansk Israels-
mission, 1971.
S. KRARUP, Harald Nielsen og hans tid, Copenhagen: Gyldendal,
1960.
R. KRETH, M. MOGENSEN, Flugten til Sverige. Aktionen mod de danske
jøder oktober 1943, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1995.
P. Ø. KNUDSEN, Efter drabet. Beretninger om modstandskampens likvi-
deriner, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2001.
T. KUSHNER, Comparing Antisemitisms: A Useful Exercise?, in
M. BRENNER, R. LIEDTKE, D. RECHTER (eds.), Two Nations:
British and German Jews in Comparative Perspective, Tübingen:
M. Siebeck, 1999, pp. 91–109.
T. KUSHNER, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society
during the Second World War, Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1989.
J. LUND, Hitlers spisekammer. Danmark og den europæiske nyordning
1940–43, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2005.
K. LYLLOFF, Barn eller fjende? Uledsagede tyske flygtningebørn i Danmark
1945–1949, Copenhagen: Danmarks Pædagogiske Universitetsfor-
lag, 2006.
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1878.
M. MOGENSEN, Det danske flygtningesamfund i Sverige og ”jødes-
pørgsmålet” 1943–45, in J. LAURSEN et al., I tradition og kaos. Fest-
skrift til Henning Poulsen, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2000,
pp. 150–160.
M. R. NISSEN, Til fælles bedste – det danske landbrug under besættelsen,
Copenhagen: Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2005.
U. ØSTERGÅRD, Peasants and Danes: The Danish National Identity and
Political Culture, in G. E. R. G. SUNY (ed.), Becoming National: A
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Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 179–201.
L. RÜNITZ, Af hensyn til konsekvenserne. Danmark og flygtningespørgsmålet
1933–1940, Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2005.
L. RÜNITZ, Danmark og de jødiske flygtninge 1933–1940. En bog om
flygtninge og menneskerettigheder, Copenhagen: Museum Tuscula-
num, 2000.
V. Ö. VILHJÁLMSSON, Medaljens bagside. Jødiske flygtningeskæbner i
Danmark 1933–1945, Copenhagen: Vandkunsten, 2005.
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buch des Antisemitismus. Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart,
München: Saur, 2009, forthcoming.
T. WAGNER, Belated Heroism: The Danish Lutheran Church and
the Jews 1918–1945, in: K. P. SPICER (ed.), Antisemitism, Christian
Ambivalence and the Holocaust, Bloomington–Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, published in association with the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C, 2007, pp. 3–25.
T. WAGNER, Overcoming Prejudice: The Danish Church and the
Jews 1918–1945: Stepping into the Breach or Relativizing Anti-
Semitism?, in Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 16, 2003,
T. WAGNER, Juden in Kopenhagen 1780–1820. Studien zu Emanzipation
und Akkulturation, Technische Universität Berlin: unpublished M.A.
Thesis, 1998.
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hagen: Gyldendal 1994.
L. YAHIL, The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy, Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969.
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Justice and Memory.indb 262 02.11.2009 13:39:44
Remembering and Forgetting:
Brief Reflections
Justice and Memory.indb 263 02.11.2009 13:39:44
Justice and Memory.indb 264 02.11.2009 13:39:44
The Legacies of the Holocaust in
Scandinavian Small State Foreign Policy
Cecilie Felicia Stokholm Banke
To some extent, the Holocaust as a universal legacy challenges the
national narratives in many European countries. This development
can be observed in small nation-states like those in Scandinavia, where
adjusting to international moral standards is crucial and closely con-
nected to security. Addressing crimes of the past and demanding
historical justice is a way to get access to the international political
scene. The past has become a moral guidepost which aids access to
the international community – something of particular importance
for small nations. Thus, examining the ways the national narratives
are challenged by international moral standards, and how small na-
tion-states respond to these challenges, can bring us closer to how
and why the Holocaust has become important not only for global
memory, but also in global politics.
There is no question that during the 1990s, Denmark, Sweden and
Norway experienced increased public and political interest for the
Holocaust as a history that should be addressed specifically. Most
well-known is the process started by the then Swedish Prime Min-
ister, Göran Persson, who hosted four international conferences,
Stockholm International Forums, from 2000 and through 2004, and
established the public authority, Forum for Living History, whose
mandate is to maintain the memory of the Holocaust and, through
remembrance, help to prevent a similar crime. But also in Denmark
and Norway, the Holocaust has been addressed specifically by several
politicians, and both countries have officially apologised for their
immoral conduct towards Jews – Denmark for denying 21 Jewish
refugees entry from Germany in 1941, and Norway for participating
in the systematic deportation of its Jews to Nazi Germany and/or to
extermination camps. As such, the Scandinavian countries have fol-
lowed in the footsteps of Germany and developed their own ways to
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Justice and Memory.indb 265 02.11.2009 13:39:44
come to terms with, not only the darker sides of Second World War
history, but also the Holocaust as a genocidal crime that has to be
specifically addressed.
To some extent this development might seem odd, at least consid-
ering the war record of Denmark and Sweden. Why should Sweden
– a presumably neutral country during the war – go through such a
process? And why should Denmark – a country with a reputation for
its heroic rescue of the Danish Jews – engage in such soul-searching?
What could have made these countries examine the darker sides of
their history, and, at least in the Danish case, issue an apology, as the
Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, did in 2005?
To answer these questions, we need to look at the developments
in the Scandinavian countries and relate them to what the French
researcher, Ariel Colonomos, has termed the moralising of interna-
tional relations during the 1990s1. What we see during the 1990s is an
increased interest in human rights and international humanitarian
law: Sanctions, humanitarian interventions, and demands for “clean
historical records”. And this interest gives the Holocaust a new po-
sition in the political culture developing in Europe after the fall of
communism. With the growing interest in human rights, comes a
growing interest for how nations behaved in the past. And what used
to be primarily a West German characteristic becomes now a general
norm for Europe. To be European is to come to terms with past atroci-
ties, and thus specifically with the Holocaust. During the 1990s, and
in the beginning of the 2000s, European states had to acknowledge
their guilt in participating in various ways in the Holocaust.
In Denmark, addressing the Holocaust specifically and investi-
gating Denmark’s share of responsibility happened because of the
Stockholm International Forums. Of course, in Denmark as in other
countries, historians had shown an interest in Holocaust history. As
elsewhere in Europe, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary,
Shoah, was shown on national television and had a strong impact on
young scholars, as did the Hollywood-produced TV series, Holocaust,
shown on national TV in 1979.
But, the Holocaust was primarily seen as a German and a Jewish
history, and Denmark was generally not included in this history.
The dominant theme in national historiography since the end of the
WWII was the Occupation and how Denmark managed to get through
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Justice and Memory.indb 266 02.11.2009 13:39:44
the war without any major losses and damages. Not surprisingly, the
experts on the history of the German occupation are numerous and
productive. The interest in this particular part of Danish history has
not decreased during the past decades. On the contrary, a quick look
through the number of national, and scholarly, publications in this
period shows that interest has only increased.2
As the most dominant theme in Danish historiography, the history
of the German occupation has been revised twice, influenced by two
generational waves, with each new generation writing its own version
of national history. The first wave came during the 1970s, when a new
generation of historians started questioning both the supposed hero-
ism of the Resistance and the supposed innocent cooperation with the
German occupiers. The second wave came during the 1990s, when
journalists and young historians began to examine the Danish indus-
trial and agricultural sectors, and their cooperation – even collaboration
– with Nazi Germany. This new research of the 1990s was the starting
point of a public debate on national history, and, in my view, paved the
way for the Stockholm process to have an impact on Denmark. Here it is
important to note that the new research, which showed other sides of
the Occupation and the “innocent” cooperation with Nazi Germany,
did not relate to the Holocaust. And there is a reason for that.
As many know, Denmark has a specific status in the history of the
extermination of Jews during the Second World War. In October
1943, about 7000 Jews from Denmark managed to escape to Sweden,
and thus avoided deportation. The Danish rescue was, as described
by one of those rescued, a miracle.3 It was a miracle created by mu-
tual trust, very good internal communication, an easy escape route
– Sweden is only an hour’s boat ride from the Danish coast – and
Sweden’s willingness to accept the refugees.
However, it might surprise some that it wasn’t until the late 1960s
that the rescue received specific attention, and, when it did, it was
because of developments outside of Denmark. Since the liberation
of Denmark, the rescue of the Danish Jews was seen as an integral
part of the story of Danish resistance to the Nazis. As international
interest in the mass murder of Jews during the Second World War
grew, however, the more narrow national interpretation of the Danish
rescue was challenged from various sides.
First, in 1963, the organization, “Thanks to the Danes” (later re-
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Justice and Memory.indb 267 02.11.2009 13:39:45
named “Thanks to Scandinavia”), was launched by Richard Netter
and Victor Borge in New York City as a means of expressing appre-
ciation to the Scandinavian people for their heroic rescue of the Jews
in Denmark. The Danish Prime Minister, Social Democrat Jens Otto
Krag, attended the opening event, and, as Netter later recounted,
had difficulty understanding the purpose of the new organisation.
“Why pay homage to the Danes?” Krag, still entangled in the “occu-
pation interpretation”, asked Netter at the ceremony.4 By attracting
international attention to the rescue of the Danish Jews, “Thanks to
Scandinavia” framed the rescue in an international context of per-
secution of Jews all over Europe.
Second, in 1963, the Danish Resistance as a whole was among the first
to be included in Yad Vashem’s Righteous among the Nations because of its
perceived pivotal role in the rescue. Among the individuals honoured
with this title are also Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler.
Third, in 1966, Leni Yahil published her influential book The Res-
cue of Danish Jewry: A Test of Democracy. With Yahil’s book the rescue
of the Danish Jews was interpreted in a wider frame of a European
Holocaust. In brief, what Yahil argues is that Danish Jewry was saved
because of strong democratic traditions in Denmark. The ideas
presented in the book have shown a remarkable persistence and
although academically outdated, the myths are still used by Danish
politicians.5
These three examples indicate that the interpretation of the Danish
rescue as a light in the European darkness found its origin and broad
support abroad, especially in Israel and the United States. Through
the private and official initiatives mentioned above, the history of
Denmark during World War II was framed in the emerging inter-
national Holocaust context.
As a researcher trying to understand how the historical narratives
relating to World War II history have changed and to determine the
agents of such a change, one of Denmark’s interesting features is that
it took foreign efforts to include the Danish rescue in the national
narrative about the war. Addressing the Holocaust in and of itself,
and not as a part of Second World War history, started in Denmark
because of a development that happened outside, and at a time when
national politicians did not even understand why.
I think the example of how the rescue of the Danish Jews dur-
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Justice and Memory.indb 268 02.11.2009 13:39:45
ing the war was paid special attention and included into the public
memory of Danish WWII history, shows how national narratives are
influenced and in some cases also challenged by international moral
standards. Nathan Sznaider and Daniel Levy speak of cosmopolitan
memory, and point to the Holocaust as the foremost example of how
a history that was once of interest to a limited group eventually grew
to nearly universal importance. In the Danish case, this development
started when a group of people wanted to show their gratitude to
the countries that helped them escape and avoid deportation. From
this moment the “Danish Rescue” became a light in the darkness that
Europe ever since has tried to come to terms with.
The peculiar thing here is that Denmark was not even aware of this
change. One reason could be that the growing international interest in
the Danish rescue did not overshadow the dominant narrative within
Denmark about the Occupation. The overall conclusions remained
the same. Despite collaboration with Germany, Denmark, as a nation,
managed to act democratically and according to global human rights
standards. Unlike most other European countries, Danes rescued the
Jews of Denmark.
Denmark had not succumbed to Nazism, but cleverly cooperated
with the Nazi regime as a means of saving Danish democracy and the
Jews. The master narrative about the little, but very courageous, na-
tion fighting silently against the Nazis, luring them to believe Danes
were collaborators, was, by that time, not challenged by international
Holocaust research. On the contrary, it looked like Denmark, as one
of the few nations that could actually welcome this new historical
trend could even use it to brand itself as a moral nation.
Denmark’s Holocaust history remained uncontested until the late
1990s and Göran Persson. We cannot give Persson all the credit for
the revision of the history of the Danish occupation, but it is, in my
opinion, doubtful that Denmark, with its highly prized self-image,
would have felt obliged, without Persson, to officially acknowledge
its particular Holocaust guilt.
The Stockholm process started in 1998 when Tony Blair, Bill Clin-
ton, and Göran Persson decided to promote international cooperation
on Holocaust education, remembrance, and research. This initiative
was followed by four international conferences held each year in Stock-
holm from 2000 to 2004. During the first Stockholm International
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Justice and Memory.indb 269 02.11.2009 13:39:45
Forum in 2000, it was decided to designate January 27th as an official
day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust. Since then,
many countries have adopted this particular day as a remembrance
day – Denmark in 2004.6
With these international conferences, Sweden under the leadership
of the Social Democrat, Göran Persson, assumed the lead of what then
could be described as a new moral regime, based on human rights
and international humanitarian law. Or rather, Sweden reinstalled
itself as one of the guiding moral nations, and this time by forcing
other countries to address the darker sides of their history. This de-
velopment happened as a number of new countries from the former
communist world were about to become members of the European
Union. To be a member of the European club meant, by that time,
to come to terms with the past, and not just any past, but that dark
and difficult past.
For Sweden, leading the moral way for other nations was not such
an unfamiliar role. Through the 1950s and 1960s, this was actually
the role Sweden played in international politics. As a neutral country,
Sweden was not weighted down by its actions during WWII and could
walk directly onto the global stage as one of the righteous nations
of the newly established UN. For example, the Swedish minister for
disarmament at that time, Alva Myrdal (married to the famous Swed-
ish economist, Gunnar Myrdal) was an active international player,
working for peace and development.
What was, however, unusual was that this role for Sweden now
meant a new relationship with the Jewish community at home and
a new relationship with Israel. Göran Persson’s visit to a synagogue
in Stockholm, wearing a kippah, was a first for a Social Democratic
leader. I will not elaborate more on this here except to mention
that the Stockholm process also included a change for Scandinavian
countries in their relation to Israel and the Middle East.
The Stockholm process had a direct and immediate impact on Den-
mark. There had been no national commission in Denmark until, in
the wake of the Stockholm International Forum in January 2000, the
Danish Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies was established.7
The first major task of the Centre was a large research project to
investigate Danish policy towards Jewish refugees before and during
the war. The Refugee Project, as it was called, was commissioned by
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Justice and Memory.indb 270 02.11.2009 13:39:48
the Social Democratic Prime Minister, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, as
a response to the national debate concerning Denmark’s share of
responsibility for the Holocaust.
In early 2000, just after the first Stockholm International Forum, an
article in the daily Berlingske Tidende argued that Danish authorities
during the Second World War refused 21 Jewish refugees from Nazi
Germany entry into the country and sent them back to an unknown
fate – ultimately death in Auschwitz. The story generated considerable
controversy, and the political response was a government-financed
investigation into official Danish policy towards German-Jewish refu-
gees.
Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen made an official statement
on behalf of the Danish nation, and ordered an in-depth investiga-
tion of this history:
We cannot give the victims and their families their life back, nor can we remove the
incredible sufferings people were exposed to then, but we can write the true history
about what took place. And we can acknowledge our responsibility that this will never
happen again. When this chapter of our history is written the government will, on
behalf of the nation, express its attitude – also addressed to the relatives.8
Considering the well-known history of the rescue of the Danish Jews
in October 1943, it may seem odd that Denmark should also examine
its less heroic response to the killings of European Jews during the
Second World War, and thus its national share of responsibility. Yet
this extremely favourable image of Denmark as a kind of safe haven
for Jews has gone through changes during the past decade.
New books about a less flattering side of Denmark’s history dur-
ing the occupation have tainted the previously pristine image and
have fuelled renewed controversy about the hitherto widely accepted
“policy of cooperation” raising questions about whether it was the
wisest path a small occupied country like Denmark could follow, given
the circumstances.
The current historical debate in Denmark can be seen as taking
place between two main schools: the moralists and the realists. The
latter maintain a practical view as to what was possible for Denmark.
The former hold a moralistic view as to how Denmark should have
behaved. The division reflects how differently history can serve a
society in the present, and how things that seem just and fair to one
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Justice and Memory.indb 271 02.11.2009 13:39:48
generation, can be considered opportunistic by another.
In the end, the outcome of the refugee research project led to
Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen issuing an official apology
in the National Memorial Park in Copenhagen on 4 May 2005. Fogh
Rasmussen stated:
The remembrance of the dark aspects of the occupation era is unfortunately also
a part of the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Denmark.
Thus I would very much like – on this very occasion and in this location – on behalf
of the government and thus the Danish state, to express regret and apologize for
these acts. An apology cannot alter history. But it can contribute to the recognition
of historic mistakes. So that present and future generations will hopefully avoid
similar mistakes in the future.9
Looking at Norway, we see a similar development following the
Stockholm process, even though Norway’s war record is very different
from that of both Denmark and Sweden. Norway was, like Denmark,
occupied, but carried out a more vigorous and violent resistance be-
fore succumbing to occupation, and, unlike Denmark, the majority
of Norwegian Jews were deported, in part with the help of locals. In
this sense, Norway’s wartime history is more similar to the general
European situation.
The Belgian historian Pieter Lagrou examined how the memory of
the Second World War is presented in a national and patriotic nar-
rative in Belgium, France and the Netherlands. He discovered that,
within this narrative, there is little room for the commemoration of
events or groups whose history and experiences could not be utilized
for post-war recovery.
One of these groups was the Danish Jews, whose war experience
was not only radically different from that of most of their country-
men, but whose experiences could not be used within a meaningful
national narrative.
For Post-war societies “negative history” was of little interest, es-
pecially when things were out of control. These societies needed a
history of WWII that they could live with as nations, and which, at the
same time could serve the future. And therefore, for many societies
the focus on resistance was the most meaningful way to address the
past, since resistance could generate some kind of moral meaning.
After all, people did react against the occupying forces, and, after
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Justice and Memory.indb 272 02.11.2009 13:39:48
all, this resistance eventually bore fruit, and was rewarded.10
In Norway’s WWII history, we can observe the same focus on resist-
ance against the occupying forces. As described by the Norwegian
historian, Ingjerd Veiden Brakstad, the Norwegian memory of WWII
is very much shaped by patriotic memory. However, in Norway we
find that the experience of the Norwegian Jews was in fact known in
several ways in the immediate post-war years (most importantly in the
press). By presenting the Deportation of the Jews as a solely German
pursuit and completely at odds with what was said to be the Norwe-
gian core values, the memory of what had happened to Norwegian
Jews could serve a purpose within the national narrative.
The symbolic embrace of the Jews and their suffering was portrayed
as natural to all “good Norwegians.” This rhetoric portrayed Norwe-
gians as protectors of “their” Jews, and as immune to anti-Semitic
influences. That Norwegians had participated in the deportations of
Jewish countrymen and that Norwegians were not, in fact, immune
to anti-Semitism was hardly ever an issue in this context. In this way
the memory of the Jewish experiences could serve a purpose in the
national epos needed in the post-war years – as a symbol of German
cruelty and Norwegian humanism.11
Coming back to the initial aim of this paper, namely some reflec-
tions on the relation between the legacies of the Holocaust and the
foreign policy of Scandinavian small-states, the Stockholm process
challenged the national narratives in these countries with the demand
to adjust to international moral standards.
Not least in the Danish case we see a widely respected narrative,
namely the one on the Danish rescue of Jews in October 1943, being
challenged as a consequence of the Stockholm process. The logic be-
hind the official apology, and thus admittance of Denmark’s share of
responsibility to the Holocaust, is that Denmark is “such a pure and
moral nation”, that it can afford to acknowledge this particular dark
side of the past, as both the Social Democratic prime minister Poul
Nyrup Rasmussen, and later the following Anders Fogh Rasmussen
from the Liberal Party, did.
Some would even claim that Fogh Rasmussen instrumentalised
the narrative about the Occupation, when the liberal-conservative
government broke the general consensus around the course of Dan-
ish foreign policy, by joining the Iraq coalition in 2003 and bringing
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Denmark into a new role in international activism. In a speech held
during the commemoration of the August rebellion in 1943, when
the Danes held a strike for the first time and thereby showed their
resistance against the Germans, Fogh stated that the politics of co-
operation was “a moral decline”.12
No minister had ever openly questioned this relatively solid histori-
cal consensus. What Denmark did during the Occupation was, up
to that point, officially considered a wise and prudent policy for a
small nation like Denmark. The policy of cooperation brought the
society safely through the war, saved most of the Jews, and managed
eventually to place Denmark on the winning side.
But in his speech of August 2003, Fogh questioned the historical
consensus, and did so just before Denmark entered the Iraqi war,
introducing a new activist foreign policy for Denmark.
This particular speech provoked a huge debate in Denmark about
how history serves a society, and how one is allowed to judge the past.
Fogh used the past to justify a shift within the foreign policy and
security doctrine, and brought Denmark into the war in Iraq.13
In conclusion, I would like to comment on Moshe Zimmerman’s
remarks during his presentation about how the Munich-agreement of
1938 has become a shortcut in some Israeli political argumentation. I
think that both in the Danish and in the Israeli cases, we can observe
a certain degree of historicism in present elite political discourse,
where the past is used not to inform, but to justify, a specific policy
in the present. The past has become a justificatory argument for
some politicians. Even though the Stockholm process started out as
a new moral orientation based on human rights and international
standards, the process has in some cases led to historicism and an
exaggerated use of the past in present politics, both nationally and
internationally.
Notes
1 COLONOMOS 2008.
2 LAURIDSEN 2002.
3 FOIGHEL 2007.
4 Richard Netter interview in the Danish newspaper Politiken, 11 March 1993.
Translation by the author.
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5 E.g. Mr. Bertel HAARDER in Berlingske Tidende 2008 about the “history
canon”; Anders Fogh RASMUSSEN in Washington Post 2002, cf. Sofie Lene
BAK, HiA review.
6 On the history of Task Force for International Cooperation of Holocaust Re-
membrance, Education and Research, see KROH 2008.
7 For the establishment of the Danish center, see ØSTERGAARD 2000. In 2003
the center merged by law into the Danish Institute for International Studies,
DIIS, see Lov om etablering af Dansk Center for Internationale Studier og Men-
neskerettigheder, in Lov nr 411 af 06/06/2002.
8 Quoted in RÜNITZ 2005: p. 7.
9 The entire speech was published in Danish in the daily Berlingske Tidende, 5
May 2005.
10 LAGROU 2000.
11 BRAKSTAD 2007.
12 Speech, PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen, “60 året for 29. august 1943”, 29 August
2003.
13 Speech, PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen, “Visioner om Danmarks aktive Europapoli-
tik”, 23 September 2003. See also Hans MOURITZEN 2007, The “Presence of the
Past”: Theorizing the Interplay of Past and Present Geopolitics in Contemporary Foreign
Policy, project description, September 2, 2007, www.diis.dk.
Bibliography
C. F. S. BANKE, Demokratiets skyggeside. Flygtninge og menneskerettigh-
eder i Danmark før Holocaust, Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag,
2005.
C. F. S. BANKE, Remembering Europe’s Heart of Darkness, in M. PAKIER
and B. STRÅTH (eds.), A European Memory? Contested Histories and
Politics of Remembrance, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010.
S. L. BAK, Jødeaktionen oktober 1943. Forestillinger i offentlighed og forskn-
ing, København: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2001.
I. V. BRAKSTAD: Okkupasjon, motstand og myter – Den patriotiske
minnekulturen og jødeforfølgelserne, in Fortid nr. 2-2007.
A. COLONOMOS, Moralizing International Relations: Called to Account,
New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.
I. FOIGHEL, The Danish Miracle, København: Christian Ejlers Forlag,
2007
H. KIRCHHOFF, Et menneske uden pas er ikke noget menneske, Odense:
Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2005.
H. KIRCHHOFF and L. RÜNITZ, Udsendt til Tyskland, Odense: Syd-
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dansk Universitetsforlag, 2007.
J. KROH, Transnationale Erinnerung, Der Holocaust im Fokus geschich-
tspolitischer Initiativen, Frankfurt/M: Campus Verlag, 2008.
P. LAGROU, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation. Patriotic Memory
and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965, New York:
Cambridge Universtiy Press, 2000.
J. T. LAURIDSEN, Samarbejde og modstand. Danmark under den
tyske besættelse 1940–45. En bibliografi, København: Museum
Tusculanums Forlag, 2002.
D. LEVY and N. SZNAIDER, The Holocaust and Memory in the
Global Age, Philadelphia: Tempel University Press, 2006.
L. RÜNITZ, Af hensyn til konsekvenserne. Danmark og flygtnin-
gespørgsmålet 1933–1940, Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag,
2005.
U. ØSTERGAARD, Holocaust, folkedrab, folkemord og europæiske
værdier, in Folkemord, Den Jyske Historiker, Nr. 90, December
2000.
276
Justice and Memory.indb 276 02.11.2009 13:39:49
Two Sides of the Coin:
Clean Break and Usable History
The Case of Hungary
András Kovács
The famous slogan of the East-European Communist parties – “ein-
holen und überholen” (to make up and overtake the West) – has actually
been realised only in one field: memory politics. This happened,
however, in a strange way: in former communist countries the de-
mand for a clean break was fulfilled immediately after the seizure of
power, that is in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The fierce debates of
the early post-war years were abruptly stopped, and a boring, official
Manichean narrative took their place. This narrative was constructed
around the heroic struggle of Good vs. Evil, with the Communist
parties and movements representing the former, and all other play-
ers representing the latter. Depicted as conscious or unconscious
representatives of the exploiting classes, these players represented
reaction, as opposed to Communist progress. It is no surprise that
the fall of the old system did not spark a resounding demand for a
clean break with the past, but exactly the opposite: a total revision
of the former ruling narrative. The vehement struggles to shape and
master historical memory were among the most striking phenomena
accompanying the transition. As one commentator stated at the time,
the public debates exhibited “a rage for the past, an obsession with
history”.1 And indeed, the debates on pre- and post-war Polish anti-
Semitism, on the expulsion of German and other minorities from
post-war Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, on the Slovak puppet
state and on the Benes-decrees in the Czech Republic and Slovakia,
on the role of Marshal Antonescu in Romania, on the nature and
responsibility of the so called Horthy-system in Hungary, on the sub-
stance of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and many others indicate
that history became a central issue in public controversies.
The reason for all this was not only that freedom of speech and
expression liberated new energies and created broad spaces for de-
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bating everything that was not possible to discuss earlier. The quest
for truth was undoubtedly an important factor in these debates. But
this alone fails to explain the vehemence and the emotionally-loaded
atmosphere of all these controversies. The explanation for this should
be sought in the characteristics of the political actors of the transi-
tion.
A particular problem faced by the rival political camps, parties
and organisations established after 1989 was the task of establishing
clear and distinct identities. It was not a simple issue at all. Political
identities are usually constructed on the basis of well distinguish-
able political programs, long existing political traditions, traditional
electorates, specific ideologies, etc. However, the political programs
of the new parties and camps were in many respects identical. This
was fully understandable, since all of them had entered the political
arena with the intention of winding up the Communist system and
replacing it with capitalism and parliamentary democracy. After the
decades of dictatorship, they, obviously, could not have a traditional
electorate, either. When they entered the political arena it was abso-
lutely not clear which groups in society supported them. And finally
their historical traditions – if they existed at all, like in the case of
the social-democrats, the different peasant parties, the liberals – had
become rather blurred in the long decades of non-existence. There-
fore, they did not have too many alternatives, except attempting to
forge an identity in the symbolic sphere.
In this situation, there were two fundamentally different methods
of creating identity at the symbolic level. The parties’ first method
was to position themselves somewhere along the western political
spectrum, by indicating an allegiance to a Western political group-
ing. The second method for manifesting identity was to express a
relationship with certain emblematic periods, events or individuals
of national history. Consequently among the various parties, and the
intellectual camps behind them, there was a great struggle to appropri-
ate history and to demonstrate historical tradition and continuity.
An important aspect of this struggle on the battlefield of identity
politics was the relationship to the politics of the stormy post-WWI
period. In the case of Hungary, this meant the Horthy regime. It
was almost inevitable that the state-sanctioned anti-Semitism of the
interwar period, Hungary’s participation in the Second World War
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as an ally of fascist Germany, and Hungarian responsibility for the
persecution of the Jews would become issues of the identity politics
debate. This trend was strengthened by a sociological factor: the pres-
ence of a large number of historians, philosophers, and sociologists
among the newly active politicians – for whom the area of identity
creation was a natural sphere.
The Hungarian identity debates share structural similarities with
two debates conducted in Western Europe: Germany’s “historians’
dispute” and the anti-fascism-communism or totalitarianism debate
(conducted mainly in France and in Germany).2
As is known, in the 1970s and 1980s some German historians and
writers who went out to argue for the historical embeddedness and
legitimacy of modern conservatism in Germany realised that, after
the years of Nazi rule, it was only possible to legitimise Germany’s
conservative tradition by demonstrating that the extreme right wing in
the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Party, and the Third Reich itself were
not inevitable historical and political consequences of the imperial
authoritarian state and pre-1933 conservatism. The argumentation
of Nolte and various other historians in the conservative camp was
directed at interpreting the development of fascism as a pan-Eu-
ropean response to the crisis of classical liberalism and at viewing
its manifestation in Germany – Nazism – as a reaction to Bolshevik
dictatorship. Thus, it was not seen as an inherent consequence of
German history but as a development spurred on by external factors.
Associated with this train of thought was a criticism of “anti-fascism”
– particularly the version of it functioning as the official ideology in
the German Democratic Republic. Communist anti-fascism and its
Western counterparts were viewed simply as means for legitimizing
the communist dictatorship by depicting conservatism as a predeces-
sor to or even as a prototype of fascism.
A similar argumentation strategy was used by conservative his-
torians in Hungary after the change of the political regime. Like
their counterparts in Germany’s “historians’ dispute”, conservative
participants in the Hungarian debate sought to recreate the continu-
ity of the conservative national tradition. In order to do so they, too,
had to create a sharp distinction between the intentions of national
conservatives and the events that happened under their rule, like col-
laboration with Nazi Germany, anti-Jewish legislation, persecution
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of the Jews, and the historical developments that led to the seizure
of power by the Hungarian fascists, the Arrow Cross party, in 1944.
According to the basic argument of the conservatives both the pro-
Nazi extreme right-wing and Soviet-style communism were tenden-
cies alien or even hostile to the Hungarian political tradition. They
could acquire power (or the vestiges of power) only through external
pressure and assistance. This struggle was determined by so called
geopolitical realities. Both the extreme right-wing in 1944 and the
communists in 1948 could seize power only because of the country’s
geopolitical position and the insensitivity of the major western pow-
ers to Hungary’s western Christian commitment.
In this discourse, the “derailing” of Hungarian history is the result
of the unjust peace treaty signed at Trianon after the First World
War, a treaty dictated by the Western powers. This calamity explains
the failure of Hungarian liberalism and the increasing dominance of
radical anti-liberal politics. Attempts to achieve a legitimate revision of
Trianon forced honourable Hungarian conservatism into an alliance
with Germany, and pushed it into the pincers of German demands
and the ambitions of the domestic pro-Nazi extreme right wing. Anti-
Semitic legislation was a consequence of this alliance: the anti-Semitic
laws were concessions made to the Germans in order to prevent a more
brutal persecution of the Jews; they served also as means of silencing
the Hungarian extreme right. Thanks to these laws, however – and
to the fact that the Horthy regime resisted demands for deportation
of Jews until the country’s occupation by German forces – the largest
Jewish community in the German sphere of influence could more or
less survive until the German invasion of the country in March 1944.
Though Horthy remained in his position even after the invasion,
that is at the time of the deportation of more than a half-a-million
Jews, he is nevertheless credited with saving a significant portion of
Hungarian Jewry. Had he resigned in March 1944 – so the argument
goes – the majority of the Jews in Budapest would not have survived
the war; they survived only because Horthy stopped further deporta-
tions from Hungary following the deportation of Hungary’s provin-
cial Jews. Responsibility for the Holocaust is therefore borne solely
by the German occupiers and the collaborators of the Arrow Cross,
who constituted only a minority and were radical opponents of the
conservative governments. Participation in the war on the side of the
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Nazis was, on the one hand, a geopolitical necessity and, on the other,
acceptable even from a moral point of view, since the war was being
fought against another totalitarian dictatorship (the Soviet Union). The
predominant view of the post-war decades, the total condemnation
of the entire Horthy era as a type of proto-fascism or semi-fascism
and its exclusion from the set of acceptable and valuable historical
traditions, serves only the apologetic aims of Marxian-Communist
historiography: in the name of anti-fascism, such a view justified the
violent destruction of the traditional Hungarian Christian conserva-
tive forces after 1945. The reified form of this argumentation is the
widely debated exhibition of the Terror House Museum (opened in
2001), which presents the history of the two dictatorships – the Arrow
Cross and the Communists – as the result of the loss of the country’s
independence, first in 1944, then in 1948. The clear message of the
exhibition is that without foreign domination Hungary would not
have ever left the world of European democracies and, consequently,
the responsibility for the Holocaust and for the misdeeds of the Com-
munist regime lie on the side of the two totalitarian regimes that had
forced the country to derail from its own track.
The successive waves of debates concerning Hungarian history were
stirred by a great variety of issues, and they have not remained inside
of the circle of historians and intellectuals.3 The disputes were im-
mediately raised into the political sphere as leading politicians of the
period, such as the Prime Minister, József Antall, and the foreign min-
ister, Géza Jeszenszky, entered the fray. It was Antall who most clearly
summed up the basic argument of the conservative narrative:
[. . .] The compelling circumstances were able to force us into alliances, to force us
into wars, which the Hungarian people did not feel to be their own, which they did
not want to fight, but which they had no choice but to do so. [. . .] But let nobody
reproach us for being on the wrong side, because usually we were forced onto the
wrong side. With our suppressed wars of independence and our proud national revo-
lutions, we always sought to show our real intentions, and when we were abandoned
and we stood alone, we were forced into frameworks of state and political alliances,
as a logical consequence of which we were placed on the wrong side. Thereafter,
punishment was our lot.4
In this discourse, the main means of realising the purpose of the
discourse is to contrast the “internal” and the “external”, the “organi-
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cally developed” and “forced”, the “historical national substance” and
the “accidents, alien to the nation”. Within this model, the conserva-
tive narrative struggled to separate the “accidental” path leading to
the Hungarian Holocaust from the “substantial” path of Hungarian
history. In so doing, it interpreted the Holocaust as an “external”
and imposed event. The argument interpreting the Holocaust as a
consequence of the Trianon Peace Treaty was used again by József
Antall in a speech in memory of Pál Teleki (the Hungarian prime
minister who wholeheartedly supported anti-Semitic laws while
opposing Nazi Germany, and who eventually committed suicide in
1941 after admitting that it was impossible for Hungary to leave the
German alliance).5 Antall said the following:
Between the two world wars, Pál Teleki’s name was linked to laws and regulations that
have raised doubts and given occasion for unilateral judgment. [. . .] Pál Teleki was
the representative of a conservative philosophy, but not of some kind of backwardness.
Instead, he represented traditionalism and the preservation of values. Moreover,
acknowledging the country’s geopolitical situation, he sought compromise solutions
to the great political challenges of the era, and any search for compromise may at
times be accompanied by appeasement policies and temporary setbacks . . .6
On another occasion, Antall said:
Legislation against the Jews [. . .] cannot be explained or accepted. From a legal or
human standpoint, it is never acceptable; historically, however, it may be rationalised
in a variety of different ways.7
For sure, the great majority of conservative participants in the identity
politics debates were not anti-Semitic. There was no hidden anti-Se-
mitic message behind the arguments of Antall, and the others. The
restoration of a political system similar to the one of the Horthy era
was not the aim of their policy either – as their agitated partners in
the debate often claimed. Nevertheless, their neo-conservative image
of history did undoubtedly have certain elements which, in a different
context, may have formed part of an anti-Semitic discourse. Against
such attempts at re-contextualisation, the conservative discourse of-
ten proved defenseless. Thus, willingly or unwillingly, it provided a
point of reference for those extreme rightists who sought to renew
and re-legitimise anti-Semitism.
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If pre-Holocaust Hungarian mainstream politics was not responsi-
ble for what happened to the Jews of the country, then the post-war
demand to take responsibility for it has not only been unjust – argued
the representatives of the emerging extreme right already in 1990
– but it has also served as an effective tool in the struggle for control
over political power. This is the point where the openly anti-Semitic
discourse diverged from the conservative one. This discourse was
dominated by the theme of traditional Hungarian anti-Semitism: the
nightmare vision of an alien and excessive Jewish power, based on an
international concentration of forces which endangers the substance
of the Hungarian collective. The common feature of these views is
that they tried to find forms of expression which do not contradict
the consensus on the illegitimate nature of overt anti-Semitism in the
post-Holocaust era and in the Hungarian public sphere. Consequently,
they denied any anti-Semitic orientation and rejected the charge of
anti-Semitism. In this discourse, the acknowledgment and condemna-
tion of the persecution of the Jews actually served to legitimise the
anti-Semitic content. “I am not an anti-Semite,” wrote István Csurka,
the successful writer of the Kadar era, the best known representative
of the new trend. This was in response to the charges already raised
against him at the beginning of the 90s.
I have never offended a person or group because of race, religion, skin colour, or
ethnic background: I consider what happened to the Jews prior to and during World
War II to be the shame of 20th-century Europe; as a human being and a writer I
considered it my moral duty to salute the memory of the victims, and that is what
I have done.8
In line with the conservative argument in the historian’s debate,
Csurka also condemned the culprits: the Germans and their Hun-
garian collaborators, members of the Arrow Cross. Nevertheless, he
was not prepared to accept that the anti-Semitism of the murderers
had anything in common with the anti-Semitism that enjoyed wide-
spread support in Hungarian culture and politics before the physical
persecution of Jews began. And at this point the argument devi-
ated from the conservative path, veering in the direction of blatant
legitimisation of the pre-war Hungarian anti-Semitism. In his view
“traditional” Hungarian anti-Semitism was a reasonable reaction to
specific social problems.
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The horrors of Nazism and the Second World War had to happen so that the problem
of the Hungarian Jews could be removed from the columns of the newspapers and
periodicals and replaced with reports about the seizure of property, yellow stars,
and deportation.
Because of the Holocaust and its consequences, these problems and
their continuity could not be discussed and solved in a “Hungarian
way”.
According to Csurka, in the period after the Second World War, the
general conduct of Jews and the specific role played by Communist
politicians of Jewish descent are understandable and explicable, but
nevertheless harmful and vicious. Csurka willingly acknowledged
that the Communist Jews represented only a minority among the
survivors; nevertheless, they were able to use the fears of the Jewish
majority for their own manipulative purposes. They presented the
communist system as the sole guarantee that the former anti-Semitic
system would not return. Therefore, it was not only the Communist
Jews who supported the system en masse after 1945. According to
Csurka, “the left-wing in Hungary, even the Communist remnant,
enjoyed the financial support of the former middle-class liberal
Jews. . .”9 This alliance was the basis of the evolving strategy of a
“preventive strike”: the fear of anti-Semitism mobilised nearly all Jews
to use the favorable post-war political conditions created by the shock
of the Holocaust for seizing key positions in the economy, in politics
and in media in order to defend the collective “Jewish interests”. This
made post-war Communism “Jewish”, and at the same time destructive
from the point of view of the nation, since the new rulers could only
find foreign political supporters and allies, whose interests stood in
obvious contradiction to the interests of the nation.
Rationally explicable by the horrors of the Holocaust, this “Jewish
strategy” spanned political systems and remained unaltered despite
its changing appearance. According to the representatives of the ex-
treme right discourse, there is a striking continuity between the Com-
munist and post-Communist system. After the fall of Communism,
Jews were able to maintain their previous power by employing the
same method as before, that is the manipulation of fears concerning
anti-Semitism both in Hungary and abroad. The former Communist
Jews are linked by a secret thread to Jews who opposed the former
political system. The experiences and the memory of persecution
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trigger the same reactions in them despite the seemingly different
political views. The former Communists and the present liberals con-
tinuously use the charge of anti-Semitism in order to delegitimise the
anti-Communist national forces. For the Jews, who have been living
in constant fear ever since the Holocaust, anything that happens in
the interest of the nation is threatening, and the defensive reactions
are immediately set in motion. Whenever organisations representing
national interests appear, they immediately have to be subdued or
incapacitated. If personalities make an appeal in public to the nation,
then they have to be silenced. This can be done, again, only with the
support of powerful allies, that is by using the international Jewish
financial and media power. Thus, new foreign masters appeared
who no longer live in Moscow but in New York and in Tel Aviv. “It’s
a war now, a domestic Hungarian cold war, between the Hungarian
people and the domineering foreigners . . .” wrote Csurka.10
“They’ve forced a financial system and a colonial financial management adminis-
tration on us which [. . .] aims to establish a secure zone, refugee camp and hinter-
land for the perpetual war in the Middle East. For all this to happen, the primary
need is that others rather than Hungarians should dispose of Hungarian assets, or
Hungarians who are reliable as far as the Middle East is concerned and who profit
from the transaction.”11 The “final aim is the extermination of Hungarians. Not by
using weapons or poison gas, but by financial policy means, by removing livelihood
opportunities, and by leading them towards self-destruction.”12
Thus, old anti-Semitic structures were transformed for the simplifi-
cation and rationalization of the trauma and new political conflicts
caused by the transition to liberal capitalism and by joining suprana-
tional organizations. The tensions caused by economic and cultural
globalisation were portrayed as a conflict between cosmopolitan and
national interests, the consequences of joining the process of inter-
national integration as the loss of national sovereignty, and the social
consequences of the economic and political transition as the result of
being at the mercy of colonial masters. Meanwhile, either covertly, in
coded form, or overtly, the image of the Jew as destroyer of the nation
was evoked as the domestic agent of the colonizing Foreigner – thus
the old cliché of a Jewish conspiracy. This message is embedded in a
historical narrative, again, suggesting an unbroken continuity between
the problems – and the reason for the problems – of the pre-1945
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period as well as the Communist and the post-Communist periods.
In this case the historical narrative has a direct political function,
too: it connects historical clichés with present-day tensions in order
to mobilize the losers of the transition for political purposes.
At first glance the position of the left does not seem to be problem-
atic with regard to the period and events under discussion. The leftist
discourse presents itself as the natural inheritor of the moral capital of
the anti-fascist camp of the interwar period. The legitimative nature
of the discourse occurs first when the left – in the Hungarian case a
descendent of the former ruling party – tends to present itself as the
exclusive significant representative of anti-fascism and anti-racism.
This discourse is ready to accept responsibility, but only on behalf of
“others,” and its representatives seem to discover the descendants of
all the “others” in the ranks of their present-day political opponents.
The main problem concerning the leftist discourse is not only that it
neglects the existence of an important non-Communist democratic
tradition in prewar Hungary (for example social-democracy which
was destroyed exactly by communist policy), but also its selective
and relativising perception of the Communist past. The attempts of
relativisation have occurred most obviously in the leftist discourse on
the 1956 revolution, most notably in 2006 in the course of the fiftieth
anniversary events. Not wanted to alienate party militants and voters
for whom 1956 still represented a counter-revolution against the so-
cialist order, Ferenc Gyurcsány, the Socialist prime minister and party
leader at the time, declared on several occasions that all histories of
1956, that is that of the revolutionaries and that of their adversaries
were equally valid. Consequently, the narrative which legitimised the
executions and persecutions after the revolution, and the narrative of
the other side must both be accepted as valid – independently from
political choice and preference. Naturally, a similar argument con-
cerning the pre-war and wartime history would be radically attacked.
For these problems, selectivity is the most characteristic trait of the
leftist discourse. The left is reluctant to accept that anti-fascism as
well as the political instrumentalisation of anti-fascism, which served
the destruction of democratic political opponents after 1945, are both
part of its heritage. In the postwar decade, whether someone was
placed in the category of a “fascist” with devastating consequences
often had nothing to do with the person’s role before 1945. The most
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notorious example of this is how fast “junior-ranking members of the
Arrow Cross Party” were transferred to the Communist Party as “mis-
led workers” – a subject which is effectively visualised and exploited
by the exhibition in the “House of Terror”. Additionally, nowadays,
as in the Polish and in the Hungarian case, it is a well-documented
fact that postwar communist politics instrumentalised and used anti-
Semitism in order to gain popular support in the postwar years. In
Hungary, some Communist-organized anti-capitalist demonstrations
against “black-marketeering” turned into anti-Jewish pogroms in pro-
vincial cities. Even in the post-1965 decades, in the period of the “soft
dictatorship”, Communist politics constantly recreated the “Jewish
question”, even if it refused to tolerate overt anti-Semitism (as was
the case in Hungary). Recently discovered documents prove that even
in Hungary, Communist party and government organs regularly took
note of whether individuals falling under their scrutiny were Jewish
or non-Jewish. Whenever Jewish origin was considered to be a risk,
the individuals involved were subjected to discriminative measures
based exclusively on their descent (defined basically according to the
Nuremberg laws).13
Thus, since the debates about history took place in a political con-
text, their political instrumentalisation rapidly ensued. For the left, the
most effective means of shattering the legitimacy of the conservative
position in the eyes of the public was to call attention to the possibility
of a hidden agenda, namely the reconstruction of the prewar anti-
Semitic system, behind it. Meanwhile, the conservatives – employing
a similar strategy – attempted to portray their liberal and left wing
opponents as covert or overt apologists for the communist regime
hiding behind the veil of anti-fascism with the purpose of securing
the ruling position of the old communist elite. Instead of a perhaps
cathartic confrontation with the different and differently terrible
pasts, usable histories were constructed. The past has been presented
so that it could justify contemporary political positions and serve as a
weapon against opponents. In this way the usable histories fulfill their
identity function: by virtue of their symbolic significance, the position
taken in these debates gradually became a code of political identity.
In order to express political choice it became sufficient to take a side
in the debate about a historical exhibition; instead of arguing for or
against a political program, or concrete policies, it became sufficient
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to delineate the “historical pedigree” of the opponent in order to
contest his political legitimacy. If taking sides in a historical debate
substitutes for taking part in political conflicts, if the positions in a
Historikerstreit function as direct political codes, despite the intensity
and sharpness of the debate, the payoff will be the same as in the case
of a clean break: it is not to expect that politically instrumentalised
historical memory will be able to fulfill its real political mandate.
Notes
1 CSAPLÁR 1991.
2 The basic texts of the German “Historikerstreit” see Historikerstreit, München:
Piper Verlag, 1987; On the anti-fascism debate see GRUNENBERG 1993. The
French debates were mainly dealing with the book of COURTOIS et al. 1997.
3 For a historical review (a critique with commentaries), see KARSAI 1992; BRA-
HAM 2001.
4 ANTALL 1993, pp. 270–271.
5 Jeszenszky - kitapsolt párhuzam. Holocaust-tanácskozás Budapesten, in Magyar Hírlap, 6
April 1994 (vol. XXVII, no. 79), p. 4. And: “Kitapsolták” Jeszenszky Gézát, in: Magyar
Nemzet, 6 April 1994 (vol. LVIII, no. 79), p. 1 and p. 5.
6 He then continues: “. . .There is nothing more unhistorical than to take one or
two sections from the life works of Pál Teleki and to view and judge them from
the perspective of events that happened subsequently and from the perspec-
tive of political principles that were later compromised. . .” In ANTALL 1993:
p. 109. For an interpretation of Hungary’s role in the Second World War, see
also Dr.Antall József miniszterelnök beszéde a Hadtörténeti Múzeumban 1992. január
11-én (Prime Minister Dr József Antall’s speech in the Museum of Military History on 11
January 1992), in: Magyar Fórum, vol. IV, no. 4, 23 January 1992, pp. 11–13.
7 ANTALL: pp. 582.
8 See: Csurka István nyilatkozata és válaszlevele (István Csurka’s Report and Answer
Letter), in: Magyar Nemzet, 20 January 1990 (vol. LIII, no. 17.), p. 7.
9 Ibid., p. 11.
10 CSURKA 1995a.
11 CSURKA 1995b.
12 CSURKA 1998.
13 See KOVACS 2004.
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Bibliography
J. ANTALL, Modell és valóság [Model and Reality], vol. II, Budapest:
Athenaeum Nyomda Rt., 1993.
R. L. BRAHAM, Assault on historical memory, in C. R. BROWNING,
Hungary and the Holocaust: Confrontation with the Past. Symposium
Proceedings, Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Holocaust
Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001.
S. COURTOIS, N. WERTH, J. PANNÉ, K. BARTOSEK, J. MARGO-
LIN, A. PACZKOWSKI (eds.), Le livre noir du Communism, Paris:
Robert Laffont, 1997.
V. CSAPLÁR, Múltak osztogatása [Distribution of pasts], in Ring,
26 March 1991.
I. CSURKA, 1995a, Helyszíni közvetítés [Running Commentary], in
Magyar Fórum, 23 March 1995, p. 2.
I. CSURKA, 1995b,Helyszíni közvetítés [Running Commentary], in
Magyar Fórum, 20 July 1995, p. 2.
I. CSURKA, Minden, ami van [All There is], in Magyar Fórum, 5
February 1998, p. 2.
A. GRUNENBERG, Antifaschismus – ein deutscher Mythos, Reinbek bei
Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993.
L. KARSAI, A Shoah a Magyar sajtóban 1989–1991 [The Shoah in
the Hungarian press 1989–91], in E. FERENC, M. M. KOVÁCS
and Y KASHTI (eds.), Zsidóság, identitás történelem, Budapest: T-
Twins Kiadó, 1992, pp. 59-84.
A. KOVACS: Hungarian Jewish Politics from the End of the Second
World War until the Collapse of Communism, in E. MENDEL-
SOHN (ed.), Jews and the State. Dangerous Alliances and the Perils
of Privilege. Studies in Contemporary Jewry, XIX, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004, p. 124–156.
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Justice and Memory.indb 290 02.11.2009 13:39:51
Confronting War Crimes of the Wehrmacht
Walter Manoschek
Conflicts Waged to Define the Memory of the Wehrmacht
“One day, the extraordinary achievements of the front and home-
land will find their rightful appreciation in the judgment of history.
[. . .] For this reason, every soldier can proudly and honourably put
down his arms.” Thus concludes the final situation report made by
the Commanding General of the Wehrmacht on May 9, 1945. With
this proclamation, the war was officially ended and the controversy
about how the war was to be remembered was opened.1 And for a
long time it appeared as though the campaign waged to define the
memory of the war would be more successful than the actual war
itself. “The German army’s greatest victory,” as Omer Bartov wrote,
“was won on the field of politics, for here it was possible to return
without any challenge from the most murderous military campaign
in German history.”2
Auschwitz as the Symbolic Site of the Holocaust
Up into the 1960s, National Socialist crimes were predominantly rep-
resented in public memory as crimes perpetrated by the Nazi elite.
Research focusing on Hitler and other Nazi elites served the German’s
and Austrian’s need to free themselves from their own history. Other
groups of perpetrators first became part of the collective memory of
the Second World War during the 1960s, in part as a result of Adolf
Eichmann’s trial. From this point on, all those institutions whose
members had actively played a role in the concentration camps and
death camps, not only the Nazi elite, were associated with National
Socialist crimes and the Holocaust. Finally during the 1960s, a pub-
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licly acknowledged, to some extent coherent portrayal of the largest
methodically-planned mass murder in history began to become more
concrete. “Auschwitz” became the symbolic place and a metaphor
for the entirety of what had occurred. “Auschwitz” emphasised the
most radical and grotesque form of extermination. It is true that
only relatively few knew about and directly participated in what was
actually happening on the level of the extreme case of “Auschwitz.”
With “Auschwitz” as the focus of attention, the forms of extermina-
tion which went under the pretence of conventional warfare along
with their protagonists faded into the background. What occurred,
in the words of Jan Philipp Reemtsma, was an “obfuscation through
emphasising the extreme.”3
“Emphasising the extreme” served an exonerating sociopoliti-
cal function. Through concentrating on the crimes committed by
fanatical National Socialist perpetrators, a relatively small segment
of the population, it was possible to divert attention away from the
mainstream of society.
The Myth of the “Unsoiled Badge” of the Wehrmacht
In 1946, the Allied powers’ International Military Tribunal con-
demned two dozen top Wehrmacht officers to death or long prison
terms for war crimes. During the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials and
in trials before the Allied powers’ national courts, hundreds of mem-
bers of the military – among them many Austrians – were convicted
of war crimes and crimes against humanity.4 During the beginning
of the 1950s, the Federal Republic of Germany made granting am-
nesty and releasing the German Wehrmacht soldiers to be the sine qua
non for joining NATO. The ensuing wave of a amnesties contributed
“significantly to the situation that the fundamentally illegal character
of the National Socialist regime and its wars of aggression could be
obscured. [. . .] At the price of altering historical reality, the former
soldiers,” as the German Historian Norbert Frei has put it, “were to
be given the opportunity to find some meaning in the sacrifices they
had often made during their military service.”5 In the context of the
integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the West, “the
legend of the ‘unsoiled badge’ of the Wehrmacht and the ‘normal
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military operations’ they had waged was maintained to such an extent
that it was almost impossible to be called into question by historians
until well into the 1980s.”6
Strategies for the Integration of Former Members of the Wehrmacht into
Austrian Society
With the Federal Republic of Germany paving the way, Austria was
able to create its own legend of the Wehrmacht. The reasons behind
this had to do with the question of how it was going to be possible to
reintegrate the more than one million former “Ostmark” Wehrmacht
soldiers into Austrian society and to make their memories of the war
serve the purposes of the construction of the Austrian nation. The
integration of the Austrian Wehrmacht collective into political culture
often took place by means of the cultic setting of the war memorial.7
A political-historical coalition was forged in this ritualised form of
commemoration of the fallen soldiers between the Austrian collective
of Wehrmacht soldiers and the social and political elite of the Second
Austrian Republic. Heidemarie Uhl has accurately summed up the
essence of this agreement:
The formal apologies made by public representatives were not a one-sided under-
standing and for this reason cannot solely be explained as election tactics. On this
level it was much more a question of being one of the central plans of integration into
the Second Republic: Party representatives, the authorities and the church honoured
this fulfillment of duty for the fatherland as a timeless patriotic virtue, regardless of
the political system they served, and with this they gave the soldiers the feeling of
being entirely rehabilitated without having to completely distance themselves from
their past. As a symbolic quid pro quo, representatives from veterans’ organisations
now swore the very same allegiance to the Republic.8
There was no place in the Austrian cultural memory for former We-
hrmacht soldiers to recall their own version of what had happened
during the war if it in any way deviated from the official agenda,
and thus there were no contradictory memories or representations
of what happened present in public discourse. On an institutional
level, the veterans’ organisations – especially the Österreichischer
Kameradschaftsbund (ÖKB) [Austrian Veterans’ Organisation] with its
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250,000 members – maintained a monopoly on the interpretation of
what had happened during the war.9 The same was true with inter-
views conducted with former soldiers. Their personal observations
and traumatic experiences, their ideological and political positions
during the war, which often contradicted the narrative of being in-
nocent, apolitical victims, were for the most part ignored.10
The Wehrmacht and the War of Annihilation
50 years after the end of the war, on the threshold between com-
municative and cultural memory, the “Wehrmachtsausstellung”, as it is
commonly referred to, brought the institution of the Wehrmacht onto
center stage showing its role in the perpetration of war crimes. The
Wehrmacht was precisely the institution in which the mainstream of
society, approximately 18 million Germans and Austrians, had been
active during the war. And it was not a question of individual in-
stances of criminal acts in war, as can be found in all wars, but rather
of structural, National Socialist-motivated crimes against the Jewish
population, civilians and prisoners of war. These were crimes in
which the Wehrmacht was not merely incidentally involved but rather
where soldiers acted both as accomplices and on their own accord.
It was not a question of crimes committed by specific organizations
or units, but rather of crimes committed by a large portion of the
male population. And this by no means constituted the exception but
rather was an inherent part of daily life during the war.
The term “Vernichtungskrieg” [war of extermination or annihilation]
which came to be used beginning in the mid-1990s best characterizes
this war waged beyond any notion of international law or law in war:
The entire Jewish population was to be murdered, the Slavic popula-
tion was to be decimated and enslaved using hunger and terror, and
millions of Soviet prisoners were to be starved to death and either
deported to work as forced labour in the greater “pan-Germanic
Reich” or interned in concentration camps.
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The Wehrmacht during the War in Poland: Field of Experimentation for
the War of Annihilation
Commonly, the beginning of the “war of extermination” is associ-
ated with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941. But this
portrayal underestimates the extent to which the Wehrmacht employed
elements of the war of extermination from the very beginning of the
war. Jochen Böhler recently published a book with the telling title
“Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg” [Prologue to the War of Extermina-
tion] analysing for the first time in German, almost 70 years after the
fact, the ravaging of the Wehrmacht in the Autumn of 1939 in Poland.11
“Freischärlerwahn” [paranoid fear of partisans] as Böhler called it, was
one of the main driving forces for the ruthless actions taken towards
Polish civilians at the beginning of the invasion. The inexperienced
troops had naïve expectations of what the actual fighting would be
like, expecting the enemy to stand up and fight in an open battle.
But the Polish troops, who were in a state of constant retreat, began
to fight from under cover. Villages and forests were put to use in
order to at least delay the Germans’ advances, in the hopes that the
western allies would intervene in time. The losses that were actually
suffered by the Wehrmacht through these, according to the laws of war,
legitimate tactics were in fact minimal, as their success was limited.
However, the German troops projected their anger about the use of
these tactics onto the Polish civilian population. The entire population
came to be dealt with as partisans, even if they just happened to be
caught between the fronts with no proof that they had been involved.
Entire towns were systematically burned to the ground, inhabitants
were executed on the streets, hand grenades were thrown into houses
and cellars where families had tried to escape the fighting. Already in
the first few weeks of the war, these acts of violence on the part of the
German army cost the lives of thousands of Polish civilians.12 When
Polish soldiers were captured during these conflicts, they were not
treated as prisoners of war, but instead were immediately executed by
the Wehrmacht soldiers. This was not a question of individual acts of
excess but rather a mass phenomenon that occurred everywhere the
Wehrmacht was active during the autumn of 1939. Hundreds of Polish
towns were burned to the ground as thousands of civilians died in the
fires, hand grenade explosions and machine gun barrages.
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The manifest anti-Semitism of the campaign, documented in sol-
diers’ diary entries and letters from the front, was also evident in
acts of aggression perpetrated by Wehrmacht soldiers. Cutting and
burning off beards along with making prisoners “run the gauntlet,”
forced labour and fake executions became popular daily rituals. The
number of Jewish victims who died due to Wehrmacht excesses in the
autumn of 1939 is not possible to be accurately determined. But the
numerous case examples suggest that by the end of the year, about
7.000 Jewish people were killed by the occupying forces,13 a large
portion of these at the hands of Wehrmacht units.14 What is clearer
is the Wehrmacht’s responsibility for the fate of about 50.000 Polish
Jewish prisoners of war. Beginning in 1939, they were transported to
work camps and ghettos run by the General Government or directly
into concentration camps. Only a few hundred Polish Jewish soldiers
survived the Second World War.15
Criminal Orders: The War against the Soviet Union
As part of the planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union, work
also began on devising orders relating to the conduct of the war and
ensuing occupation in the East. In March 1941, Hitler had already
informed 200 generals and staff officers of the units who were to be
sent to the Eastern Front that this war would be “a struggle between
two world ideologies”, to be conducted beyond the realms of estab-
lished codes of martial or international law.16 The first results were the
notorious “criminal orders” contained in the following directives.
1. Decree on Military Jurisdiction in the Area “Barbarossa”, issued
13 May 1941 (Barbarossa Decree).17
2. Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia, issued 19 May
1941.18
3. Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars, issued 6
June 1941.19
4. Orders Concerning the Deployment of the Security Police and
the Security Service within Military Formations, issued 28 April
1941.20
5. Various orders relating to the treatment of Soviet prisoners of
war, issued from June to December 1941.21
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As the issuing dates of these orders show, the scope of the violent
measures proposed was not a consequence of escalation in the conflict,
but was in fact laid down in the spring of 1941 – months before the
planned invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June – by the Chief of
the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), Wilhelm Keitel. This scope
was systematically increased from the summer of 1941 onwards.
The “Barbarossa Decree”
In breach of all international conventions, the “Barbarossa Decree”
removed the civilian population in the Soviet Union’s territory from
the jurisdiction of the martial law courts. The troops themselves
were now to act as judge, jury and executioner: they should “defend
themselves mercilessly against any threat whatsoever from the enemy
civilian population”. Irregular combatants were to be shot immediately,
whether in combat or in flight. Irregulars were defined as including
unarmed volunteers (“agitators”, “leafleteers” and “arsonists”) as well
as civilians merely suspected of participating in such activities. There
was no longer any necessity to prosecute members of the Wehrmacht for
acts against enemy civilians – even if the act itself was a military crime.
Court-martial proceedings were to be initiated only “when necessary
for the maintenance of discipline or the safety of the troops”.22
This de facto declaration of war against the civilian population
culminated in the command issued by the OKW on 16 December
1942: “Troops are therefore entitled and obliged to use any means
whatsoever in this struggle – even against women and children – where
this is the only way to ensure success. [. . .] No German engaged in
counter-insurgency activity may be subject to disciplinary or court-
martial proceedings on account of his conduct in the struggle against
insurgent groups or their sympathizers.”23
The removal of the war, on the orders of the Wehrmacht leadership,
from normal military legal constraints was reflected in correspond-
ing casualty figures, a few of which are mentioned here by way of
example:
• In the rear military area of Belorussia, during the first nine months
of the campaign – when the Partisan movement was still taking
shape – 63.257 “Partisans” were killed. The low number of German
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losses – 638 dead and 1.355 wounded – demonstrates that most of
these “Partisans” were civilians, and did not die in combat. Things
were no different in the part of Belorussia that was under civilian
administration: by November 1941, out of 10.940 people captured,
10.431 had been shot dead.24
• In the Ukraine, the High Command of the Sixth Army distinguished
between “actual Partisans” and “vagabond elements”. Their fate,
however, was identical: “Along with the actual Partisans, [the Army]
eliminated many elements prowling the countryside without identity
papers, concealing their role as agents and intelligence operatives
of the Partisans. In the course of this action, several thousands in
the Army zone were publicly hanged or shot.”25
• Even in Serbia, where de jure the “Barbarossa Decree” was not in
force, in practice it was applied there too: in the course of their
campaign against Partisans in the autumn of 1941, Wehrmacht units
shot dead between 20.000 and 30.000 civilians – their own losses
amounted to 160 dead and 278 wounded.26
The death tolls alone, from three different theatres of war in the
year 1941, make it clear that these were neither matters of military
combat in any true sense against the Partisans, nor simply excesses
committed by individual Wehrmacht units.
Guidelines for the conduct of troops in Russia
On the day of the invasion of the Soviet Union, the “Guidelines for
the Conduct of Troops in Russia” had already revealed to soldiers
of the Eastern Army the character of the civilian opposition groups:
“Bolshevism is the deadly enemy of the National Socialist German
people. This corrosive Weltanschauung – and those who support it
– are what Germany’s struggle is against. This struggle demands a
ruthless and strenuous crackdown on Bolshevik agitators, irregulars,
saboteurs and Jews, and the complete elimination of both active and
passive resistance. The Asiatic soldiers, in particular, are inscrutable,
unpredictable, underhand and unfeeling.”27
These terms could be arbitrarily applied to the population as re-
quired. For the 20th Infantry Division for example, men who did not
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yield to the recruitment of forced labour were regarded as “saboteurs”
and shot.28 It was in this vein that Wehrmacht chiefs and divisional com-
manders formulated their guidelines for the “establishment of law
and order”. The Wehrmacht commander in Ostland,29 Major General
Walter Braeder, drew up the following list: “Law and order are en-
dangered by: (a) Bolshevik soldiers and agents (Partisans), whether
dispersed or strategically placed in woods and isolated locations; (b)
Communist and other radical elements; (c) Jews and those friendly
to Jews.”30 “The Jew is therefore to be viewed without exception as
identical to the Partisan”, was a formula familiar to the troops. In
September 1941, the High Command of the 17th Army provided an
even more precise definition of groups to be regarded as suspected
Partisans: “Jews of either sex and of any age.”31
The “Commissar Order”
The “Commissar Order”, issued on 6 June 1941, envisaged the on-the-
spot shooting by troops of any captured political commissars of the
Red Army. Although the enforcement of this order was strenuously
denied by the Wehrmacht after the war, it is now clear that “the Com-
missar Order was car ried out within all armies and tank groups, by at
least 80 per cent of the army corps and at least half the divisions.”32
Political commissars were presented to Wehrmacht troops as an image
of the enemy into which anti-communist and anti-Semitic projections
were seamlessly merged. The bulletin “Information for Troops”, June
1941, stated, for example: “What Bolsheviks are, is clear to anyone
who has once taken a look into the face of one of these red commis-
sars. [. . .] It would be an insult to animals to describe as animal-like
the features of these people, a large, percentage of whom are Jew-
ish. They are the embodiment of the infernal, people mutated into
a crazed hatred of all that is noble in humanity. In the form of these
commissars, we are witnessing the uprising of the subhuman against
noble blood.”33
Surviving letters from soldiers at the front demonstrate that the
“Commissar Order” was carried out right from the first days of the
Russian campaign: on 24 June 1941, the junior officer Heinz H. of
the 6th Infantry Division reported home: “Yesterday the first Russian
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captives turned up with a captured commissar. The latter is sure to
be shot. In that respect the laws are hard and just.”
And the soldier Herman K. knew, too, at the time of the push to-
wards Moscow in mid-July 1941, about the fate of captured political
commissars:
We get nearer and nearer to Moscow. Everywhere the same picture of destruction.
[. . .] The people are living in abject misery, and nothing else that has been written
about Russia is exaggerated: every commissar who is taken prisoner or who gets
snatched is shot immediately.34
Orders concerning the Security Police (Sipo) and the Security Service (SD)
The regulations governing the deployment of the Security Police and
the Security Service within military formations, decreed by OKW
Chief, Wilhelm Keitel, in March 1941, meant that the Einsatzgruppen
and the stationary units of the Security Police and the Security Service
were empowered to assume executive responsibility for measures af-
fecting the civilian population. In black and white terms, this meant
that the notorious organisations controlled by Heinrich Himmler were
authorized to carry out their programme of murder of the Jewish
population throughout the field of military operations. With this ac-
commodation between the military and the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich
Himmler, “the framework for a state-sponsored war of annihilation
against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ was already in place.”35 On the basis of
this accommodation, the Einsatzgruppen were able to murder more
than a million Jews with the acquiescence of the Wehrmacht.
Orders relating to the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war
Whereas captured political commissars of the Red Army were shot
immediately, far in excess of half the total 5.5 million Soviet prisoners
of war also died, as a result of malnourishment, disease and shooting.
In total, 3.3 million died in German captivity – between the summer
of 1941 and the spring of 1942 alone, the total was more than 2 mil-
lion.36 Responsibility for transport, accommodation, provisions and
the care of prisoners of war lay with the Wehrmacht. The OKW had
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ruled that “the Bolshevik soldier has forfeited any entitlement to be
treated as an honourable soldier, or in accordance with the Geneva
Convention.”37 The Wehrmacht was thus applying a principle laid
down by the Chief of Staff General Halder in March 1941: the Com-
munist is “not a comrade to begin with, and is not a comrade at any
time thereafter.”38
Prisoners’ food rations lay below minimum subsistence levels. Trans-
ports to the camps were often survived by no more than 10 per cent
of prisoners. The Quartermaster General of the Military, General
Eduard Wagner, decreed: “Non-working prisoners of war . . . shall
starve”, while the High Command of the Sixth Army issued orders
“to shoot all work-shy prisoners of war.”39
The policy of population decimation encompassed not only Soviet
prisoners, but also the civilian population. In order to guarantee
supplies to the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, as well as to the Volks-
gemeinschaft at home, the occupied areas were plundered extensively.
Moreover, the policy of allowing people to starve and driving out
the local population was intended to create space for the settlement
policies being pursued. Responsibility for the implementation of
these measures lay with the Wirtschaftsstab Ost. Here, the respective
tasks of the Reich ministries and the economic departments of the
Wehrmacht came under central coordination. The ramifications of the
policy were summarized by Wirtschaftsstab Ost as follows: “Many tens
of millions of people” would “become superfluous” and “either die
or emigrate to Siberia.”40
Crimes of the Wehrmacht in Serbia
After the western campaigns, Yugoslavia was invaded in the spring
of 1941 and divided amongst the Axis Powers. Serbia came under
German military occupation and after partisan forces led by Tito
began their armed insurrection against the occupation, the Wehrma-
cht began a racially motivated war of extermination. For every dead
German soldier, 100 prisoners were shot, for every wounded soldier,
50 were shot. Beginning in the fall of 1941, the first groups to be
liquidated by the execution commandos were the male Jews, Sinti
and Roma – more than 6,000 victims. After this supply of hostages
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had been used up, the Wehrmacht went over to randomly killing other
Serbian civilians. During the two largest massacres on the Balkans in
October 1941 alone, 2.056 people were killed in Kraljevo and 2.300
in Kragujevac, including numerous women, children and the elderly
– all at the hands of Wehrmacht firing squads.41 None of the soldiers
who participated in these killings were ever convicted after the war.
All of the trials were dismissed.
Bloody Tracks in Greece
In summer 1943 the 1st Mountain Division was ordered to Greece to
fight the partisans.42 During these actions, the Division categorically
did not take any prisoners. Whoever was found with a weapon was shot
on the spot. The surrounding villages were plundered and burned
down. The remaining inhabitants – from babies to the elderly – were
randomly massacred and listed in the troops records as “enemy dead.”
During the months of July and August 1943 alone, the 1st Division
destroyed 184 towns and killed 1,759 civilians – with their own losses
at 22 casualties. The worst crime on innocent civilians was committed
in the Epirian village of Kommeno where on August 12, 1943, about
120 members of the division entered the village and without meeting
any resistance, began a massacre which would last three hours kill-
ing 371 people, among them 172 women and 97 children and youths
under 15 years of age. The company did not suffer any casualties or
wounded. The case of Kommeno is also a good example of how the
Wehrmacht systematically manipulated reports in order to cover up
war crimes. While the regiment report (incorrectly) listed “150 civil-
ian dead”, the division report mentions “150 enemy dead”, with the
report sent to the General Staff referring to “150 dead bandits” and
in the German General Staff’s official daily report with the Italian
11th Army, a certain First Lieutenant Kurt Waldheim would laconically
note, “Concerning the 1st Mountain Division. The town of Komeno
[. . .] was captured in spite of heavy resistance with enemy losses.”
Here it becomes evident how by way of four war reports, a crime of
war was transformed into a conventional act of defense.
Along with the many civilians, Italian soldiers were also among the
victims of the 1st Mountain Division. After Italy’s capitulation at the
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beginning of September, 1943, the Italian division Acqui stationed on
the Ionic islands Kefalonia and Corfu decided not to put down their
weapons but rather to fight against the Wehrmacht. According to a
“Führerbefehl” [under direct order of the Führer], the Italian officers
were to be shot, and the petty officers and enlisted men were to be
deported to the east to forced labour camps. From the over 10.000
Italian soldiers stationed on Kefalonia, 525 officers were killed. About
2.000 Italian soldiers were killed after being captured by members
of the 1st Mountain Division.
None of the members of the 1st Mountain Division were convicted
by Austrian or German courts of any of these crimes of war. Only
General Hubert Lanz, the commanding general of the army corps
which included the 1st Mountain Division, was put on trial for among
other things the murder of the Italian soldiers on Kefalonia during
the so-called “Hostages Trial” in 1948 against the generals active in
the southeastern theater. He was convicted and sentenced to 12 years
in prison, but was soon released in 1951. The investigations and pre-
liminary proceedings in Italy, Greece and the Federal Republic of
Germany were put to a halt under the influence of the politics of the
cold war, the rearmament of the Federal Republic and its integration
into NATO. In 1956, the German Army [Bundeswehr] again established
a 1st Mountain Division in which soon after its conception, officers
from the former Wehrmacht division took on the highest ranking
positions. Among them were those accused of being the worst war
criminals active in the Balkan theatre.
Reasons for the Many Years of Silence about the Crimes Committed by the
Wehrmacht
One of the arguments claims that it was first possible to have access to
adequate information about these crimes after the opening of archives
in the east. This argument is very simply not true. The information
in these archives increased the number of details about the crimes
committed by the Wehrmacht, but the most important material had
already been accessible to researchers for decades.
This poses the question of why research avoided this aspect. Some
of the reasons have already been given: The Wehrmacht tried to sys-
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Justice and Memory.indb 303 02.11.2009 13:39:52
tematically cover up their crimes. As I showed with the case of Kom-
meno, the massacre of 371 innocent civilians was transformed into
an indefinite number of “enemy casualties.”
Deceptive notions such as “Bandenbekämpfung [fighting against
bandits]”, “Sühnemaßnahmen [expiation or atonement measures]”,
a neologism for reprisal measures, “Freischärlertum [illegal partisan
snipers]” et cetera further complicate getting to the bottom of the
reality of the crimes.
Of much greater importance, however, was the vow of silence that
determined the situation both on a national and international level.
In the Federal Republic, it was part of the politics of the cold war,
Germany’s integration into the West, and its membership in NATO,
that made it possible to sweep these crimes under the carpet on an
international scale. The release in the early 1950s of all of the mem-
bers of the Wehrmacht who were convicted in the trials held by the
Allied powers is without a doubt an example of this. Both the Federal
Republic of Germany and Austria were confronted with the problem
of how the National Socialist “Volksgemeinschaft” – and here especially
the 18 million former Wehrmacht soldiers – could be integrated into a
democratic system. The answer to the problem was simply to remain
silent about the crimes committed by the Wehrmacht. And as a result,
no more than a handful of former members of the Wehrmacht were
ever convicted of war crimes.
And finally, it was the very positions of power held by the Wehrmacht
generation up into the mid-1990s that inhibited this debate. Only
after they began to step down from their positions did it become
possible, set in motion by the “Wehrmachtsausstellung”, for a broad
public debate about the crimes committed by the mainstream of so-
ciety. At last, the silence which had obscured the crimes committed
by the Wehrmacht was finally broken. Again I would like to return to
the final situation report made by the Commanding General of the
Wehrmacht which I referred to at the beginning of my paper: “One
day, the extraordinary achievements of the front and homeland will
find their rightful appreciation in the judgment of history.” It took
decades for this Janus-faced statement with all of its criminal impli-
cations to be appreciated in its historical significance.
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Justice and Memory.indb 304 02.11.2009 13:39:52
Notes
1 HEER, MANOSCHEK, POLLAK, WODAK 2008.
2 BARTOV 1991, p. 183.
3 REEMTSMA 2000, p. 276.
4 UEBERSCHÄR 1999.
5 FREI 1996, p. 22.
6 FREI 1996: p. 305.
7 GÄRTNER, ROSENBERGER 1991.
8 UHL 1994: p. 149.
9 EMBACHER 1999.
10 HORNUNG 1996.
11 BÖHLER 2006.
12 BÖHLER 2006: p. 76.
13 POHL 1998: p. 77.
14 POHL 1993: p. 24f.
15 BÖHLER 2006: p. 178.
16 Notes of General Franz Halder, quoted in: UEBERSCHÄR, WETTE 1999,
p. 249.
17 Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv Freiburg (BA-MA), RW 4/v. 577: Erlaß über die
Ausübung der Kriegsgerichtsbarkeit im Gebiet “Barbarossa” und über besondere
Maßnahmen der Truppe (Decree on the exercising of military jurisdiction in the
area “Barbarossa” and on special measures for the troops). OKW chief of staff,
Wilhelm Keitel, 13 May 1941.
18 G. R. UEBERSCHÄR, Hitlers Entschluss zum “Lebensraum”-Krieg im Osten, in
UEBERSCHÄR, WETTE 1999: 41.
19 Id.
20 MÜLLER 1980: p. 42f.
21 See STREIT 2001.
22 See endnote 16.
23 OKW Bandenbekämpfung, 16. 12. 1941, quoted in MÜLLER 1980: 139f.
24 HEER 1995, p. 109.
25 Kriegstagebuch AOK 6, Ic, 7. 12. 1941, quoted in BOLL, SAFRIAN 1996, p. 92.
26 MANOSCHEK 1995, p. 166.
27 Quoted in W. WETTE, Die propagandistische Begleitmusik zum deutschen Überfall
auf die Sowjetunion am 22. Juni 1941, in UEBERSCHÄR, WETTE 1999, p. 50.
28 MÜLLER 1980: p. 93.
29 German occupation zone comprising the Soviet Baltic states and parts of Belorus-
sia.
30 Quoted in H. HEER, Killing Fields. Die Wehrmacht und der Holocaust, in HEER,
NAUMANN 1995: p. 66.
31 Quoted in R. HILBERG, Wehrmacht und Judenvernichtung, in MANOSCHEK
1996: p. 28.
32 J. FÖRSTER, Verbrecherische Befehle, in WETTE, UEBERSCHÄR 2001: p. 146.
33 Quoted in MESSERSCHMIDT 1969, p. 326f.
305
Justice and Memory.indb 305 02.11.2009 13:39:53
34 The two letters quoted are from the Library of Contemporary History (Bibliothek
für Zeitgeschichte) in Stuttgart (“Sammlung Sterz”).
35 J. FÖRSTER, Verbrecherische Befehle, in WETTE, UEBERSCHÄR 2001: p. 140.
36 C. STREIT, Die Behandlung der sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen und völkerrechtswid-
rige Probleme des Krieges gegen die Sowjetunion, in UEBERSCHÄR, WETTE 1999:
p. 160.
37 OKW, Anordnung für die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener, 8. 9.
1941, quoted in: HAMBURGER INSTITUT FÜR SOZIALFORSCHUNG 1996:
p. 179.
38 Notes of General Halder, quoted in UEBERSCHÄR, WETTE 1999: p. 249.
39 See STREIT 2001: pp. 181ff.
40 HAMBURGER INSTITUT FÜR SOZIALFORSCHUNG 2002, p. 14.
41 MANOSCHEK 1995.
42 MEYER 2008.
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daten an der „Ostfront“, in Erobern und Vernichten. Der Krieg gegen
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H. EMBACHER, “. . .daß die Ehre der Kameraden unangetatstet
bleiben müsse.” Die “Wehrmachtsausstellung” und das Ges-
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der Gegenwart, Innsbruck: Österr. Studienverlag, 1991.
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Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944. Ausstel-
lungskatalog, Hamburg: Hamburger Ed., 1996.
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H. HEER, Die Logik des Vernichtungskrieges. Wehrmacht und Parti-
sanenkampf, in H. HEER, K. NAUMANN (eds.), Vernichtungskrieg.
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hinter der Front, Wien: Picus, 1996, p. 182–205.
W. MANOSCHEK, “Serbien ist judenfrei.” Militärische Besatzungspolitik
und Judenvernichtung 1941/42, München: Oldenbourg, 1995.
M. MESSERSCHMIDT, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat, Hamburg:
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H. F. MEYER, Blutiges Edelweiß. Die 1. Gebirgs-Division im Zweiten
Weltkrieg, Berlin: Links, 2008.
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Fischer, 1998.
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Generalgouvernements 1939–1944, Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 1993.
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über ein prognostisches Versagen, in M. Th. GREVEN, O. VON
WROCHEM (eds.), Der Krieg in der Nachkriegszeit. Der Zweite
Weltkrieg in Politik und Gesellschaft der Bundesrepublik, Opladen:
Leske + Budrich, 2000, pp. 273–290.
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UEBERSCHÄR 2001: pp. 178–192.
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Sowjetunion, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1999.
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H. UHL, Erinnern und Vergessen. Denkmäler zur Erinnerung an
die Opfer der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft und an die
Gefallenen des Zweiten Weltkriegs in Graz und in der Steiermark,
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in Graz und in der Steiermark vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur
Gegenwart, Wien–Köln–Weimar: Böhlau, 1994, p. 111–197.
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dert, Darmstadt: Primus, 2001.
308
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Israel’s Prenatal Memory:
Born 1948 – Traumatised 1938
Moshe Zimmermann
The one remarkable thing about collective memory is that it has very
little to do with memory’s original meaning, for the individual. The
concept of collective memory is used in a metaphorical way, which
ignores the real biological and mnemotechnical mechanisms that
characterise the process of registering facts and impressions on the
individual brain. The memory of an individual person is the recol-
lection of an event that happened to him, whereas so-called collec-
tive memory is usually a reference to events that either happened
before the individual was even born or, if they occurred during the
lifetime of the individual, did actually happen – but to other people.
The registration of events on an aggregate of individual brains is the
outcome of an endeavor of societal agencies, agencies of memory,
which are agencies of education and collective orientation that aim
to create a collective identity. This is why so many elements of what
we usually call collective memory do not belong to the experience of
the individuals who compose the community of memory.
Within Jewish tradition, collective memory – the imposition of
past experiences on the Jewish collective with the help of agencies of
socialisation – plays a central role. The Book of Deuteronomy recom-
mends that the Jewish people “remember the days of old, consider the
years of many generations” (32:7) as a general rule, and specifically
that they “remember what the Amalekites did to you when you came
out of Egypt” (25:17). Occurrences of the past began to find their way
into Jewish collective memory as they were read about in the bible, the
Jews’ sacred and most popular text. Thus, past occurrences, whether
real or invented, became and continue to become a component of
collective memory. This process has a clear aim: Preservation of these
memories molds collective identity, which guides the collective in its
future actions.
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The State of Israel was born on the 5th day of the Hebrew month
of Iyyar 5708 (15.5.1948), yet the State’s memory, the memory of its
citizens, extends back to a time much before this birthday, not only
because the individual adult citizens of 1948 had memories of the
time before, but also because the socialisation of these citizens had
focused intensely on the creation or invention of old, even ancient
memories. No wonder, then, that the memory of 1938 also became a
component of the collective memory of the citizens of the State born
ten years later. This quasi-prenatal collective “memory” fulfilled
the function of conditioning behaviour compatible with the Zionist
ideology as propagated by the State. Of course, 1938 was only one of
the fateful historical junctions to be memorised, but it was a central
one.
At least four major European events of 1938 are not only relevant to
collective Jewish memory, but actually entered collective Israeli memo-
ry: The “Anschluss” (March); the Evian Conference (July); the Munich
Agreement (September); and the “Reichskristallnacht” (November). Of
course, events that happened in Palestine in 1938 left a more decisive
and direct imprint on later Israeli collective memory: These were,
first and foremost, the Arab mutiny (in Hebrew, “unrest”), and the
planned partition of Palestine into two states. Yet because the origins
of Jewish Palestinian society were European, and because Zionism
and anti-Semitism were European phenomena, European memories
also became a prominent part of the collective Jewish memory in
Palestine, and later of Israeli collective memory.
Of the four above-mentioned events in Europe, three directly af-
fected the fate of the Jews: The Anschluss, which introduced the Third
Reich’s anti-Semitic policy into Austria (now the Ostmark), made its
way to Palestine in the form of photos of non-Jewish Austrians jeer-
ing at Austrian Jews as they scraped the pavement with toothbrushes
– photos that became iconic everywhere, as well as in Palestine. Eich-
mann’s Zentralstelle for Jewish emigration from Austria also became
an element of collective memory, as a great number of Austrian Jews
immigrated to Palestine within one year. The Evian Conference dealt
not only with the forced migration of Jews from Central Europe and
the need to rescue persecuted Central European Jews, but also touched
upon the very relevant problem of Jewish aliyah, Jewish migration
to Palestine, where the British Mandate imposed restrictions on the
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number of Jewish immigrants. The Zionist movement in general,
and the Zionist leadership in Palestine, in particular, was interested
in transforming the Evian initiative into an instrument of mass emi-
gration to Palestine. That so little was achieved during and after the
conference initially seemed to have become an important component
of Zionist memory, with the aim of stressing not only the inevitabil-
ity and exclusivity of the Zionist solution to the Jewish problem, in
general, but also the need for no less than a Jewish state.
The Reichskristallnacht immediately became, from the day it hap-
pened, an event to be remembered – in Palestine as everywhere in the
Jewish world. In Palestine as elsewhere, this pogrom was seen as an
inexplicable but extremely significant event, particularly because it
happened in a State that was considered highly civilised, a State that
had officially, openly become anti-Semitic. This kind of behaviour
– as exemplified by the pogrom – was in itself, of course, not un-
precedented: Eastern European Jews had experienced it many times
before. But a German pogrom dealt a harsher psychological blow than
had the Russian ones – to all Jews. It led to the conclusion that times
had changed, and progress had stopped. No wonder that this event,
too, left its mark not only on the Jews who were living in Palestine
before or during World War II, but also on collective Jewish-Israeli
memory after 1948. Since Israeli education and Israeli political dis-
course have always underlined allegedly eternal anti-Semitism, and
sought the most conspicuous historical examples of Jew-baiting as a
justification for Zionism, the Reichskristallnacht of 1938 has since its
occurrence been a hallmark of collective memory. Interestingly, in
2008, 70 years after Kristallnacht, this memory was activated not only
as a typical example of the fate of Jews in times of anti-Semitism,
but also as a warning against the violent tactics used by settlers in
the occupied West Bank against Palestinian Arabs. When the Israeli
prime minister condemned the attack against Arabs by Jews in the
city of Hebron in December 2008, calling it a pogrom, he had the
Reichskristallnacht in mind. Also interestingly, the double-edged use
of this memory may explain why this element of collective memory
has lost its prominence in Israeli collective memory over time.
One might have expected this event, which was extremely and ex-
clusively anti-Jewish, to become the most prominent one for Israelis
reflecting back on 1938. But it did not. The one event that took place
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in 1938, and that looms over the collective memory of Israelis, is no
other than the Munich Agreement. This agreement shocked the Yishuv
(Jewish settlement in Palestine) in real time, and has remained a most
important component of Israeli collective memory ever since.
In October 1938, the Yishuv was alarmed by news of the Munich
Agreement, which began the process of dismembering Czechoslova-
kia. If England was ready to give up its European ally Czechoslovakia,
why wouldn’t it be ready to betray the Zionist enterprise in Palestine,
and go back on its promise to recognize a Jewish national home in the
faraway Middle East? Even the pogrom of November 9th, Kristallnacht,
was interpreted in light of the Munich Agreement accordingly – that
is as an outcome of the policy of appeasement, and of England’s lack
of will to use its power in its own interest. Given the growing Arab
pressure on England in the Middle East in the 1930s, and given the
threat that Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany posed in this context, the
Zionist leadership, as well as the Yishuv in general, could not help
but become most pessimistic about the future of the Jewish national
home. Indeed, England relinquished the plan it had proposed in
1937 of creating two states in Palestine, one of them a Jewish state.
Moreover, in May 1939, a short time after Hitler had turned Bohemia
into a German protectorate, England went so far as to practically pro-
hibit Jewish immigration to Palestine. Thus the Munich Agreement
– this traumatic event – left a deep impression on the Yishuv, and
ever since has been a pivotal component of the collective memory of
Israeli society. In Israeli schoolbooks, the Munich Agreement is not
merely mentioned, but rather is explicitly used as a lesson, even as a
warning for Israelis: A small state, even if it is a democracy, may be
sacrificed by its stronger democratic allies if they are confronted by
a seemingly overwhelming threat. The combination of the memory
of the Munich Agreement with the widespread tendency to compare
Arab states or the Arab world to Nazi Germany has rendered this
warning most effective. When Israelis are reminded of 1938, they
are first and foremost reminded of the Munich Agreement and its
consequences for Czechoslovakia.
It was the partition of Palestine into two states following the UN
decision of November 1947, and the existence of an Arab minority
in the newly created State of Israel, whose neighbours were Arab
states, which almost automatically called to mind a comparison with
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the situation of Czechoslovakia in 1938. The expulsion of Palestinian
Arabs during the war of 1948 could thus retroactively be justified
by the historic experience of Czechoslovakia following the Munich
Agreement. In fact, prior to 1977, it was the right-wing opposition to
Israel’s then social-democrat government that most frequently used
this comparison to justify its criticism against that government’s
policy. Moreover, when right-wing politicians came to power in 1977,
they instrumentalised the memory of the Munich Agreement in
order to justify their policy toward the Arab world, while the more
radical right-wing fringes used the same memory in opposition to
the government, which they considered not sufficiently right-wing for
their radical purposes. The Munich Agreement thus became iconic,
and one of the most convincing arguments in favour of hard-line
politics.
The following provide some concrete examples: In 1985, when
Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union and
instituted the process of Glasnost, the situation in the Middle East
began to change, too. On July 24, 1985, a short time after the change
in Soviet leadership, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, discussed the
changing background of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A typical
reaction, from staunch right-wing MP Uzi Landau, was a comparison
to the 1930s: Hitler had also talked about peace, and Chamberlain
was duped by Hitler’s false pretences. Therefore one should not be-
lieve in the authenticity of change, neither in the Soviet Union nor
in the Arab world.1 Geula Cohen, who had been Menachem Begin’s
partner in terrorist activities prior to the founding of the State and
who in 1985 was a member of Knesset representing a party on the far
right, brought another effective icon into the debate: Chamberlain’s
umbrella. One need not mention the word “Munich” in Israel, but
merely to say the word “umbrella” – which is associated with Cham-
berlain and his policy – to raise the specter of the Munich Agreement
and persuade listeners that any policy of concession on the part of
Israel will signal collective feebleness and cowardice, and therefore
is a mistake, even a crime.
Two years later, when Glasnost was no longer a secret by any means,
another MP from the right-wing Likud party (then as in 1985 a part-
ner to the coalition) typically remained suspicious, and attacked the
plea of then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres (the Israeli Labor Party
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Justice and Memory.indb 313 02.11.2009 13:39:54
was the other partner in the tandem coalition) for a change in Israeli
policy toward the Palestinians with the words: “God forbid we imitate
the Munich Agreement”. He was seconded by Rabbi Meir Kahhane
(a member of Knesset with a clear nazistic program), who went so far
as to identify the already-ratified 1979 Camp David Agreement with
Egypt as “Munich”. By this time, Menachem Begin, the right-wing
Israeli prime minister who had signed the Camp David Agreement,
was a retired politician. However, in June 1982, when the war he
had waged against Lebanon was criticised by the London “Times”,
he had used the same tactic: He brushed aside the criticism with the
argument that a newspaper that supported the Munich Agreement
in 1938 did not have the moral authority to criticise Israel or him
personally.
The Oslo Accord between Israel and the PLO signed in September
1993, which was an unprecedented breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian
relations, again activated the historic memory of Munich. Especially
outspoken in this respect was then-MP Rehavam Ze’evi (nicknamed
“Gandhi”), leader of the Moledet (Homeland) Party, which propagated
the “transfer” (the euphemism used for expulsion) of Arabs out of
the Land of Israel. For him, the Oslo Accord was a red flag; again
and again, he called it “the Oslo-Munich-Agreement”, and “pure
madness that must be stopped” (29.11.1994). For him, the lesson of
Munich 1938 was not only that no similar agreement should be signed
by Israel, but also that the “transfer” of Arabs was the only effective
precaution against repetition of the Munich error by Israeli foreign
policy. After all, Germans living in the Sudentenland had indeed been
expelled by the end of World War II with the consent of the Allies;
Ze’evi wanted to implement the same solution in a prophylactic way
in the Middle East. Ze’evi was not alone. In December of 1994, after
Arafat, Rabin and Peres had won the Nobel Peace Prize, then Member
of Knesset Landau commented: “It is like giving the Nobel Prize to
Hitler, Daladier and Chamberlain”. This comparison proved decisive
in the process of de-legitimization of the Oslo Accord, and served
as an important excuse for the assassination of then Prime Minister
Rabin in 1995.
These automatic references to Munich would not have been as effec-
tive as they were without the help of both the media and the educa-
tion system. Both preserve the memory of Munich in such a way that
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three key words – Munich, Chamberlain and umbrella – condition
Israelis to an attitude of intolerance and defiance toward the world,
especially the Palestinians. School history books never fail to mention
Munich, using it as a most acute warning and as proof that history
lessons are practical (and dangerous), after all: They nip in the bud
any attempt to end the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
Thus, the appropriation of this specific memory of 1938 by Israeli
right-wing politicians has helped create a general shift toward right-
wing ideology and politics in general.
The tripartite memory of Munich-Chamberlain-umbrella has
proved to be such an effective tool in the service of the political right
wing, that its use (or misuse) has become more widespread with
time. The Iraq War of 2003, and the alleged Iranian nuclear threat
to Israel, have served as direct catalysts for a “Munich reaction”. One
need not read only reports of the Knesset and follow parliamentary
debate. Much relevant material is to be found in the commentaries
of the press, and in the relevant talk-backs of online media portals.
Criticism of US and Israeli Iraq policy is reflected by remarks such as,
“Today’s Chamberlain with the umbrella is Mitzna [then the leader
of the Israeli Labor Party]”2; or “Peres refuses to learn from history
– he ignores the lesson of Munich”.3 This retrospective interpretation
of the Munich Agreement goes beyond criticising appeasement as
such; in fact, it lays blame on the political left of 1938, so as to present
a clear-cut symmetry between 1938 and the present, and so as to draw
a parallel between the European lesson and the Israeli conclusion.
The Israeli left of today, which does not favour a pre-emptive strike
against Iran, is described as being hesitant and perfidious, as stalling,
like its predecessors in 1938.
Thus, paradoxically enough, in Israeli collective memory the events
recalled by “Munich”, “Chamberlain” and “umbrella” overshadow
other, seemingly more relevant events of 1938. “The Anschluss” or
“Evian” do not ring a bell, and the Hebrew translation of “Kristall-
nacht”, though better known to the general public, does not play the
role it should play among the heirs of the victims of discrimination
and persecution, or the role it could play against the background of
the reversal of roles between Jews and non-Jews as victims and per-
petrators in the Jewish State created in 1948.
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Justice and Memory.indb 315 02.11.2009 13:39:54
Notes
1 The quotes here and below are from the official Proceedings of the Knesset (Divrei
ha’Knsset).
2 YNET, 8.12.03
3 Makor Rishon, a radical right-wing daily, 9.3.08
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Justice and Memory.indb 316 02.11.2009 13:39:54
Contributors
Christine Anthonissen
Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of General Linguis-
tics, Stellenbosch University since 2004. Her research focuses mainly
on Discourse Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis and social aspects of
Bilingualism and Multilingualism. She has done an analysis of media
discourses of the late 1980s considering how the South African news
media managed stringent censorship regulations. More recent work
relates to discourses in coming to terms with a traumatic past, related
to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and dis-
courses between health workers and patients in an HIV/AIDS clinic.
Recent publications refer to censorship and self-censorship in the
media (in Wodak, R and Koller, V. (eds.) 2008. Handbook of Applied
Linguistics vol.3), to experiences of interpreters at the TRC hearings (in
Journal of Multicultural Discourses 3:3, 2008), and to intercultural com-
munication in an HIV/AIDS clinic where patients are supported in the
introduction to and use of anti-retrovirals (with B.Meyer in Stellenbosch
Papers in Linguistics PLUS, Vol. 36, 2008).
http://www.academic.sun.ac.za/linguist/personeel/ca_eng.htm
Mitchell G. Ash
Professor of Modern History, head of the Working Group in History
of Science and Speaker of the Ph.D. program, “The Sciences in His-
torical Context” at the University of Vienna, and a Full Member of
the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Ash is author or editor
of eleven books and numerous articles and chapters concentrated in
the following research fields: the relations of science, politics, society
and culture in German-speaking Europe since 1850; forced migration
and scientific change during and after the Nazi era; and the history
of modern psychology and psychoanalysis.
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Recent publications include American and German Perspectives on
the Goldhagen Debate: History, Identity and the Media. Holocaust and
Genocide Studies, 11 (1997), 396–412; Forced Migration and Scientific
Change: Steps Towards a New Approach, in: R. Scazzieri & R. Simili
(eds.), The Migration of Ideas. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History
Publications, 2008, pp. 161–178.
http://www.univie.ac.at/Geschichte/htdocs/site/arti.php/90051
Aleida Assmann
English Literature and Egyptology studies at the universities of Hei-
delberg and Tübingen. Since 1993 she holds the chair of English
Literature and Theory at the University of Konstanz. She was a fel-
low of the Wissenschaftskolleg at Berlin in 1998/1999 and lectured
at various universities such as Princeton, Yale, Vienna and Chicago.
Her publications deal with theories of fiction between the 16th and
the 18th century, the history of writing and of print media, and the
forms and media of cultural memory and the development of col-
lective memory in post-war Germany.
Recent Publications: Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des
kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Spaces of Memory: Forms and Development of
Cultural Memory), München 1999; Der lange Schatten der Vergangen-
heit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (The Long Shadow of the
Past: Cultures of Remembrance and Commemoration, München 2006:
Geschichte im Gedächtnis. Von der individuellen Erfahrung zur öffentlichen
Inszenierung, München 2007. She has also edited volumes on literary
analysis and cultural studies, including Weisheit (1990) (Wisdom), Texte
und Lektüren (1996) (Texts and Readings) and Verwandlungen (2005)
(Transformations).
http://www.uni-konstanz.de/ang-ame/index.php?page=704
Walther L. Bernecker
Professor, born in 1947, majored in History, German and Hispanic
studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg,
1973-1977 and 1979-1984 Assistant Professor at the Chair of Modern
and Contemporary History at the University of Augsburg, 1984/85
„Visiting Fellow“ at the „Center of Latin American Studies“ at the
University of Chicago, 1986 post doctoral degree (Habilitation),
1988-1992 Chair of Contemporary History at the University of Bern,
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since 1992 Chair of Culture and Civilizations of Countries of Roman
Languages at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.
Recent publications: (together with Sören Brinkman) Kampf der Erin-
nerungen. Der Spanische Bürgerkrieg in Politik und Gesellschaft 1936–2006.
Nettersheim 2006, 22006, 32007, 42008 [erweitert und überarbeitet];
Spanien-Handbuch. Geschichte und Gegenwart. Tübingen 2006; (ed.
together with Günther Maihold) España: del concenso a la polarización.
Cambios en la democracia española. Madrid–Franfurt/Main 2007; Span-
ien heute. Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur. Frankfurt/Main 2008.
http://www.awro.wiso.uni-erlangen.de/bernNEU.html
Rudolf de Cillia
Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and Second Language
Acquisition Research (Sprachlehrforschung) at the Department of
Linguistics, University of Vienna. He has studied German and Roman
languages and literature and general as well as applied linguistics at
the University of Vienna and worked as a High School teacher be-
fore his Habilitation (Postdoctoral Dissertation) in 1995. His focus of
research is Language Policies/ Politics (European and Austrian lan-
guage policy, foreign language policy, linguistic minorities, language
and migration), Critical Discourse Analysis (language and politics, the
discursive construction of identity, language and identity, language
and prejudice) and Language Teaching Research and Foreign Lan-
guage Didactics, and he has widely published in these areas.
Recent publications: Smeds, John/Sarmavuori, Katri/Laakonen,
Eero/de Cilia, Rudolf (eds.): Multicultural Communities, Multilingual
Practice. Monikulttuuriset yhteisöt, monikielinen käytäntö. Festschrift für
Annikki Koskensalo zum 60. Geburtstag. Turku: Turun Yliopisto.
2005; Rudolf de Cillia and Ruth Wodak: Ist Österreich ein „deutsches“
Land? Sprachenpolitik und Identität in der Zweiten Republik. Innsbruck
u.a.: Studien Verlag. 2006; Ruth Wodak, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin
Reisigl, Karin Liebhart (2009): The discursive construction of national
identities. Second and extended edition. Edinburgh University Press;
de Cillia, Rudolf/Wodak, Ruth (2009): Gedenken im „Gedankenjahr“.
Zur diskursiven Konstruktion österreichischer Identitäten im Jubiläumsjahr
2005. Wien/Innsbruck: Studien Verlag.
http://www.homepage.univie.ac.at/rudolf.de-cillia/php/
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Marek Czyzewski
Professor at the Institute of Sociology and Head of the Department of
Research on Social Communication, University of Lodz, Poland. Main
interests include: public and mass communication, public opinion
and democracy, violence, war and collective memory, “discourse of
hostility” and hate speech, knowledge-based society and “governmen-
tality”, intercultural and international communication, qualitative
social research (predominantly discourse analysis and sociology of
interaction), social theory (especially interpretive-constructivist ap-
proaches, sociology of knowledge and Foucault).
Recent publications include: Öffentliche Kommunikation und Rechtsex-
tremismus, Lodz 2005; six articles in the Polish Encyclopedia of Sociology:
“Discourse”, “Ethnomethodology”, “Goffman”, “Intersubjectivity”,
“Prejudice”, “Qualitative Analysis” (1998–2005); Rhetoric and Poli-
tics: Twenty Years of Polish Transformation (co-editor; forthcoming in
Polish); Discourse of Hostility (editor and co-author; in preparation,
in Polish). Co-editor of Sociological Review [Przeglad Socjologiczny, a
Polish sociological journal] (1998–), editor of the Polish edition of
Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit by Jürgen Habermas (2007), and co-
editor of the Library of Public Discourse. Culture, Rhetoric and Democracy
(in Polish 2009–).
http://www.eksoc.uni.lodz.pl/is/czyzewski.html
Titus Ensink
General linguistics studies at Nijmegen University, and as a visiting
fellow sociolinguistics and ethnomethodology at the University of
California, San Diego. He is Senior Lecturer in Discourse Studies at
the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). His research inter-
ests are: Political rhetoric in relation to commemorations, and frame
analysis of text and of media messages.
Recent publications: Framing and perspectivising in discourse (co-ed.),
Amsterdam & Philadelphia 2003; The Art of Commemoration. Fifty Years
after the Warsaw Uprising (co-ed.), Amsterdam & Philadelphia 2003.
http://www.rug.nl/staff/e.f.a.j.ensink/index
András Kovács
Professor at Central European University, Budapest, Nationalism
Studies Program / Jewish Studies Program, Academic Director, senior
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researcher in the Institute for Ethnic and Minority Research at the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Research subjects: Jewish identity and antisemitism in post-war Hun-
gary; memory and identity; socio-economic attitudes and political
choice.
Recent publications: Un débat entre historiens dans les années 80: la
tragédie des Juifs hongrois. In: D. Bechtel–É. Patlagean–J.CH. Szurek-
P. Zawadzki (eds.): Écriture de l’Histoire et Identité Juive. L’Europe
ashkénaze XIXe-XXe siécle. Les Belles Lettres, Paris 2003; New Jewish
Identities. (Ed. with Zvi Gitelman, Barry Kosmin), Central European
University Press, Budapest, New York, 2003; Jewish Groups and Identity
Strategies in Post-Communist Hungary. In: Zvi Gitelman, Barry Kosmin
, András Kovács (eds).:New Jewish Identities. Central European Uni-
versity Press, Budapest, New York, 2003; Jews and Jewry in contemporary
Hungary: results of a sociological survey (Ed.), Institute for Jewish Policy
Research, London 2004; Hungarian Jewish Politics from the End of the
Second World War until the Collapse of Communism. In: Ezra Mendel-
sohn (ed.): Jews and the State. Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of
Privilege. Studies in Contemporary Jewry, XIX. Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 2004.
http://web.ceu.hu/jewishstudies/faculty.htm#akovacs
Walter Manoschek
Professor for Political Science at the Department of Government at
the University of Vienna. He was affiliated to the Hamburg Institute
for Social Research for the exhibition “Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen
der Wehrmacht 1941–1944”.
The current focus of his research includes politics of the past as well
as National Socialism and Holocaust research. His latest works have
comprised extensive research projects on the victims of National So-
cialist military courts, and research on the process of denazification
at the University of Vienna after 1945. Besides he is working on a
movie about a massacre on Hungarian Jews at the end of the Second
World War in Burgenland.
Recent publications: The Discursive Construction of History. Remembering
the Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation (editor together with Hannes Heer,
Alexander Pollak and Ruth Wodak), Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke
– New York 2008. Austrian victims of National Socialist military justice,
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in: Bernard Mees/Samuel P. Koehne (Eds.), Terror, War, Tradi-
tion. Studies in European History. Proceedings of the XVth Biennal
Conference of the Australasian Association for European History,
Melbourne, July 2005, Unley 2007
http://staatswissenschaft.univie.ac.at/index.php?id=11290
Anton Pelinka
Professor of Nationalism Studies and Political Science, Central Euro-
pean University, Budapest, Director, Institute for Conflict Research,
Vienna.
Research Interests: Comparative Politics, Democratic Theory, Aus-
trian Politics, European Integration.
Recent publications: Democracy Indian Style. Subhas Chandra Bose and the
Creation of India’s political Culture, Transaction Press, 2003; Demokratie
in Indien. Subhas Chandra Bose und die Entstehung der Politischen Kultur,
StudienVerlag 2005; Vom Glanz und Elend der Parteien. Struktur- und
Funktionswandel des oesterreichsichen Parteiensystems, StudienVerlag 2005;
Vergleich politischer Systeme, Boehlau, 2005; Kreisky – Haider. Bruch-
linien österreichischer Identitäten (with H.Sickinger, Karin Stoegner),
Braumueller, 2008.
http://web.ceu.hu/polsci/faculty/personal/pelinka.htm
Martin Reisigl
Lecturer for Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna, work-
ing on a habilitation project supported by research fellowships of the
German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Austrian
Academy of Sciences (APART). From April 2006 until February 2007,
he was a visiting professor at the university “La Sapienza” in Rome,
Italy. From February until June 2007, he was a visting fellow at the
Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. His research interests
include (critical) discourse analysis and discourse theory, text linguistics,
academic writing, sociolinguistics, (political) rhetoric (language and
discrimination, nationalism, racism, populism), language and history,
linguistics and literature, argumentation analysis and semiotics.
Recent publications: Nationale Rhetorik in Fest- und Gedenkreden. Eine
diskursanalytische Studie zum „österreichischen Millennium“ in den Jahren
1946 und 1996 (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2007); The Discursive Con-
struction of National Identity (together with R. Wodak, R. De Cillia and
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K. Liebhart, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 22009); Rhetoric
of political speeches, in: R. Wodak, V. Koller, (eds.) (2008): Handbook
of Communication in the Public Sphere. Berlin, New York: Mouton de
Gruyter. pp. 243–269; Analyzing political rhetoric, in: R. Wodak, M.
Krzyzanowski, (eds.) (2008): Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social
Sciences. London et al.: Palgrave. pp. 96–120.
http://www.univie.ac.at/linguistics/personal/florian/Schmerzpro-
jekt/de/reisigl.htm
Dirk Rupnow
Professor at the Institute for Contemporary History, University of
Innsbruck; studied History, German literature, Art history and Phi-
losophy in Berlin and Vienna; 1999/2000 Project researcher with
the Historical Commission of the Republic of Austria; Fellowships at
the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (Vienna), the
Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), the Simon Dubnow Institute
for Jewish History and Culture (Leipzig), the History Department of
Duke University, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at
the US Holocaust Memorial Museum; 2007 Visiting Assistant Profes-
sor at Dartmouth College; Lecturer at the Institute for Contemporary
History at the University of Vienna.
Recent publications: Aporien des Gedenkens. Reflexionen über ‚Holocaust’
und Erinnerung, Freiburg/Br. – Berlin 2006; Vernichten und Erinnern.
Spuren nationalsozialistischer Gedächtnispolitik, Göttingen 2005; (together
with Gabriele Anderl) Die „Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung“ als
Beraubungsinstitution, Munich 2004; Täter – Gedächtnis – Opfer. Das
„Jüdische Zentralmuseum“ in Prag 1942–1945, Vienna 2000
http://www.uibk.ac.at/zeitgeschichte/mitarbeiterinnen.html.de
Gitta Sereny
Born in Vienna, 13 March 1921, and witnessed Hitler’s entry into Vi-
enna in 1938 – on her birthday. She was attending the Sorbonne when
the Nazis invaded, and volunteered to help with refugee children,
taking a group to a castle in the Loire. Escaping to the United States in
late 1941, wrote and lectured on children in Europe, and later joined
UNRTA as a children’s officer, in DP camps in Germany.
Her books and articles have often dealt with two themes: children in
trouble – The Case of Mary Bell (1972) and Cries Unheard (1998) – and
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the Third Reich – Into That Darkness (1974), Albert Speer, His Battle with
Truth (1995), and The German Trauma (2002). For her contribution to
British-German understanding, she was awarded the CBE (Com-
mander of the British Empire) in 2004.
Cecilie Felicia Stokholm Banke
Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies
specialized in Holocaust and genocide studies. From 2005-8 Associate
Professor in 20th Century European history at Roskilde University.
Banke has a PhD-degree (1999) in history from Roskilde University
with a dissertation on progressive social policy in Scandinavia, and a
MA-degree in history and sociology from Roskilde University/Lund
University with a thesis on modernization and social change in Spain
and Russia.
Recent Publications on Spain during General Franco, the Scandina-
vian welfare state (Den sociale ingeniørkunst i Danmark. Familie, stat og
politik fra 1900 til 1945, 1999), Danish refugee policy during the 1930s
(Demokratiets skyggeside. Flygtninge og Menneskeretttigheder i Danmark
før Holocaust, 2005) and on the legacies of the Holocaust in post-war
Europe (Remembering Europe’s Heart of Darkness in A European Memory?,
Malgorzata Pakier & Bo Stråth, 2009). Banke serves as member of the
Danish delegation to Task Force for International Cooperation on
Holocaust Remembrance, and is in charge of the activities at DIIS,
Holocaust and genocide.
http://www.diis.dk/sw7581.asp
Thorsten Wagner
Research fellow at Scandinavian Studies Department, Humboldt
University of Berlin, since 2008. Studies at the Hebrew University,
Jerusalem, at the Technische Universität Berlin and the Freie Uni-
versität Berlin. Postgraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison, USA. Ph.D.-project on the emancipation and acculturation
of Danish Jewry 1780–1849 in a comparative European perspective.
Since 2001 docent at the Educational Dept. of the Jewish Museum of
Berlin, and fellow of the Danish Research Council, in affiliation with
the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Copenhagen,
2001-–005. Since 2007 docent for the Berlin program of the University
of Washington-Seattle. Regular workshops and lectures at the Danish
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Institute for Study Abroad, University of Copenhagen.
Recent Publications: Hans Lassen Martensen. In: Wolfgang Benz (ed.),
Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegen-
wart, Saur, München 2009, forthcoming “Wiege der Haskalah? Der
Kopenhagener Kontext der Familie Euchel.” In Andreas Kennecke
(ed.), Vom Nutzen der Aufklärung oder: Woß tut me damit: Isaak Euchel
(1756–1804), die jüdische und die deutsche Aufklärung, Berlin 2008,
forthcoming.“Belated Heroism: The Danish Lutheran Church and
the Jews, 1918-1945.” In Kevin P. Spicer (ed.), Antisemitism, Christian
Ambivalence, and the Holocaust, Bloomington 2007, pp. 3-25. (Published
in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
Washington, D.C.)
Ruth Wodak
Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University
since 2004 and has remained affiliated to the University of Vienna.
Besides various other prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize
for Elite Researchers in 1996.
Her research interests focus on discourse studies; gender studies;
language and/in politics; prejudice and discrimination; and on
ethnographic methods of linguistic field work.
She is member of the editorial board of a range of linguistic journals
and co-editor of the journals Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse
studies, and Language and Politics, and co-editor of the book series
Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture (DAPSAC).
She has held visiting professorships in Uppsala, Stanford University,
University Minnesota, University of East Anglia, and Georgetown
University, and is corresponding member of the Austrian Academy
of Sciences. 2006 and 2007, she was chair of the Humanities and
Social Sciences Panel of the EURYI awards (ESF). 2008, she was
awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament (at
University Örebrö).
Recent publications: Ist Österreich ein ‘deutsches’ Land? (with R. de Cil-
lia, 2006); Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences (with M.
Krzyzanowski, 2008); Migration, Identity and Belonging (with G. Delanty,
P. Jones, 2008), The Discursive Construction of History. Remembering the
Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation (with H. Heer, W. Manoschek, A. Pol-
lak, 2008), The Politics of Exclusion (with M. Krzyzanowski, 2009), and
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Gedenken im Gedankenjahr (with R. de Cillia, 2009). The monograph
The construction of politics in action: ‘Politics as Usual’ (Palgrave) is in
press (2009).
http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/profiles/Ruth-Wodak/
Moshe Zimmermann
Professor for German History and since 1986 Director of the Rich-
ard-Koebner-Center for German History at the Hebrew University,
Jerusalem.; Besides various other prizes, he was awarded the Less-
ing-Prize of the Lessing Akademie Wolfenbüttel 2006.
Author of many publications in German, English and Hebrew about
nationalism, antisemitism, the history of sport, film-history and Ger-
man-Jewish history, as well as about the Holocaust, collective memory
in Germany and Israel, and German-Israeli relations. Involved with
the curriculum planning of the Ministry of education. Also present
in feuilleton and media discussions.
Selected Publications: Wilhelm Marr – The Patriarch of Antisemitism,
New York 1986; Wende in Israel. Zwischen Nation und Religion, Berlin
1996; Die deutschen Juden 1914-1945, München 1997; Deutsch,-Jüdisch,
München 2000; German Past- Israeli memory, Tel Aviv 2002 [hebr.];
Goliaths Falle, Berlin 2004; Deutsch-jüdische Vergangenheit: Judenfeind-
schaft als Herausforderung, Paderborn 2005. Deutsche gegen Deutsche.
Das Schicksal der Juden 1938–1945. Berlin 2008.
http://koebner.huji.ac.il/zimmermann.asp
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