Dear Philip,
Are you sure you didn’t win a Pulitzer for your Rwanda book? If you didn’t, you should have.
I’ll try to refine my objection to what I see as Peter Novick’s Rankean nostalgia for remembering the Holocaust not just “as it was,” but as it was understood at the time. In fact, I agree completely that this dimension should be restored to both our historical understanding of events and our memory of them afterward. In fact, the contemporaneous understanding (and misunderstanding) of the Holocaust as it unfolded has too long been ignored by historians (like Novick at times in this book) still deeply suspicious of the occasionally inaccurate memory of survivors or even of the complete misapprehension of events by victims at the time. Both the so-called “false memories” and mistaken grasp of events as they unfolded tell us much about how victims responded as they did, which is why I believe they must be restored to the historical record.
My problem is not Novick’s excavation of the Holocaust as grasped at the time, but rather his implied suggestion that memory over time is somehow less worthy and so should be displaced altogether with the more “original” understanding of events as they unfolded, that we should (as if we really could) return to a time of small “h” holocaust–as more universally construed. But you’re exactly right to say that we cannot shuck one kind of memory to embrace the other. Our memory and understanding of events remain much more complicated, hence true, if we hold in mind simultaneously all three dimensions of Holocaust memory: the understanding of these in the midst of events; the evolution of such understanding over time; and the reasons we now deign to remember at all.
I was also struck by your meditation on the bothersome word, “memory,” which uncannily echoes the central thesis of my new book, After-Image, now in press at Yale, part of which I published last spring in an article I wrote on “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the After-Images of History” (Critical Inquiry, Spring 1998). Please excuse me for quoting from my own writing, but as you’ll see, we are clearly on the same wavelength:
[Spiegelman’s] postwar generation, after all, cannot remember the Holocaust as it actually occurred. All they remember, all they know of the Holocaust is what the victims have passed down to them in their diaries, what the survivors have remembered to them in their memoirs. They remember not actual events but the countless histories, novels, and poems of the Holocaust they have read, the photographs, movies, and video testimonies they have seen over the years. They remember long days and nights in the company of survivors, listening to their harrowing tales until their lives, loves, and losses seemed grafted indelibly onto their own life stories. (pp. 669-70).
Gulp. Are you sure we’re not the same person?
Now you may argue, rightly, that at some point, such memory may become a little self-aggrandizing, self-indulgent, even self-absorbed–especially if it remains, in your words, “indifferent to careful historical knowledge.” I would agree completely, adding only that our generation, therefore, must make both the history of events and the ways it is passed down to us the twin objects of our inquiry. This way, we attempt to keep in mind both the events and our reasons for recalling them in the first place.
This brings us, I suppose, to the so-called “lessons of the Holocaust,” or why we recall the Holocaust at all. Here I would suggest, contra Novick, that not every institutional memory of the Holocaust is a deliberate instrumentalization of it toward cheap and self-interested ends. Novick’s actually quite good at ferreting out many of the instances where this is, indeed, the case. But as I’ve suggested before, the reasons for memory are as various as the communities, traditions, nations, and forms doing the remembering. Much of Holocaust memory, too much perhaps, is made for us reflexively by the religious and national paradigms on which it is overlaid. For a tradition that already makes the ancient remnants of a destroyed temple in Jerusalem its holiest shrine, how surprising can it be that another, even more terrible destruction in the 20th century has come to occupy so central a place in Jewish self-definition and identity? I may wish it weren’t so, and I reject the ultraorthodox reasons for remembering the Holocaust as one in a series of Jewish catastrophes caused, supposedly, by our sins. And I also reject the redemptive logic implied by some of the civic remembrance of the Holocaust in Israel, whereby the murder of European Jewry is seemingly redeemed by the birth of the State of Israel. But these traditional reasons for remembrance preceded the Holocaust and explain its significance for many at a preconscious level, whether we like it or not. One of our jobs as critics and historians is to point out just how our traditions, religions, and national mythologies remember for us–and then look at the possible consequences of such memory.
For as you point out in the case of a nation such as Serbia, which has forged its self-identity so destructively on the mythologized memory of its 1389 defeat in Kosovo, the lessons of Kosovo may actually be more pertinent to understanding Holocaust memory, or at least its possible consequences, than vice versa. I know my students have a better, much more troubled, understanding of why and how a world stood by in the face of mass murder during World War II, now that they have watched themselves and their parents stand by during the massacre of Bosnian Muslims and Rwandan Tutsis. Indeed, here I remind my students that memory of past mass murder may even serve as a kind of substitute for action against a contemporary destruction.
Hence the terrible if fantasized epiphany I had during the 1993 dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A few moments into his speech, Elie Wiesel suddenly stopped and turned toward President Clinton, sitting behind him on the dais amid flags drooping in the rain. In so many words, Wiesel said, “Mr. President, I can’t sleep at night for what my eyes have seen in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Please, Mr. President, you must do something to stop this terrible slaughter of innocents.” President Clinton was clearly moved by this impromptu appeal, but because he had not yet acted to thwart the 2-year-old and still unfolding massacre of Bosnian Muslims, I imagined hearing him say words he never actually said: “But Elie, I am doing something about the Bosnian Muslims. I am here, with you, remembering the Holocaust.” Lofty intentions aside, my heart sank as I realized that we were getting it all backwards.
I hope this isn’t too self-absorbed for you, Philip. Now to you.
James
