The Book Club

The Fetishization of “Memory”

Dear James,

Wow–I thought we were recruited to challenge each other, and here you’ve awarded me a Pulitzer Prize for my Rwanda book. It ain’t so, but thanks.

Seems we agree in the main about the strengths of Peter Novick’s book (telling the history of how the Holocaust has been recognized, understood, represented, and misrepresented here in the United States) and its weaknesses (the tone and tightness of its argument), so let’s move on to the engaging issues it raises.

You make the keen point that in demonstrating how, during and immediately after the war, the Holocaust was perceived much more modestly than it is now, as part of the war against Hitler’s Reich and not its defining feature, Novick sounds almost nostalgic. And you observe that Novick seems to suggest that “almost any evolution of Holocaust memory over time is a distortion of the authentic (if narrower) understanding people had of it at the time.” I agree, and I agree also with your claim that it’s a part of history for our understanding of events to change with time. But I don’t agree with your claim that “we can no more remember the Holocaust as it was known at the time, than we can turn the clock back.” Rather, I would say that we can allow our understanding of events to grow and change as we reinterpret their meaning over the years, and at the same time we can–indeed should–remember how they were perceived in their moment. After all, our understanding and knowledge will be truer if we remain aware of the original response, rather than shucking one understanding to embrace another. So, by reminding us of earlier responses to the Holocaust, Novick provides an antidote to some of the ahistorical or anti-historical distortions to which our contemporary “memory” is prone.

But let’s talk for a minute about this bothersome word “memory.” I don’t remember the Holocaust, and you looked young enough when we met that I don’t think you do either. I have inherited, through family stories, and through reading, the memory of others’ memories of life and death in the time of the Nazis. But what I remember are these representations–not the events themselves. Yet we favor this word “memory” because it is charged with a sense of personal experience and so carries a greater sense of emotion than our notion of “history.” Memory is the word of slogans. Nobody says, “Study the history of the Alamo.” Of course, memory can be rooted in a strong sense of history, but too often the idea of memory as a duty or a sacrament is promoted with complete indifference to careful historical knowledge. And it is this process that Novick rightly laments.

The fetishization of “memory”–regardless of our experience of the thing remembered–goes hand in hand with victim-identity politics. The memory of my wound, the thinking goes, tells me who I am. But one need only look to Serbia to be left without doubt that it is fundamentally unwholesome for a people to forge its sense of itself from a mythologized memory of defeat and victimization. That does not mean that wounds are necessarily better forgotten, but it does remind us that memory is not ipso facto a positive force from which clear lessons of right conduct can be learned. After all, the memory of trauma–direct or secondhand, real or imagined–is often indistinguishable from grudge, and grudges are a kind of lesson, too.

But, you ask, doesn’t NATO’s belated intervention in the Balkans–the decision to use force to stop Milosevic’s relentless crimes against humanity–suggest that some lessons of the Holocaust have been learned? That’s certainly the official line, but while I don’t think it’s simply phony, I am also not entirely persuaded by it. We did nothing to stop far greater killing in Rwanda, or during the past eight years of the Balkan wars, or in Sierra Leone today. And I don’t believe there is a shred of evidence that we would have acted as we did (bombing, but shying away as much as possible from the risk of sacrifice) in Kosovo if the humanitarian imperative weren’t deemed politically expedient for a host of other reasons. If, as we are told, the West acted to defend the Kosovar part of humanity largely because of the memory of the Holocaust, does that mean that the places where we don’t act are not on our map of humanity? During Rwanda and most of the past decade of the Balkan war, it looked as if the lesson of the Holocaust was that you can get away with genocide, unimpeded by international military intervention, so long as you don’t disturb the peace of the Western European powers.

I’m not saying that the legacy of the Holocaust cannot be read as a cautionary tale against appeasement or “standing by” during times of atrocity, and I’m not saying that people and even governments are not morally educable. But when we speak of remembering the Holocaust and its lessons, everything depends on what about the Holocaust we purport to remember, and how we go about it. We didn’t need the Holocaust to know right from wrong, and so far since the Holocaust the evidence is that Kosovo–where the long-term outcome of our campaign is far from obvious–was in every way the exception and not the rule of the West’s response to mass political atrocity. So whenever people talk about the lessons of the Holocaust, I can’t help remembering that a movie version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf was found in the headquarters of the Hutu Power leaders who visited genocide on Rwanda’s Tutsis, while speaking of a “final solution.” These killers, who presided over the murder of 800,000 in 100 days (at an average killing speed three times faster than that at which Jews were slaughtered during the Holocaust) were studying the lessons of the Holocaust as intently as anyone who visits the Museum on the Mall.

So–back to you, James.
Philip