Dear James,
You’re right that “not every institutional memory of the Holocaust is a deliberate instrumentalization of it toward cheap and self-interested ends,” and that in focusing almost exclusively on abuses and exploitations of Holocaust memory, Novick himself distorts the history of that memory. Tony Judt makes a related point in his sharply negative review of Novick’s book in the New Republic, where he observes that Novick “has spent a lot of time thinking about the uses and the abuses to which the Holocaust has been put in modern America; but he has devoted curiously little effort to thinking about the Holocaust itself.” True, and the Holocaust remains almost relentlessly interesting to think about–in large part because one can do so while drawing on many deeply thoughtful works (as opposed to questionable popularizing) that already exist on the subject. But then Judt (with a tip of his hat to you, James) counters Novick’s complaint that there is too much Holocaust obsession around us by saying effectively that there cannot be too much. He writes: “I still share James Young’s preference for inadequate and even abused memory over comfortable forgetting.”
Is that really the choice? Can’t we ask for a higher critical standard, in which the measure of Holocaust representation is not its quantity or pervasiveness in the culture, but its quality–without advocating (or being accused of advocating) forgetting? Anyway–how can dumbing down of memory be a safeguard against the worry that the Holocaust is at risk of being forgotten?
These questions bring us back to our common concern with the problem of what it means to remember the memories of others. I hadn’t read your essay in Critical Inquiry, which you quoted from, but yes–the echoes of my own thinking on this question are uncanny. Since we’re quoting ourselves: After a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington five years ago, I wrote in the New York Times Magazine:
The Holocaust maxim, “Remember,” may be acquiring a new meaning with the passage of time. What we cannot remember directly, we must imagine through representation, and our response is less immediately to the event than to the medium that has conveyed it to us. It is not the Holocaust that is suddenly such a huge popular draw, but the Holocaust Museum and the Holocaust movie, Schindler’s List. The creators of these artifacts, and many who celebrate them, tend to indulge in vainglorious rhetoric, claiming that an affirmative public response to representations of the Holocaust places today’s secondhand witnesses on the right side in the struggle of good against evil.
But does it really? Doesn’t the fact that “memory” is now not so much a matter of absorbing the event as such, but of absorbing intermediary representations of the event mean that we should hold those representations to the highest critical standards?
So we’re back to the question of whether Holocaust memory offers us useful lessons for understanding our world in our own times. I’m intrigued by your suggestion that “the lessons of Kosovo may actually be more pertinent to understanding Holocaust memory, or at least its possible consequences, than vice versa.” Leaving aside the question of what exactly the lessons of Kosovo might be, I take it that you’re saying we could learn a lot about how we really (rather than ideally) respond to the legacy of the Holocaust by recognizing the groping, often less than heroic fashion in which we respond or fail to respond to contemporary episodes of mass political violence. Again, as you say, we’re pretty much on the same wavelength. I ended the above-mentioned article on the museum by saying,
As Americans observe the bloody unravelings of the post-cold-war world, the Holocaust Museum provides a rhetorical exercise in bearing witness to dehumanization and mass murder from a seemingly safe distance.
Of course, I was only talking about the way that museum seemed to function at that moment, and I happened to be visiting in May of 1994, as the genocide in Rwanda was at its peak and photographs of dead bodies there were on the front pages of the newspapers. I was not talking about “the memory of the Holocaust” as a whole–if there is such a thing–and I’ve felt frustrated in our correspondence here over the past few days that the immensity of our subject and the limitations of space have inclined us to speak rather broadly and generally, when it seems to me that we both have formed our ideas and responses to Holocaust commemoration in terms of very specific artifacts: images, texts, testimonies, etc.
So I wonder: Must we really seek to be able to name the exact lesson we learn from our encounters with the artifacts that excite our imaginations? Is “lessons” the best way to describe what we come away with? We tend to speak of lessons as if what we learn from the Holocaust will be in some way positive, affirmative or affirming of what we hope will be best in and for humanity. But that isn’t my experience; the truths that are yielded are mostly quite terrible. So isn’t it more honest, and probably more productive, to say that what we are really left with when we contemplate the Holocaust are questions about all that is essential in the fabric of human experience? I’ll leave you with that question about questions, James. Or–no–I’ll leave with this prose poem, “The Past,” which I recently came across in Czeslaw Milosz’s new collection, Road-side Dog:
The past is inaccurate . Whoever lives long enough knows how much what he had seen with his own eyes becomes overgrown with rumor, legend, a magnifying or belittling hearsay. “It was not like that at all”–he would like to exclaim, but will not, for they would have seen only his moving lips without hearing his voice.
Thanks for the discussion.
Philip
