The Modern State,the Question of Genocide,and Holocaust Scholarship

This review article asks: what defines mass violence in the twentieth century as particularly modern and how does the Holocaust figure in this history? The article compares the work of two path-breaking historians—Mark Levene and Timothy Snyder—while also discussing recent research by other scholars. It argues that the emergence of nation-states, together with technology and scientific knowledge to alter the environment, created the conditions for distinctly modern violence aiming to destroy diversity in societies and the environment. The article examines the relation between genocide, including the Holocaust, and the rise of twentieth-century nation-states. It follows the persistent idea that the Holocaust is unique in a way that establishes a hierarchy of Holocaust/genocide/other mass violence. As Levene argues, the contextualization of the complex set of events and processes called the Holocaust within the violent history of ethno-national and ethno-religious “homogenization” of nation-states challenges this framework. The article then turns to Snyder’s argument that, since Hitler’s worldview of racial struggle over land and food rejected agricultural science, genetic engineering in agriculture is one way to heed the Holocaust’s warning. A discussion of the devastating impact of genetic engineering in agriculture—in the frame of the violent implications of modern “development”—underscores how the destruction of societies perceived as “backward,” particularly indigenous groups in the Global South, follows the destruction of their biodiverse habitats and agriculture to make way for monoculture genetically engineered crops. A focus on case studies of such mass violence and the responses by indigenous groups facilitates, finally, a discussion of the recent turn to microhistories in Holocaust scholarship. These offer another contextualized view: of the societies that faced the assault of nation-states. The article concludes that the complexities on the social level, each rooted in specific circumstances and histories, challenge the analytical value of the general term “Holocaust.”     

Uncovering a Painful Past: Archaeology and the Holocaust

Abstract

Places connected to the Holocaust, and the physical evidence that lies within them, survive as reminders of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis. Both the treatment of these sites and attitudes towards them have varied considerably in the years since the Second World War. In recent years, a number of archaeological investigations have been instigated by curators at Holocaust sites in a direct attempt to enhance visitor experiences and education programmes. Archaeologists have initiated investigations at other forgotten and dilapidated sites in an attempt to raise awareness of these places. This paper will discuss two case study sites where archaeological investigations have been undertaken and where attempts have been made to inform conservation, heritage management, and education strategies. It will highlight the various challenges that may arise in the course of developing dissemination tools and discuss strategies that have been adopted to account for them. Specifically it will focus on how archaeologists can present novel means by which to locate, record, and re-present the physical evidence of the Holocaust and how they can tell the stories of difficult heritage sites even when traditional forms of memorialization/muzealization is not wanted or practical.     

BIOPOLITICS AMONG THE DISCIPLINES

A new wave of publications attempts to bring together theory and history in order to reconsider the past, present, and future in light of a looming catastrophe. Whether in political theory, sociology, anthropology, or intellectual history, scholars are attempting to reflect about the present beyond the old boundaries that separate left and right, inner and outer, civilian and solider, friend and enemy. Three recent publications, by Catherine Mills, Didier Fassin, and an anthology edited by Devin Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard Wetzel, do so by considering the growth of biopolitical critique in their respective disciplines.     

TO CATCH THE ECHO: RETHINKING ACTS OF WITNESSING TO THE SHOAH

In light of recent revelations about global ignorance and disbelief regarding the Holocaust, first‐hand testimonies acquire fresh significance. Two disparate books frame this discussion of how writings by survivors serve to deepen our understanding of the Shoah. Otto Dov Kulka's memoir, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death, is a carefully crafted account by a professional historian who survived as a child in Auschwitz. Thomas Trezise's work, Witnessing Witnessing, is an analytical inquiry into the literary and epistemic issues that frame different genres of testimony ranging from video to poetry. Kulka's slender account is situated in the context of other works by survivors, including Saul Friedländer's When Memory Comes, Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After, and a more recent work by Joseph Polak, After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring. The emphasis in this discussion is upon the challenges that survivors face in articulating horror, especially to readers in the twenty‐first century. Trezise's more voluminous work is based upon the literary and philosophical theories of Adorno, Levinas, and Freud, among others. The question raised in this essay focuses upon which of these narrative strategies might work better to convey the complex meanings of the Shoah after the generation of survivors has departed from the historical scene. In the end, the halting words of those who went through the death camps is all we have to counter the ignorance and disbelief spreading around the world. Kulka's book, combining memories, dreams, and art works, fosters an imaginative encounter with inconceivable historical realities. Trezise's theoretical engagement with indexicality and with the phatic function of language helps us to understand the impact of testimonies within the scholarly literature. It does not, however, point a clear path toward conveying the importance of the Holocaust to the public at large. For this purpose, we need books such as Kulka's that enable the generation after the Holocaust to listen to silences embedded in survivor narratives. These silences must be carried forward in time, along with the ethical mandate not to forget the atrocities of the Shoah. If we can embrace this mission, we may be able to diminish the reign of hate running amuck today.     

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.     

Walking a Fine Scientific Line: The Extraordinary Deeds of Dutch Neuroscientist C. U. Ariëns Kappers Before and During World War II

Dutch neuroscientist Cornelius Ubbo Ariëns Kappers is famous for pioneering neuroembryological work and for establishing the Amsterdam Central Institute for Brain Research. Less well known is his anthropological work, which ultimately played a role in saving Dutch Jews from deportation to their deaths during the Holocaust. Ariëns Kappers extensively campaigned against anti-Semitism and Nazi persecution during the 1930s. During World War II, he utilized his credentials to help create anthropological reports “proving” full-Jews were “actually” partial- or non-Jews to evade Nazi criteria, and at least 300 Jews were thus saved by Ariëns Kappers and colleagues. His earlier work demonstrating differences between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish skull indices became the focus of an attempt to save hundreds of Dutch Portuguese Jews collectively from deportation. Ariëns Kappers and colleagues brilliantly understood how anthropology and neuroscience could be utilized to make a difference and to save lives during a tragic era.     

后大屠杀时代:纳粹屠犹的社会后果分析

20世纪80年代以来,越来越多的学者意识到了大屠杀已经成为一个世界性的问题,在美国、以色列、欧洲等地普遍兴起了对“后大屠杀时代”的研究,主要探讨源于大屠杀并影响到后大屠杀时代的种种社会现象。通过对幸存者的心理磨难、对纳粹屠犹的神学反思、犹太意识的强化以及西方社会的“遗弃”对犹太人的精神打击等问题的研究,可以看出,大屠杀事件对犹太人社会心理产生了重大的影响。     

2. THE VICTIM'S VOICE AND MELODRAMATIC AESTHETICS IN HISTORY1

Saul Friedländer's recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. He has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the Holocaust, within which he integrates the victims' authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. Excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources.     

BALANCED TRUTH: STEVEN SPIELBERG'S SCHINDLER'S LIST AMONG HISTORY,MEMORY, AND POPULAR CULTURE1

Looking at the public reaction to it, one might say that Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List is undoubtedly the most successful film about the Holocaust. The film's success in the U.S. and other Western countries can be traced back mainly to the fact that it creates the impression of telling a true, apparently authentic, story. This essay investigates how this impression of historical truth and authenticity emerges in a fiction film. For this purpose the essay reverts to a concept developed by Jörn Rüsen, which distinguishes among three dimensions of historical culture, namely political, aesthetic, and cognitive. In addition to the historical context that serves as a specific precondition for the film's success, the essay primarily investigates the strategies of authentication Spielberg applied at both the visual and narrative levels. The investigation concludes that the impression of evidence produced by the movie is significantly a result of the sophisticated balancing of the three dimensions mentioned above. The film utilizes artifacts of an existing and increasingly transnational (visual) memory for the benefit of a closed, archetypical narrative. It follows the aesthetic and artistic rules of popular narrative cinema, and largely recurs to conventions of representation that were common in film and television programs of the 1990s. Although these forms condense the historical course of events, the film manages to stay close to insights gained by historiography. The hybrid amalgamation of history and memory, and of the imaginary and the real, as well as the combination of dramaturgies of popular culture with an instinct for what can (not) be shown—all of these factors have helped Schindler's List to render a representation of the founding Holocaust myth in Western societies that can be sensually experienced while being emotionally impressive at the same time.