Statesman, India
March 18 2005
LABOUR OF MOURNING:Commemoration Of Holocaust Should Not Be Routine
Affair
By PRASENJIT CHOWDHURY
In this season of Holocaust remembrance, we get a `celebration” of
the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The lesson of
history is that there should not be yet another instance of a crime
against humanity though we have since seen Stalin’s purges, the
killing fields of Rwanda and ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, the
liquidation of nations, not to speak of Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib
and numerous civil wars. History does repeat itself. But in
remembering the Holocaust and the tales of survival, we want to
uphold the triumph of human sprit.
The whole exercise has been reduced to `the labour of mourning’.
Ritualisation of mourning is all very solemn but the pitfalls are far
too evident in recent instances of genocide. The empire of kitsch
built around one of the direst hours of humanity has often reeked of
making art out of bloodstains.
Glut of films
Not alone Auschwitz, but Holocaust literature has taken hold of our
collective imagination; a whole glut of films, documentaries and
dramas have come up. The Holocaust has become the subject of
countless works of art as individuals and communities seek to
memorialise victims and make sense of a senseless event. When Roman
Polanski’s The Pianist was having to tackle such an inherently
sensational subject such as the extermination of Polish Jews, in its
adaptation of classical keyboardist Wladyslaw Szpilman’s
autobiography by screenwriter Ronald Harwood The Dresser, there were
people to judge the `personal’ and professional credentials of the
filmmaker. For making a film that deals with basic survival, the
critics were quick to point out that Polanski is himself a famous
survivor. His mother died in Auschwitz, his father was confined in a
separate Nazi concentration camp, and Polanski grew up in the Krakow
ghetto.
The post-war German state’s relations with the Third Reich, Hitler
and Holocaust are carefully codified in law. The Federal Republic
still defines itself by its difference from and rejection of what
went before. This results in peculiarities like the exception from
the constitutional guarantee of free speech, under which it is
illegal to deny that Holocaust happened, or even that the number of
victims was smaller than commonly believed. Commemoration of the mass
destruction of Germany’s Jews has become a routine affair.
Only a few years back, the publication of Daniel Goldhagen’s American
bestseller Hitler’s Willing Executioners stressed how much of a
problem the Holocaust remained for the new Germany. The thesis of the
book is that ordinary Germans took part in the killing of Jews not
because they were obeying orders, were afraid of the consequences of
resisting or were too hypnotised by Hitler’s `demagoguery’. Goldhagen
set out to demonstrate that Germany in 1933 was a `society pregnant
with murder’ because violent anti-Semitism was so deeply rooted in
the consciousness of ordinary people that all Hitler needed to do for
the annihilation to proceed was give the starting signal. The
dynamics of oppressed-oppressor, victor-victim relationships have
been the bane of historical contentions as the ritualisation has
revolved around the good-Nazi-bad-Nazi theme.
Moral `imperative’
The Israeli journalist, Tom Segev, in his book The Seventh Million
describes a visit to Auschwitz and other former death camps in Poland
by a group of Israeli high school students, some from secular
schools, some from the religious ones. All of them were prepared for
the visit by the Israeli ministry of education, fed with a staple of
books and films on the subject and including meetings with survivors.
On their arrival in Poland, they were not sure whether they would
emerge from the experience as `different people’? The students were
`prepared’ to believe that the trip would have a profound effect on
their `identities’ as Jews and as Israelis.
In February 1994, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List resurfaced with
interviews with survivors, photographs of perpetrators, fresh
evidence and memories with a certain regularity. Prior to that
cinemas were showing Europa, Europa, the story of a Jewish boy who
survived the war by passing for a German; Korczak, Andrzej Wajda’s
film about the Warsaw ghetto; Shoah, nine hours of interviews with
Holocaust witnesses and Sophie’s Choice, the story of a woman forced
by the Nazis, to choose between her son and her daughter. The quality
and abundance of such films, not to mention the documentaries, the
journalism and the novels (even Martin Amis has written about the
Holocaust) and the attention they get, prove that nobody really finds
them either peculiar or obsessive. On the other hand, filmmakers and
writers on the Holocaust feel that there is a moral `imperative’ to
return to that subject again and again.
Today, films such as Schindler’s List and Viktor Klemperer’s diaries
– stories of Jews cheating death and good Germans helping them – are
replacing the guilt-obsession of Werner Fassbinder and Heinrich Böll
in the 1960s and the 1970s. Klemperer settled in East Germany where
his diaries were unpublished because of their unflattering comparison
between national socialism and communism. Spielberg has made films
about Japanese concentration camps (Empire of the Sun) and Nazi
concentration camps but not about Soviet concentration camps, they
fail to catch somehow the `collective’ imagination.
`It is foolish’, writes Primo Levi, the Italian-Jewish writer, `to
think that human justice can eradicate’ the crimes of Auschwitz. `The
destiny of the Jewish people, whom no earthly power has ever been
able to eradicate’ – so speaks a character in Jean-Françoise
Steiner’s novel about a revolt in Treblinka. Such sentiments lead to
self-delusion. There are clashes of remembrance and opinion now that
we have an enormous body of memoirs and studies describing the
experience of the concentration camps. `After Auschwitz’, wrote
Theodore Adorno famously, `to write a poem is barbaric’. It means to
`squeeze aesthetic pleasure out of artistic representation of the
naked bodily pain of those who have been knocked down by rifle
butts’.
The shrewder among us may have guessed what we’re getting at. Many of
us know that Stalin killed by means of mass murder and concentration
camps, at least twice as many people as Hitler – not because he was a
`worse’ or `more unique’ dictator but because he was in power much
longer. His crimes occurred within a decade of the Holocaust,
sometimes in precisely the same Polish and Ukrainian villages.
Monuments and museums
Stalin not only managed the Katyn massacres (the order to kill 15,000
Polish officers, the documents of which were locked until a few years
back) but also the purges in Russia and the artificial famine in
Ukraine, the murder of one in ten Balts, the execution of most
intellectuals living in the Soviet Union, and the near liquidation of
the Crimean Tartars. While the state of Israel has been able to build
monuments and museums to Hitler’s victims, the Poles and Balts and
Ukrainians remained under Soviet rule for another 50 years, unable to
speak out, unable to move to America or Britain, unable to write
books and make films.
Iris Chang, the Chinese-American writer of a bestseller titled The
Forgotten Holocaust of World War II on the 1937 rape of Nanking
pointed out how a culture also needed to be deemed as heirs of its
very own Holocaust. The instance of Bangladesh in the throes of its
making comes into mind. The Nanking massacre, during which tens of
thousands of Chinese were slaughtered by Japanese troops, was a
hideous event. The brutal lives and violent deaths of countless men
and women from Africa and China who were traded as slaves must not be
forgotten. The mass murder of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire cannot
be denied. And what about the communal riots, the organised butchery
of man against man?
If collective guilt gives us a moral duty not to let the terrible
tragedy of Holocaust pass by our memory, it is imperative as well to
focus on other tragedies as compulsively. We mourn not because
rituals demand it, not because we must but because we should.
(The author is a freelance writer)