Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

Memory and the Future

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series Editors: Andrew Hoskins and John Sutton The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’ under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination? Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (editors) MEMORY IN A GLOBAL AGE Discourses, Practices and Trajectories Brian Conway COMMEMORATION AND BLOODY SUNDAY Pathways of Memory Richard Crownshaw THE AFTERLIFE OF HOLOCAUST MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND CULTURE Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown and Amy Sodaro (editors) MEMORY AND THE FUTURE Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society Mikyoung Kim and Barry Schwartz (editors) NORTHEAST ASIA’S DIFFICULT PAST Essays in Collective Memory

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–23851–0 (hardback) 978–0–230–23852–7 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Memory and the Future Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society Edited by

Yifat Gutman Adam D. Brown and

Amy Sodaro

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown and Amy Sodaro 2010 Individual chapters © contributors 2010 Afterword © Jeffrey K. Olick 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–24740–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Memory and the future : transnational politics, ethics and society / edited by Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown, Amy Sodaro. p. cm. — (Palgrave Macmillan memory studies) ISBN 978–0–230–24740–6 (hardback) 1. Collective memory—Political aspects. 2. Memorialization—Social aspects. 3. War and society. 4. War memorials—Social aspects. 5. Political violence—Social aspects. I. Gutman, Yifat, 1977– II. Brown, Adam D., 1977– III. Sodaro, Amy, 1975– D862.M46 2010 306.2—dc22 2010027518 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Notes on the Contributors

viii

Introduction: Memory and the Future: Why a Change of Focus is Necessary Yifat Gutman, Amy Sodaro and Adam D. Brown

1

Part I Memory through Space and Time The Internationalization of Memory – How Meanings and Models Travel the World 1 Changing Temporalities and the Internationalization of Memory Cultures Daniel Levy

15

2 Misremembering the Holocaust: Universal Symbol, Nationalist Icon or Moral Kitsch? Ross Poole

31

3 Memory and History from Past to Future: A Dialogue with Dori Laub on Trauma and Testimony Dori Laub and Federico Finchelstein

50

4 Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow: The Internationalization of a New Commemorative Paradigm Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro

66

Part II Forms and Genres Narrative, Oral History and Visual Memory – How the Form Serves the Aim 5 The Role of Conversations in Shaping Individual and Collective Memory, Attitudes and Behavior Jonathan Koppel and William Hirst v

89

vi

Contents

6 Re-Presenting Victim and Perpetrator: The Role of Photographs in US Service Members’ Testimony Against War Kimberly Spring 7 How Shall We Remember Srebrenica? Will the Language of Law Structure Our Memory? Selma Leydesdorff

105

121

Part III Temporality and the Political I: Utopia 8 Refugees from Utopia: Remembering, Forgetting and the Making of The Feminist Memoir Project Ann Snitow

141

9 Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud: Utopia and Memory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee Lindsey A. Freeman

158

Temporality and the Political II: Revenge 10 Authorizing Death: Memory Politics and States of Exception in Contemporary El Salvador Gema Santamaria-Balmaceda

179

11 Memories of War and Enacting the Future at Yasukuni Shrine, Japan David P. Janes

195

Afterword Jeffrey K. Olick

209

Index

214

List of Figures

Cover Photo: Church lights, Barcelona, Spain. February 2010 Guy Ravitz © 4.1 Nyamata Memorial, Rwanda Amy Sodaro 4.2 Monumento a los Desaparecidos, Montevideo, Uruguay Louis Bickford/International Center for Transitional Justice 4.3 Choeung Ek, Cambodia Louis Bickford/International Center for Transitional Justice 6.1 One of the photographs taken by an Army sergeant of the bodies of Iraqi men exhumed from a mass grave that were used as ‘trophies of war’ by others in his unit Courtesy of Kristofer Goldsmith 6.2 A photo taken of a Marine sergeant, who poses on the hood of a car destroyed during a checkpoint shooting; the body of the driver lies prone inside the car Courtesy of Adam Kokesh 9.1 The opening ceremony of the ‘atomic city’ of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 19 March 1949. Ed Westcott, Courtesy of the Department of Energy Photo Archives 9.2 Miss Universe of 1966 receives irradiated dimes at the American Museum of Atomic Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Courtesy of Oak Ridge Associated Universities 9.3 The ‘Calutron Girls’. Ed Westcott, Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration

vii

67 74

80

114

116

159

164 168

Notes on the Contributors

Louis Bickford, a political scientist, has been working on memory, memorialization and transitional justice since 1997, when he consulted for the Ford Foundation’s Historical Memory Initiative in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Since then, he has developed strategies for confronting the past in Bosnia, Cambodia, Colombia, Kosovo, Liberia, Morocco and Peru, among others. He served as Associate Director of the Global Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was a founding staff member of the International Center for Transitional Justice, where he developed the Truth and Memory program and is currently teaching at The New School and New York University. He has published dozens of articles, book chapters and op-eds, and is currently a consultant for the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Adam D. Brown, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at New York University Medical Center, USA. He conducts research in the social, cognitive and neural properties of memory and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He is also an Australian-American Fulbright Senior Scholar. Federico Finchelstein is Associate Professor of History at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. He received his PhD at Cornell University. Professor Finchelstein is the author of four books on fascism, the Holocaust and Jewish history in Latin America and Europe. His most recent book, Transatlantic Fascism (2010), studies the global connections between Italian and Argentine fascism. He has published more than 50 academic articles and reviews on fascism, Latin American populism, genocide and anti-Semitism in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian publications, both in collective books and specialized peer review journals in the USA, UK, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Israel, Brazil and Argentina. Lindsey A. Freeman is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at The New School for Social Research. Her current research is concerned viii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

with modern industrial utopias of the twentieth century, the Manhattan Project and the secret atomic cities of the USA. She is currently an adjunct lecturer at Rutgers-Newark University and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Eugene Lang College, The New School. Yifat Gutman is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at The New School for Social Research, New York, USA. Her research has focused on memory activism and political change in a transnational context. Her publications include ‘Where do we go from here: the pasts, presents and futures of Ground Zero’ (Memory Studies, 2009), ‘The cultural constitution of publics’ (co-authored with Jeffery C. Goldfarb) in the Handbook of Cultural Sociology (2010), and the forthcoming Past Before Future: Memory Activism in Israel/Palestine (working title). William Hirst is Professor of Psychology at The New School for Social Research. His research interests span attentional processes, memory in amnesiacs and social remembering. In recent years, he has taken a particular interest in the formation of collective memories. David P. Janes is a University in Exile Fellow and PhD student in the Department of Sociology at The New School for Social Research. He also serves as Director of Foundation Grants at the United StatesJapan Foundation, a Trustee of the Japan ICU Foundation and a Scott M. Johnson Fellow of the United States-Japan Leadership Program. His research interests include the study of war memory in Northeast Asia, transnational social movements and civil society in Asia, US-Japan relations, as well as the influence of moral reasoning on actors engaged in contentious politics. Jonathan Koppel is a PhD Candidate in cognitive psychology at The New School for Social Research. He conducts research on social influences on memory and has published several articles on conversational remembering and the formation of collective memories. Dori Laub is currently a practicing psychoanalyst in New Haven, Connecticut working primarily with victims of massive psychic trauma and with their children. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and Co-founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. He obtained his MD at the Hadassah Medical School at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and his MA in Clinical Psychology at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. He

x

Notes on the Contributors

was Acting Director of the Genocide Studies Program (GSP) at Yale in 2000 and 2003. Since 2001 he has also been serving as Deputy Director for Trauma Studies for the GSP. Dr Laub has published on the topic of psychic trauma, its knowing and representation, in a variety of psychoanalytic journals and has co-authored Testimony – Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History with Professor Shoshana Felman (1992). Daniel Levy is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Stony Brook University in New York. As a political sociologist he is interested in issues of globalization, collective memory studies and comparative-historical sociology. Among his books related to memory studies are The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (2005) and Human Rights and Memory (2010), both with Natan Sznaider. Forthcoming is The Collective Memory Reader (with Jeffrey Olick and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi). Selma Leydesdorff, Professor of Oral History and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, has published extensively on Jewish history, oral history, the Holocaust and trauma. Her dissertation, We Lived with Dignity, was published in English translation in 1994. She is one of the principal editors of the Memory and Narrative series and is Chair of the Commission on the History and Culture of Jews of the Dutch Royal Academy. She was Supervisor for France and the Benelux at the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project and has worked on the International Forced Labor project. Eight years ago she started to work on the stories of the female survivors of Srebrenica. The ensuing Dutch book was translated into Bosnian and is forthcoming. At present she is working on the project ‘Late Consequences of Sobibor,’ for which she is interviewing survivors of Sobibor in the Demjanjuk case. Jeffrey K. Olick is Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Virginia. While he has published on a wide variety of topics, his interests focus particularly on collective memory, critical theory, transitional justice, and postwar Germany. Olick is the author or editor of numerous articles and six books, including The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (Routledge, 2007), In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943–1949 (University of Chicago Press, 2005), and the forthcoming The Collective Memory Reader (with Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy). Ross Poole is the author of two books, Morality and Modernity (1991) and Nation and Identity (1999), and numerous articles and chapters

Notes on the Contributors

xi

for academic journals and collections. Until 2000, he taught at Macquarie University, where he was for many years head of the Philosophy Department. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches in the Departments of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. He is currently working on a book entitled Past Justice. Gema Santamaria-Balmaceda is a Dean’s Fellow and a PhD student in the Sociology Department at The New School for Social Research. She holds a Masters in Gender and Social Policy from the London School of Economics. She was a Chevening Scholar and is currently a Fulbright Scholar. Her work has been published in journals such as Americas Quarterly, Revista Mexicana de Politica Exterior and Foreign Affairs en Espanol. Her main interests are post-political violence, sociology of law and punishment, feminism and social theory. Ann Snitow has been a feminist activist since l969 when she was a founding member of New York Radical Feminists. With Rachel Blau DuPlessis, she edited The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation. She has written germinal articles about feminism and is currently Director of the Gender Studies Program at The New School for Social Research. A co-founder of the Network of East-West Women (NEWW), her most recent writing and political work is about the changing situation of women in Eastern Europe. Amy Sodaro is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at The New School for Social Research, New York, USA. Her current research is on memorialization of genocide and atrocity and examines how societies use memorials as mechanisms for coming to terms with the past and preventing future human rights abuses. Her publications include ‘Whose Holocaust: the struggle for Romany inclusion in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’ (2008) and ‘Sixteen years later: remembering the Rwandan Genocide in the Kigali Memorial Center’ (forthcoming). Kimberly Spring is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at The New School for Social Research. Her research has focused on the moral and social claims of military service members in relation to their experiences in war as part of a larger interest in the ways in which individuals attribute moral valuations to their experiences and negotiate agreement on those values.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: Memory and the Future: Why a Change of Focus is Necessary Yifat Gutman, Amy Sodaro and Adam D. Brown

For those who study memory, there is a nagging concern that memory studies is inherently backward-looking, and that memory itself – and the ways in which it is deployed, invoked and utilized – can potentially hinder efforts to move forward. It is the purpose of this book to challenge these assumptions by looking at how the study and practice of memory are ultimately about and for the present and future. This Janus-faced view of memory as looking to the past in order to shape the present and future is the basis for the increasingly relevant and pressing concerns and scholarship about the relationship of individual and collective memory to democratic politics; human rights and transitional justice; revenge, imposture and forgery; social movements and utopian moments; and historical facts and scientific technologies. In order for memory studies scholars to develop a full understanding of how individuals and societies remember, they must consider the interplay of past and future: namely, the influence of the future – as imagined and desired by individuals and groups – on how the past is remembered, interpreted and dealt with and vice versa. Whether the past is assumed to be constantly reconstructed by social groups according to present concerns (Halbwachs 1992 [1925]) or this social construction is considered to be limited by past accounts, social frames and agents, and scientific evidence (Schudson 1992; Schwartz 1996, 2000; Shils 1981); whether memory is thought to be employed to fix past events in a single, powerful narrative to create unity (Alexander 2004; Smelser 2004) or representative of a dynamic process that not only reflects but also fosters social conflicts (Zolberg 1998) – the future has been largely left out of memory studies research. Yet inserting the future into the picture, as well as taking into account different approaches to temporality that such an operation entails can offer at 1

2

Introduction

the least a complementary explanation to and analysis of how the past is remembered. Further, as we argue, it may suggest a necessary change of direction in the field of memory studies. This change of focus from a past-oriented inquiry to one orientated toward the future raises critical questions about the field of memory studies as a whole; essentially, it asks whether memory studies is delineated by its object of study – the past – and thus limited to a more conservative, backward-looking perspective. If the field of memory studies is not a slave to the past, why has it left the future and other temporal perspectives outside its lens? What are the ethical and political consequences of this exclusion? What are the themes and questions that have been overlooked as a result, and how might their inclusion change the way we understand individual and collective memory today?

Temporality The change of focus challenges some of the themes and questions that memory scholars have regarded as central to the study of memory thus far and raises new questions, first and foremost about temporality itself. The traditional view of temporality as a linear process moving in one direction – from past to present to future – has been challenged by memory studies from the beginning. If memory scholars share one assumption, it is that temporality is not unidirectional; we do not carry the past with us into the present unchanged, but rather it is recreated in and by the present. For sociologists, Halbwachs’s argument that the past is socially constructed from the point of view of the present is fundamental; in psychology and neuroscience, research shows that individuals use the present to reconstruct the past (Bartlett 1932; Schacter 1996). Remembering the past also appears to be functionally important in shaping present constructs of the self, and the cohesion of self over time (Bluck and Alea 2002; Cabeza and St Jacques 2007; Conway 2005; Neisser 1978; Pillemer 1992). Scholars of media, literature and film have likewise focused on how memory of events is shaped and reshaped by contemporary forms that transmit stories and meanings according to present frameworks (Hirsch and Spitzer 2010; KirshenblattGimblett 2003; Landsberg 2004). However, the relative approach to temporality that this argument suggests – that is, the analytical view that temporality is not unidirectional – has not yet been fully developed and applied by memory scholars in the social sciences beyond consideration of the effect the present has on our view of the past and

Yifat Gutman, Amy Sodaro and Adam D. Brown

3

vice versa. Although a burgeoning body of literature in the humanities (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Wenzel 2006), psychology (Brown et al., under review; Conway and Pleydell-Pearce 2000; Winograd and Neisser 1988), sociology (Goldfarb 2009; Gutman 2009), anthropology (Kontopodis 2009) and neuroscience (Schacter et al. 2008) are revealing the extent to which memory and the future overlap, the future has been for the most part left unaddressed. Increasingly, however, policy makers, practitioners and activists are looking beyond their own contexts for models and methods of dealing with the past that are focused on building a better future. For example, practitioners within the somewhat loosely defined field of transitional justice, which emerged in the last few decades around various modes and methods of dealing with past conflict, are entirely focused on transforming past violence and conflict into future peace, reconciliation and democratic culture. The mechanisms of transitional justice, such as truth commissions, reparations and trials, are used and adapted around the world in varying contexts that hew to local practices and cultural values, to put the past at the service of a better future. Likewise, and on a smaller scale, activist groups from Buenos Aires to Tel Aviv are using the memory of the past to demand a better future, and legal scholars, especially within the growing field of international law, are looking to past examples to find solutions in the present that can set solid precedents for the future. Memory scholars can learn from this focus on the future, which helps us to understand the ways in which the past is used in and by the present and how this can directly affect the future. As new technologies and forms are increasingly employed to both commemorate the past and imagine the future, a focus on the future also offers important insights into the production of memory and its impact on present and future. For example, new media – the internet, digital photography, social networking and so on – have radically changed our relationship to the past (think of the stubborn and infinite permanence of information on the internet), but have also already shaped the way that we envision the future and our place within it. The implications of these phenomena have been little studied or acknowledged to date. A change of focus also offers the potential for new avenues of research and more nuanced understandings of the disciplinary conflicts underlying various approaches to memory. A new consideration of the future vis-à-vis the past may facilitate new ways of unpacking the conflicts and competition between memory and history, or struggles over the legitimacy of different methods of accessing the past that privilege particular forms of evidence (documents, testimonies, pictures and forensic

4

Introduction

reports) that would justify present claims and set future precedents (see in this volume Finchelstein; Spring; Leydesdorff). Finally, a focus on the future also raises important questions about issues deeply relevant to memory studies that have been left out of previous, past- and present-oriented research, such as utopia and revenge: how are utopian moments and their visionary futures remembered when that future arrives and the utopian dream is dead? And while the current memory studies literature tends to focus on the potential for memory to prevent or hinder conflict, what happens when memory is put to the service of revenge and the future is one of continued conflict and violence? The book addresses these issues and offers a conceptual framework for what a focus on the future in memory studies may look like. The chapters are divided into three parts that move from introducing memory studies in a transnational context in Part I, which also lays the theoretical and empirical framework for an inquiry into memory and the future through an examination of the internationalization of memory and its increasingly future-oriented form, to reconsidering and revisiting central themes and questions in light of the change of focus in Part II, such as the forms in which memory is embodied and how various uses of text, conversation and images can shape the past and so influence the future, and finally, in Part III, to revealing and studying topics that have been concealed before, due to the previous concentration of memory studies on the past and present, such as the end of utopic dreams and the resultant amnesia and nostalgia, and the dangers of revenge and perpetuation of violence and conflict.

Multidisciplinarity A second argument that underlies the present collection is about the importance of multidisciplinarity to the study of memory, generally, and particularly memory’s relationship to the future. Composed of a large range of studies on individual and collective memory, the field of memory studies is based upon disparate and diverse theoretical traditions, methodological approaches and empirical cases, which make it so interesting and at the same time challenging; while unifying all of these is neither possible nor desired, a lot can and has been achieved from conversations and collaborations that cross disciplinary boundaries. For one thing, the study of individual and social memory within each discipline is limited by the selected lenses, questions, methodologies and theories. Although these studies add to the accumulation of

Yifat Gutman, Amy Sodaro and Adam D. Brown

5

disciplinary knowledge, the body of knowledge on memory itself benefits much more from multidisciplinary research that goes beyond the limits of each discipline to reveal a larger picture and deeper understanding of the object of study. Crossing disciplinary boundaries may also reveal the stakes and preferences of each discipline, as well as what is not studied as a result. This further advances, makes critical and enriches the study of memory. Second, in our present transnational context of global flows, commemorative forms and meanings are already crossing physical and disciplinary boundaries and should thus be looked at from various sites and perspectives. Much can be learned from the work of scholars and practitioners of memory around the world who are already conducting research on or engaging with commemoration in manners that cross not only national borders but also disciplinary boundaries. For example, in France and the USA neuroscientists are studying the experiences of visitors to memorial museums to help exhibition and museum designers create the most meaningful experience possible;1 in the USA novelists and writers are working with veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the attempt to provide new outlets and methods for dealing with past trauma (Cieply 2009); in South Africa judges and lawyers have used art and architecture to turn past oppression into a hopeful future built upon the rule of law and democratic values (Sachs 2009); and around the world, artists, philosophers, legal scholars, teachers, psychologists, policy makers and others often look to each other in the search for ways to deal with the past and envision the future. These collaborations and cross-disciplinary projects are increasingly institutionalized in academic centers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international courts, museums and publications such as the journal Memory Studies and the series Studies in Memory of which this volume is part. This book – as a multidisciplinary study of the relationship of memory and the future – in itself endeavors to demonstrate how such a lens is important to memory studies in general, and how it contributes in particular to studies in and of transnational politics. The multiplicity of theoretical bases, methodological approaches, analytical perspectives and writing styles utilized by the book’s authors contribute a great deal when read separately; however, when read together, the sum is stronger than the parts. The variety of case studies, theories and methodologies not only reflect the scope of memory studies itself – from the study of memory at the most basic level of individual everyday interactions (Koppel and Hirst) to its global manifestations (Levy; Bickford and Sodaro), with many stops on the way

6

Introduction

in various local, national and international contexts – but also offer greater insight on specific themes and questions which are examined across disciplinary boundaries. The book offers multiple links between the chapters, some that follow the book’s structure, and some that cross the book’s three parts. The chapters in this volume share the assumption that memory both shapes and is shaped by political, cultural and social interactions. It is as much a product of the present as it is a projection of the future, whether these interactions are between individuals in everyday conversation (Koppel and Hirst), between and among groups vying for recognition and demanding social change (Snitow; Spring), between memory ‘workers’ and their institutions (Freeman; Leydesdorff), between victims and perpetrators (Bickford and Sodaro; Finchelstein and Laub), between political parties and nation states (Janes; Santamaria-Balmaceda) or as part of global processes across time and space (Levy; Poole). When examining the boundaries and connections between individual and collective memory, which is at the heart of the disciplinary divide in memory studies, the public use and role of individual testimony in collective remembering of the past is a recurring theme: in many chapters in this book we see shifting meanings, uses and tensions around the role of testimony that often reveal institutional arrangements and the production of knowledge. Tensions between and among the disciplines that are highlighted in the book’s chapters include those between the fields of history and psychoanalysis in a unique conversation on the theme by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dori Laub and historian Federico Finchelstein; between law and oral history in Leydesdorff’s chapter on women’s testimonies in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) criminal trials of the Srebrenica genocide; and between visual and literary criticism and sociology in Spring’s chapter on the use of photographs by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in representing themselves as antiwar activists. Like testimony, the changing representation of the past by different commemorative genres is also examined from varying perspectives to illuminate different aspects of how the past is remembered in the service of the future. Freeman, for example, sociologically traces the first utopian, and later nostalgic, representation of nuclear power in the particularly powerful example of the Museum of Atomic Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which is attempting to incorporate the USA’s complicated relationship with nuclear weapons and energy into a simple, nostalgic narrative of a past utopian dream. Like other sociological studies of the past as always in play according to present demands, Freeman

Yifat Gutman, Amy Sodaro and Adam D. Brown

7

demonstrates the unusual nostalgic demands of Oak Ridge’s present. Snitow takes a very different approach in her personal account of compiling The Feminist Memoir Project, which seeks to remember the feminist movement of the sixties, but like the Oak Ridge museum, reveals almost as much that is left out as is included in the memory project; from her personal, and self-reflexive position as an activist within the movement, Snitow’s piece departs from traditional academic studies to become something of a memoir in itself. From the perspective of the practitioners of memory, Bickford and Sodaro look at how commemorative genres are put to practical use in the pragmatic and on-the-ground effort to prevent future violence, examining how similar forms and intents have traveled the world to such widely different contexts as Morocco, Rwanda, Chile, the USA and Cambodia. On the other hand, both Janes and Santamaria-Balmaceda expose how present political goals and agendas and their concomitant imagined futures in Japan and El Salvador, respectively, determine what from the past is chosen to be remembered and how the past is shaped to achieve goals for the future.

Transnationality As different theoretical and methodological approaches can illuminate various aspects of memory studies, allowing us to make generalizations and observe patterns across the disciplines, so too can individual empirical studies point to broader trends and influences. Like the different methodological approaches taken in this book, the cases examined are widespread: from Oak Ridge, Tennessee to Tokyo; from El Salvador to Rwanda. And just as the different methodologies and theoretical approaches shed light on otherwise limited perspectives on phenomena within memory studies, so do a breadth of empirical cases. One of the major directions of memory studies focuses on the political uses of memory across time and space, which form a basis for this book’s transnational perspective and a future orientation. Underlining the significance of a transnational perspective to the study of memory, Levy proposes a notion of a cosmopolitan memory built upon a memory imperative that comes out of the horrors of the Holocaust and shapes how and what societies around the world remember today; further, he argues that today’s transnational memory culture reflects the breakdown of the nation state as a primary organizing and legitimating principal. Just as memory in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was put in the service of the nation state and nationalism, in today’s world it

8

Introduction

is focused on an increasingly transnational future. Echoing this argument, Bickford and Sodaro examine the emergence of a new paradigm of commemoration that has spread around the world, borrowing models from the Holocaust and subsequent traumas to find the ‘most effective’ ways to remember. Both pieces emphasize the importance of the future in the increasingly reflexive study and practice of memory in a global context. Poole acknowledges the powerful link between past and future while challenging Levy’s notion of a cosmopolitan memory rooted in the Holocaust by arguing for different sources for the normative power of memory across various contexts. How these broader, transnational issues intersect with particular case studies is exposed in a variety of empirical studies in this volume. In the works of Janes and Santamaria-Balmaceda, for example, we see the above-mentioned memory imperative ‘interrupted’ as the problems of the past refuse to go away in the present, upsetting the view of the future: in Japan a wish to celebrate past military might reflects a desire for a future departure from the imposed pacifism of post-war Japan and upheavals in present-day politics; in El Salvador past violence repeats itself in a seemingly endless cycle as political parties exploit the fear and memory of the population. However, this political use of the past is not specific to Japan or El Salvador, each of which represents a challenge to the imagined positive potential of memory that Bickford and Sodaro find behind the construction and implementation of the new paradigm of memorialization that they trace emerging around the world. Leydesdorff’s study of the ICTY presents another example of the potential of memory projects to fail, and she warns of the dangerous consequences of the ‘wrong’ kind of memory work. Similarly, the case studies presented by Freeman and Snitow, Oak Ridge’s atomic background and the sixties feminist movement, demonstrate what happens when the future does not turn out as hoped and expected; both examine the failure of a utopian dream and the forgetting and/or nostalgic remembrance that ensues when the vision of the future is not realized. Together these works break ground on an important aspect of memory that is completely left out of studies that do not consider the future; they also help us to understand the consequences that the future can have on how the past is remembered. We can see this on a micro-level in Koppel and Hirst’s chapter on conversation and memory’s unintended consequences as well; at the most intimate level of conversation, memory is necessarily adjusted to the dominant speaker’s desired version of the past. While this

Yifat Gutman, Amy Sodaro and Adam D. Brown

9

is significant for understanding personal relations, it also has implications far beyond the individual and can, in fact, shape political realities. Together, these case studies, while rooted in particular places and contexts, help to elucidate pressing issues in memory studies and in the transnational politics of our world today, and can allow us to draw some more generalized conclusions about the relationship of past and future. Issues of political and social change, ethical and moral norms, and cultural production and exchange are all illuminated when examined from the dual perspective of past and future and in a global context. The importance of memory studies as a field of study and practice lies in the very high stakes that individuals and groups place in memory and in what Poole refers to as memory’s ‘normative’ power. It is clear from the case studies in this book, as well as countless examples from around the world, that the past has a firm hold in the present and is not receding anytime soon. However, what this book also demonstrates is that the future is equally both determined by the past and determining how the past is remembered and represented. Thus, if we want to understand memory’s power and the high stakes involved, we must consider the crucial relationship between memory and the future. We would like to thank the many scholars who took part in making this collection, and the conference that preceded it, possible. Our colleagues who helped enrich and elevate our discussions at The New School for Social Research over the past three years, as well as contributed to the production of this collection: Naomi Angel, Alin Coman, Rachel Daniel, Lindsey Freeman, Leilani Khlopin, Marisol Lopez Menendez, Ben Nienass and Kimberly Spring. We are grateful for the intellectual support and guidance we have received from leading scholars of memory who participated and elevated our discussions and inspire this collection, among them Richard J. Bernstein, Jerome Bruner, Oz Frankel, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Marianne Hirsch, Elzbieta Matynia, Olick, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Barbie Zelizer, Eviatar Zerubavel, Yael Zerubavel and Vera Zolberg, the contributors to this volume and the editors of the Studies in Memory series, Andrew Hoskins and John Sutton. The book would not have been possible without the institutional support we have received throughout the years: we especially thank The New School President Bob Kerrey and his office, The New School Provost Tim Marshall, Associate Provost Ron Kassimir, NSSR Dean Michael Schober, Associate Dean Robert Kostrzewa and faculty and students of The New School.

10

Introduction

Note 1. This initiative is headed by French neuroscientist Katia Dauchot, and is part of an interdisciplinary memory project, ‘Memory and Memorialization: Representing Trauma and War,’ which is a collaboration between New York University, the Centre national de la recherche scientifique of Paris, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, New York and the Caen Memorial in France.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. ‘Toward a theory of cultural trauma,’ in Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka (eds), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 6–42. Bartlett, Frederic C. 1932. Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bluck, Susan and Nicole Alea. 2002. ‘Exploring the functions of autobiographical memory: why do I remember the autumn?,’ in J.D. Webster and B.K. Haight (eds), Critical Advances in Reminiscence Work: From Theory to Application. New York: Springer Publishing, pp. 61–75. Brown, Adam D., James Root, Tracy Romano, Luke Chang and William Hirst. Under Review. ‘The limits of memory and imagination: Overgeneralized autobiographical memory and episodic simulation in posttraumatic stress disorder.’ Cabeza, Roberto and Peggy St Jacques. 2007. ‘Functional neuroimaging of autobiographical memory.’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11(5), pp. 219–27. Cieply, Michael. 2009. ‘Turning swords to pens, and warriors to writers.’ New York Times, 12 October. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/movies/ 13veterans.html?_r=2& ref=arts (accessed 29 January 2010). Conway, Martin A. 2005. ‘Memory and the self.’ Journal of Memory and Language 53(4), pp. 594–628. Conway, Martin and Kit Pleydell-Pearce. 2000. ‘The construction of autobiographical memories in the self memory system.’ Psychological Review 107(2), pp. 261–88. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Goldfarb, Jeffery C. 2009. ‘Resistance and creativity in social interaction: for and against memory in Poland, Israel–Palestine, and the United States.’ International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 22(2), pp. 143–8. Gutman, Yifat. 2009. ‘Where do we go from here: the pasts, presents and futures of Ground Zero.’ Memory Studies 2(1), pp. 55–70. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992 [1925]. On Collective Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hirsch, Marianne and Leo Spitzer. 2010. Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 2003. ‘Kodak moments, flashbulb memories: reflections on 9/11.’ The Drama Review 47(1), pp. 11–48.

Yifat Gutman, Amy Sodaro and Adam D. Brown

11

Kontopodis, Michalis. 2009. ‘Documents’ memories: enacting pasts and futures at the school for individual learning-in-practice.’ Memory Studies 2(1), pp. 11–26. Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Neisser, Ulric. 1978. ‘What are the important questions?,’ in M.M. Gruneberg, E.E. Morris and R.N. Sykes (eds), Practical Aspects of Memory. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, pp. 3–24. Pillemer, David. 1992. ‘Remembering personal circumstances: a functional analysis,’ in E. Winograd and U. Neisser (eds), Affect and Accuracy in Recall: Studies of ‘Flashbulb’ Memories. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 236–64. Sachs, Albie. 2009. ‘From prison to constitutional court: the changing face of justice in South Africa.’ Paper presented at Irmgard Coninx Stiftung Roundtables on Transnationality, Memory Politics, 22 October 2009, Berlin, Germany. Schacter, Daniel. 1996. Searching for Memory: the Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York: Basic Books. Schacter, Daniel, Donna Rose Addis and Richard L. Buckner. 2008. ‘Episodic simulation of future events: concepts, data, and applications.’ The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1124, pp. 39–60. Schudson, Michael. 1992. Watergate in American Memory. How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past. New York: Basic Books. Schwartz, Barry. 1996. ‘The expanding past.’ Qualitative Sociology 19(3), pp. 275–82. Schwartz, Barry. 2000. Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shils, Edward. 1981. Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smelser, Neil J. 2004. ‘September 11, 2001 as cultural trauma,’ in Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka (eds), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 342–66. Wenzel, Jennifer. 2006. ‘Remembering the past’s future: anti-imperialist nostalgia and some versions of the third world.’ Cultural Critique 62, pp. 1–32. Winograd, Eugene and Ulric Neisser. 1988. Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory. New York: Cambridge University Press. Zolberg, Vera. 1998. ‘Contested remembrance: the Hiroshima exhibit controversy.’ Theory and Society 27(4), pp. 565–90.

This page intentionally left blank

Part I Memory through Space and Time The Internationalization of Memory – How Meanings and Models Travel the World

This page intentionally left blank

1 Changing Temporalities and the Internationalization of Memory Cultures Daniel Levy

The future and memory Collective memory is all over the space. This misappropriation of an idiom that recasts the conventional spatial dimension revolving around place is deliberate. It speaks simultaneously to the proliferation of memory talk during the last two decades and the (largely but not exclusively) disciplinary diversity that continues to surround the concept of memory. Differences notwithstanding, what most definitions of memory have in common, at least in the social sciences and humanities, is a realignment of temporalities (Olick et al. 2010). George Orwell’s observation, by now a cliché, that ‘whoever controls the present controls the past’ has long been a central theme in the memory literature. Most conceptual statements, let alone empirical undertakings, seem to revolve around this kind of instrumentalist approach to memory. According to this perspective present political concerns and dominant (nation state) interests are projected onto the past (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). This venerable research tradition is in line with Orwell’s perception of a controlling hegemonic party. Challenging this state-centric view, another popular research strand draws on Michel Foucault’s notion of counter-memory, paying attention to sub-national units of analysis such as ethnic minorities, gender and other subaltern groups with counter-memorial agendas (Foucault 1975). Despite their different vantage points, both orientations essentially consider political expediencies in the present as leading to the invention or construction of the past. Far less (theoretical) attention has been paid to the future and its relation to the temporal modes of present and past, beyond Orwell’s other instrumentalist insight that ‘whoever controls the past controls 15

16

Internationalization of Memory Cultures

the future.’ On a polemical level this omission has frequently been associated with a critique that memory supposedly is simply backward looking, and that contemporary preoccupations with the past come at the expense of a progressive future agenda. For instance, Charles Maier (1993) has warned of a ‘surfeit of memory’ and the particularistic politics of victimization that it produces. This view is echoed in John Torpey’s critique of the proliferation of memory tropes associated with transitional justice mechanisms. ‘The global spread of reparations demands and the preoccupation with the past to which it bears witness reflect an unmistakable decline of a more explicitly future-oriented politics’ (Torpey 2006, p. 5). The absence of grand political visions for the future, I suggest, is less a matter of nostalgic clinging to the past but primarily a response to the recent reconfiguration of the nation state. The memory boom of the late twentieth century coincides with the various effects of globalization on the nation state (Levy and Sznaider 2006b). More specifically, the decline of nationhood as a legitimating principle is a key factor for the fragmentation and pluralization of memory cultures (Levy and Sznaider 2006a). Returning to Orwell’s hegemonic attribution of mnemonic powers to the state, how then are we to understand contemporary memory cultures now that the party is over? Regardless of how we interpret this state of affairs, it is misleading to construe the present fascination with memory at the expense of a historically situated understanding of the indispensable relationship of past and future. And yet, from a conceptual point of view it is striking how neglected the future remains in the memory literature. Especially considering that memory is a central foundation for the articulation of the future. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, ‘an adequate sense of tradition manifests itself in a grasp of those future possibilities which the past has made available to the present. Living traditions, just because they continue a not-yet-completed narrative, confront a future whose determinate and determinable character, so as it possesses any, derives form the past’ (MacIntyre 1981, p. 223). Here memory and its association with a particular past are not an impediment for the future but a prerequisite to enunciate a narrative (bridge) over the present. A shared sense of the past becomes a meaning-making repository which helps define aspirations for the future. In his historical analysis of times and temporalities Reinhart Koselleck points out that the present is situated between past experiences which is ‘present past, whose events have been incorporated and can be remembered’ and a horizon of expectations which refers to ‘the future made present, it points to the not-yet, to that

Daniel Levy

17

which has not been experienced, to that which can only be discovered’ (Koselleck 1985, p. 272). How salient these ‘past futures’ are remains an issue of empirical investigation. What matters for our current discussion is that the preoccupation with the past and the (secularized) command to remember have become political (and ethical) principles and are perceived as central mechanisms for the transmission of values to future generations. In this view, memory is not only an intricate parcel of the fabric of meaning-making activities but can also become an empowering resource for a wide variety of groups, as the popularity of the aforementioned notion of counter-memory attests to.

The global diffusion of the ‘memory imperative’ Given the processual character of memory and the relational nature of temporalities our analysis of memory phenomena and our conceptual grasp of the temporal triad necessitates a historical analysis. On the most obvious level temporality complicates memory, so to speak, due to the fact that our notions of time themselves are subject to change (Adam 2004). To capture transformations in memory cultures, we need to take into account different levels of mediation (social, cultural and political) and their respective historical manifestations. In other words, to bring the three temporal dimensions together, we need to historicize the modalities and meanings of memory (Olick and Levy 1997). The realignment of temporalities and associated mnemonic practices are shaped in different epistemological contexts. In the following, largely conceptual and exploratory deliberations, I address the features of this past-present-future nexus with a focus on the meaning and the salience of the internationalization of memory cultures. The first section addresses the internationalization and transformation of memory practices in the global context. The second part puts forward some conceptual considerations for the study of memory cultures. The beginning of the twenty-first century is marked by fundamental global transformations challenging some of the paradigmatic national assumptions and the underlying homology of memory and nationhood that have long underpinned sociology as a discipline and the study of memory. We can speak of a resilient methodological nationalism, which refers to the implicit or explicit assumption that the nation state (still) constitutes the core category of modern social and political order. Methodological nationalism (Beck and Sznaider 2006) is bound up with the presupposition that the national remains the key principle and yardstick for the study of social, economic, political and cultural

18

Internationalization of Memory Cultures

processes. This equation of society and nation by and large encompasses the scholarly approach to collective memory: official and public memory discourses are situated, both theoretically and empirically, within a sort of national container. A critique of methodological nationalism in the context of globalization research demonstrates that a national ontology can no longer serve as a self-evident point of departure. This critical endeavor, however, should not be mistaken for the thesis that the end of the nation state has arrived. Rather, it demands a reflexive interrogation of the validity of a historically specific and thus contingent national figuration which has been instilled in the sociological imagination by the classical canon. Indeed, memory contains singular visions of the past, but this is not to say that it mimetically preserves or simply stores the past; rather, it generates pasts in the context of new epistemological contexts, such as the global iterations during the last two decades. One of the characteristic features of a global memory culture is what we call the emergence of a memory imperative (Levy and Sznaider 2010). Such an imperative marshals a set of political and normative expectations for the handling of past injustices, originally triggered by reactions to World War II and the Holocaust (Levy and Sznaider 2006a). The Holocaust has evolved from a European concern into a universal cipher primarily via the related legal codification of crimes against humanity. It is frequently tapped to comment on injustices and human rights abuses as such (in both legal and commemorative discourses). Although the ‘memory imperative’ originated with the centrality of Holocaust memories during the nineties, the Holocaust is by now decontextualized as a concept and dislocated from space and time, precisely because it can be used to dramatize any act of injustice. The Holocaust has been turned into a symbol of genocidal holocaust rather than a real historical event. Genocide, ethnic cleansing and the Holocaust are blurred into an apolitical and ahistorical concept circumscribed by human rights as the positive force and nationalism as the negative. It is against a background of particular national narratives and the global imperative of reconciliation as response to human rights violations that the dualism between victim and perpetrator memories is organized and ultimately fades. The diminishing significance of particular memories is accelerated through the Americanization, that is, the universalization of Holocaust representations. As a result, the dichotomy of perpetrators and victims is displaced and a third epistemological vantage point surfaces: that of the passive bystander and an attendant witness perspective. The argument here is not that memories of the Holocaust are universally applicable or resonate with the same salience (let alone

Daniel Levy

19

meanings) for different groups. On the contrary, the commemoration of the Holocaust as a universal code for human rights abuses is ultimately about forgetting the particular experience and redirecting the focus to symbolic political and cultural practices that underscore the (re)solutions offered by the human rights regime rather than engaging with the historical event itself (Levy and Sznaider 2006a). Nation states thus engage (or are expected to) with their own history in a self-conscious fashion. While traditional or exemplary narratives deploy historical events in the service of national foundation myths, self-conscious narratives may also draw on specific events to call attention to past injustices committed by one’s own nation. Such self-critical approaches are frequently complemented or altogether substituted with self-victimizing narratives. In this case the Holocaust is less a universal code but a screen to reframe suffering in a national context (for example, expulsion debates in Germany). Notwithstanding, this memory imperative has become an important source of state legitimacy. Moreover, this dynamic explains both the importance of human rights norms as a globally available repertoire of legitimate claim making and the differential appropriation of this universal script (Levy and Sznaider 2010). How then are models and meanings diffused around the world? And more specifically, how can we account for the internationalization of this memory imperative? One helpful sociological model explaining the global diffusion of norms and organizational forms is the world polity approach, which draws on neo-institutionalism and is championed by John Meyer and his collaborators (Meyer et al. 1997). They call attention to the state’s embeddedness in a higher level institutional and cultural order, designated as the ‘world polity.’ Aligned with it is a ‘world culture’ manifesting itself in cognitive models or scripts that specify and legitimate the sovereignty, goals and technologies of the state as a central purposive and rational actor. In this account, globalization is primarily understood as the diffusion and enactment of world culture, which ‘refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’ (Robertson 1992, p. 8). A rationalized world institutional and cultural order has crystallized that consists of universally applicable models that shape states, organizations and individual identities (Meyer et al. 1997). Particular organizations and cultural patterns, such as the aforementioned memory imperative, enjoy authority and confer legitimacy. However, the preoccupation of world polity theory with isomorphism of social entities has the paradoxical effect of reifying one core axiom inherited from classical sociology: the notion that nationality figures as

20

Internationalization of Memory Cultures

the main legitimating principle of modern social and political organization. Developing an analytical perspective that escapes this national caging requires not only reflexivity toward the cultural parameters of a modern ontology; it also necessitates grasping the emergence of alternative ontological models that counter or even transcend it. Thus we need to caution against a fallacy where we mistake the emergence of global memory cultures simply as an indication of the kind of isomorphism that neo-institutionalists stipulate. Put differently, while the world polity approach is very helpful in explaining how models are globally diffused, it is less useful for understanding how world cultural norms are incorporated into local contexts. To retain the valuable insights for how cultural models are diffused on a global level, without losing sight of the conditions of their endogenization, I propose to complement the world polity approach with a cosmopolitan perspective.1 Ulrich Beck’s cosmopolitan framework promises to be especially fruitful in this regard as it directs attention to the conditions, as well as resistances, under which cosmopolitan principles fuse particular sensibilities with universal orientations. Part of a burgeoning social-scientific literature on cosmopolitanism, it underscores the need to develop an analytical idiom of ‘modern society’ that is not limited to a national ontology by re-examining, reconceptualizing and empirically establishing it within the alternative epistemological horizon of a new cosmopolitan social science (Beck and Sznaider 2006, p. 6). Critical cosmopolitanism entails the reflexive interrogation of a historically specific, and thus malleable, concept of the national. We are thus not dealing with a linear or evolutionary approach that begins with national memory and ends with the global. The cosmopolitanization of memory does not dissolve national identifications, rather it exists alongside the national as a broader normative horizon. Globalization cannot be reduced to the external relations of putatively interconnected national societies; it carries transformative effects for the inner grammar of cultural and political identifications. To distinguish these processes of globalization from within, Beck introduces the concept of cosmopolitanization, which implies an interactive relationship between the global and the local. Cosmopolitanization is a ‘non-linear, dialectical process in which the universal and particular, the similar and the dissimilar, the global and the local are to be conceived not as cultural polarities, but as interconnected and reciprocally interpenetrating principles’ (Beck 2006, pp. 72–3). More generally, a cosmopolitan perspective seeks to overcome the habit of theorizing globalization in an either–or logic predicated on oppositions in the mold of inside–outside

Daniel Levy

21

or exogenous–endogenous (Beck 2006). Cosmopolitanism, as an analytic paradigm, highlights the transformative emergence of new social spaces and imaginaries through their very interaction. It is imperative to avoid (common) attempts to portray cosmopolitanism as antithetical to nationalism. Rather, new forms of nationalism, as well as contemporary manifestations of the nation state itself, are best understood if the social-scientific observer adopts a cosmopolitan perspective. ‘The experience of an actual removal of boundaries, which may in turn trigger a reflex of neo-national closure, requires a cosmopolitan approach for its analysis’ (Beck 2004, p. 133). Contrary to the normative universalism of some cosmopolitans, Beck’s approach highlights processes in which universalism and particularism are no longer exclusive either–or categories but instead a co-dependent pair. Subtending this argument is an understanding that meaningful identifications express particular attachments: one’s identity, one’s biography of belonging, is always embedded in a more general narrative and memories of the community or group. In this view, particularism becomes a prerequisite for a cosmopolitan orientation. Cosmopolitanism does not negate nationalism; national attachments are potential mediators between the individual and the global horizons along which identifications and memory practices unfold. A cosmopolitan methodological shift acquires its analytical force in elucidating the relationship between processes of actual cosmopolitanization and the persistence (or resurgence) of political self-descriptions normatively underwritten by a framework of nationalism. Cosmopolitanization must therefore be understood as a relational concept: it captures cosmopolitan changes and movements, on the one hand, and the resistances or blockades triggered by them, on the other.

Toward a mnemo-historical approach To take global trajectories and contingencies into consideration, when assessing the salience and malleability of memory, I propose examining the internationalization of memory cultures by way of a methodological Gestalt switch which is less concerned with the causal analysis of historical events but rather with their mnemo-history.2 According to Jan Assmann (1997), mnemo-history is not about the exploration of the past per se but rather concerned with how particular pasts are being remembered over time and how the conditions for their appropriation are subject to changes. Here the past is not merely subject to the kind of presentist instrumentalism according to which memories serve the

22

Internationalization of Memory Cultures

expediencies of the politics du jour. Rather, the past is invented, shaped and reconstructed in a dialogical relationship with the present, past constraints and future possibilities. How histories are remembered (and by extension distorted over time) emerges as the main focus of our analytic pursuits. Jan Assmann reminds us that what matters is not so much the factuality of these memories but their actuality. By historicizing memory as a contingent phenomenon, this process-oriented approach suggests that ‘memory is not only storage of past “facts” but the ongoing work of reconstructive imagination. In other words, the past cannot be stored but always has to be “processed” and mediated. This mediation depends on the semantic frames and needs of a given individual or society within a given present’ (Assmann 1997, p. 14). To sharpen the analytical surplus of a mnemo-historical approach three conceptual reflections are in order. The first concerns the specific characteristics of the mnemonic reference group. An obvious, but sometimes neglected point here is that memory practices are mediated by idiosyncratic group features of temporal experiences and distinctive cultural dispositions toward specific pasts, pastness and the future. As Maurice Halbwachs pointed out: ‘Every group – be it religious, political or economic, family, friends, or acquaintances, even a transient gathering in a salon, auditorium, or street – immobilizes time in its own way and imposes on its members the illusion that, in a given duration of a constantly changing world, certain zones have acquired a relative stability and balance in which nothing essential is altered’ (Halbwachs 1980, p. 126). Attentiveness to the kind of cultural validations that specific groups attribute to temporal registers such as progress, change, innovation and memory itself is therefore essential. Claude Lévi-Strauss, for instance, distinguishes between hot and cold societies. Cold societies are characterized by their desire to ‘annul the possible effects of historical factors on their equilibrium and continuity in a quasi automatic fashion’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966, p. 243). In contrast, hot societies are characterized by ‘resolutely internalizing the historical process and making it the moving power of their development’ (p. 243). However, extensive engagement with the past itself does not reveal much about how societies approach their history. One could argue, for instance, that societies deploying hot memories are no less eager to annul the past in order to establish balances and continuities than those who tend to minimize references to what went before. Preoccupation with memory can serve the purpose of institutionalizing memories of a particular historical past in order to bracket competing narratives. The point here is not to treat these attempts at oblivion as an antidote

Daniel Levy

23

to memory. Rather collectivized memory practices inexorably implying forgetting as their ability to mobilize and constitute mass identifications is largely based on a process of de-contextualization, which in turn requires a shift from concrete memories to abstract remembrance; that is, a move away from the concrete (and particular) experience toward a more abstract (and universal) message. Consequently, we observe a shift consisting in the institutionalization of remembrance at the expense of memories. This distinction between memory and remembrance is not incidental. Nor can it be reduced to the so-called instrumentalization of memories. Memories vacillating between the concrete and the abstract, and the implied de-contextualization inhere in the course of action from which memories derive their ritualistic strength. Ritualization depends on mediation, which by definition requires a certain form of abstraction. Moreover, the immanence of this dynamic and the significance the past carries for a group are not just the product of historical relevance and geographic proximity, but also the result of temporal distance to the events that are being remembered. This necessary transition corresponds to the argument about the inevitable shift from the concrete to the abstract. This abstraction notwithstanding, or perhaps even because of it, memory cultures retain their path-dependent qualities. Jeffrey Olick (2007) helps us address the balance of particular experiences and the universal dimensions of world cultural demands in terms of genre memories, pointing to the formative impact of the initial commemoration of an event mitigating subsequent memories. Olick’s theory of genre memory also provides us with an analytic prism to capture the co-extensive constraints of deep structured memories and globally commanding memory imperatives. Their transformative dimensions are reflected in new temporal alignments. This is particularly relevant for cases of transitional justice, where difficult pasts need to be weighed against the political expediencies of the present in order to establish a stable political system for the future. As such, transitional justice politics are reflective of and contribute to the aforementioned memory imperative by focusing on judicial and non-judicial procedures aimed at engaging legacies of human rights abuses. A second characteristic of concern for a mnemo-historical approach which is attentive to how different cultures may apprehend the future in distinctive ways relates to questions of noncontemporaneity. There is a tendency in the academic literature to privilege a mostly Western conception of cultural memory. Arguably the preoccupation with memory is a European phenomenon starting during the eighties, largely driven by delayed reactions to the atrocities of World War II in general

24

Internationalization of Memory Cultures

and the Holocaust in particular (Levy and Sznaider 2006b). However, there is a need to ‘de-provincialize’ the notion of memory, since it is frequently situated in an ideal(ized) sequence of modernity that is characterized, among other things, through its relationship to the past and traditions: be it in Ferdinand Toennies’s famous distinction of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, or in more constructivist approaches, such as Hobsbawm and Ranger’s notion of ‘invented traditions.’ Not to mention the kind of linear assumptions which have long informed social and political modernization theories operating with a conception of modernity stipulating a universalism that tends to lose track of the particular conditions that shape memory cultures. They share a bias, which leaves little empirical, let alone conceptual, space for the existence of noncontemporaneities. Instead of reproducing a view of memory that presupposes a particular sequence of temporalities, we need to be attentive to the different relationships of the temporal triad of past, present and future. As David Gross puts it: ‘What engenders noncontemporeaneity is the advance of modernity itself, and the more rapidly the modern replaces the premodern, or the late modern replaces the early modern, the more sizable amounts of noncontemporaneity get produced’ (Gross 2000, p. 142). The entwinement of differential historical experiences and distinctive group orientations are circumscribing the kind and scope of memory. Gross (2000, pp. 142ff.) delineates three types of temporal realignment. Absolute noncontemporaneity refers to a past that has been obliterated. It is a lost past for which we have mere fragments that are preserved in museums and subject to archaeological speculations, but which have no bearing on present-day experience. Relative noncontemporaneity is a past that has passed, too, but has left behind some traces that can still be evoked (for example, residual forms of behavior dating back to, but also severed from, earlier times, such as certain codes of honor, outmoded manners). Lastly, there is enduring noncontemporaneity, which addresses unmitigated thoughts and conducts from the past that are clearly incongruous with current behavioral practices. The third conceptual consideration for a mnemo-historical approach concerns the epochal features of memory, being situated between local conditions and global currents. Which mnemonic practices prevail and characterize how a particular epoch and culture envisions its future? Memory is not a timeless phenomenon but expressive of and contributing to the distinctive cultural features of particular periods. The Renaissance and especially the eighteenth century are widely considered to be the self-conscious starting point of collective memory

Daniel Levy

25

articulations. For most of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries cultural memory has been identified with the hegemonic aspirations of the nation state to establish mythical continuities and a unifying narrative of the past. While nation state memories were a self-conscious top-down effort, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries signal a self-reflexive turning point for the articulation of memories. What happens to the centrality of national memory when ‘peripheral’ or ‘marginal’ pasts penetrate into the center and discontinuities command legitimate attention? Notwithstanding these changes, the memory literature remains widely predicated on a nation state model and a concomitant methodological nationalism. Most sociological approaches continue to be pervaded with a fixed understanding of the nation state, a conception that goes back to sociology’s birth amidst the nineteenth-century formation of nation states. Ironically, the territorial conception of national culture – the idea of culture as ‘rooted’ – was itself a reaction to the enormous changes that were going on as that century turned into the twentieth. It was a conscious attempt to provide a solution to the ‘uprooting’ of local cultures that the formation of nation states necessarily involved. Sociology understood the new symbols and common values, transmitted primarily through the consolidation of cultural memories by establishing links to foundational pasts, as means of integration into a new unity. The triumph of this perspective can be seen in the way the nation state has ceased to appear as a project and a construct and has become instead widely regarded as something natural. However, global interdependencies transform mnemonic practices by recasting ‘national time/pasts’ as both affirmative and contested resources. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the spatially rooted understanding of culture is being challenged by the uncoupling of nation and state in the context of the emergence of cosmopolitan memories (Levy and Sznaider 2006b). Cosmopolitan memories refer to a process that shifts attention away from the territorialized nation state framework that is commonly associated with the notion of collective memory. Rather than presuppose the congruity of nation, territory and polity, cosmopolitan memories are based on and contribute to nationtranscending idioms, spanning territorial and linguistic borders. The ‘national container’ is slowly being cracked, which does not so much imply the erasure of national and ethnic memories, but their transformation. They continue to exist, but globalization processes also imply that different national memories are subjected to a common patterning. Collective memories begin to develop in accord with common rhythms

26

Internationalization of Memory Cultures

and periodizations, combining with pre-existing elements to form something new. In each case, the new, global narrative has to be reconciled with the old, national narratives, and the result is always distinctive. Global and local (that is, the culturally specific) values are mutually constitutive. How exactly we draw the conceptual and empirical boundaries of the local (for example, national, regional) must be determined through historical inquiry. The formation of cosmopolitan memories does not eliminate the national perspective, but renders nationhood into one of several options of collective identification. Hence a generalized critique of methodological nationalism should not be misconstrued as a contradiction to the abovementioned pledge to consider the culturally specific dimensions of memory practices and related conceptions of the future. Rather, the cosmopolitan turn suggests that particular orientations toward the past need to be re-evaluated against the background of global memoryscapes. This is not to say that memories are no longer articulated within the nation state, but that fixed points reflecting the political-cultural aspirations of European nation states lack the kind of formative and hegemonic power they enjoyed during the nineteenth century project of nation state formation and its consolidation during the first half of the twentieth century. Instead we witness a pluralization of memory, both in empirical terms but also considering their normative validation, which has given way to a fragmentation of memory, no longer beholden exclusively to the idea of the nation state. The key interpretive issue here is the transition from heroic nation states to a form of statehood that establishes internal and external legitimacy through its support for skeptical narratives challenging the kind of foundational quasi-mythical pasts, which previously served as generation transcending fixed points. Empirically those post-heroic manifestations of statehood are predicated on the memory imperative commanding a critical engagement with past injustices, manifested, among other things, in the proliferation of historical commissions and the active role of human rights organizations, to name but two of many memory entrepreneurs, which dominate public debates about usable pasts. This transformation of memory corresponds to the fragmentation of memories and their related privatization, a process which manifests itself in a changing relationship of memory and history. During the last two decades we can observe the emergence of ‘memory history’ (Diner 2003). The difference to conventional historical narratives is instructive. History is a particularized idea of temporal sequences articulating some form of (national) development. Memory, on the other

Daniel Levy

27

hand, represents a co-existence of simultaneous time transcending multitude of pasts. (National) history corresponds to the telos of modernity (as a kind of civic religion). Memory dissolves this sequence, which is a constitutive part of history. ‘Memory history’ implies the simultaneity of phenomena and a multitude of pasts. ‘Memory history’ is a particular form of memory which moves away from a state-supported (and state-supporting) national history. The previous (attempted) monopoly by the state to shape collective pasts and futures has given way to a fragmentation of memories carried by private, individual, scientific, ethnic and religious agents. To be sure, the state continues to exercise an important role in how we remember its history, but it is now sharing the field of meaning production with other players.

The future of memory Memory scholars have long debated the ‘future of the past.’ This volume contributes to a shift in perspective by returning attention to the analytical weight the future has for memory studies. I have argued here that any temporal realignment needs to be situated in its own epistemological context. This is in line with Pierre Nora’s assessment about the political, cultural and social significance the ‘age of commemoration’ has for the articulation of the future. Memory has shattered the unity of historical time, that fine, straightforward linearity which traditionally bound the present and the future to the past. In effect, it was the way in which a society, nation, group or family envisaged its future that traditionally determined what it needed to remember of the past to prepare that future; and this in turn gave meaning to the present, which was merely a link between the two. Broadly speaking, the future could be interpreted in one of three ways, which themselves determined the image people had of the past. It could be envisaged as a form of restoration of the past, a form of progress or a form of revolution. Today, we have discarded these three ways of interpreting the past, which made it possible to organise a ‘history.’ We are utterly uncertain as to what form the future will take. And because of this uncertainty, the present – which, for this very reason no doubt, now has a battery of technical means at its disposal for preserving the past – puts us under an obligation to remember. (Nora 2002, p. 3)

28

Internationalization of Memory Cultures

Moreover, if the past-orientation of memory emerged in the context of nation state formation, recent emphasis on the significance of the future needs to be examined with reference to global processes. The study of memory is related to different epochal manifestations (for example, national, global), which are mediated by distinctive historical experiences (such as generational), uneven historical developments (such as noncontemporeaneity) and concomitant path-dependent expediencies (for example, country-specific pasts and culturally contingent notions of the future). Foregrounding the importance of global processes neither implies a homogeneous response nor a converging model. Rather different approaches to globalization lead to a recognition of the multiplicity of temporal models and, above all, to the breakdown of a rigid time line determined by past, present and future. This realignment of temporalities takes many forms, but it is circumscribed by what Nora has referred to as a shift ‘from a history sought in the continuity of memory to a memory cast in the discontinuity of history’ (Nora 1989, p. 17). There are two camps responding to this temporal realignment: those who view the acceleration of time as a threat, and those who integrate it into their everyday experience. For those who take the latter, reflexive attitude, their choice of identities is no longer necessarily based on existing continuities. Instead, it is based on informed preferences. This outlook has nothing to do with evolutionary theories of modernization maintaining that particularism is a holdover from a pre-modern past. Here, universalism and particularism exist side by side. In other words, the dis-simultaneity of simultaneities has become perceptible. The time of the nation state (history) is no longer co-extensive with the time of the citizen of that state, which results in a breakup of the nation’s linear chronology. People are increasingly constructing their biographies without regard to the prescribed rules of the state. This can appear in the form of family time or work time. Experiences, including local ones, are also oriented toward a global horizon. This, of course, is not a homogeneous time, since globalization is a process of internalization that revolves around the local appropriation of global values rather than a mere superimposition of the latter on the former, as some scholars of homogenization would have it. I have referred to these global transformations in terms of cosmopolitanization, expressed in a memory imperative commanding the necessity to acknowledge the other and a critical engagement challenging more exclusionary and heroic modes of nationalism. Liberal democracies are expected to self-consciously engage with memories of past failures and treat them as a standard for future political action. To

Daniel Levy

29

be sure, there is no shortage of states resisting the memory imperative. But they do so at their own peril and with a cost to their international credibility. Whenever liberal democracies are willing to remember past human rights abuses the nation state is being revalued in the context of an emerging global memory-scape. These developments can neither be reduced to the persistence nor the demise of nationalism, but reveal how the national itself is reimagined through the increasingly prominent prism of mnemonic practices. The main interpretive point here is not the emergence of some kind of unified memory, but rather a set of globally shared memory practices which have transformative effects on how the past-present-future triad is negotiated. The past continues to serve as a resource for how we experience the present and envision the future. But the ways in which the past is being remembered has changed. To name but a few of these global iterations: the past is no longer serving primarily as an integrative mechanism but also recognizes the conflictual nature of memories. Heroic pasts are often replaced by ‘toxic’ pasts, making presumptions of shared futures problematic and rendering temporality into a subject of historical reflection. This shift from an attempted unified/unifying memory culture to one that celebrates the proliferation of memories also complicates the future by providing competing options. To be sure, paying close attention to this pluralization is not a matter of cultural relativism but of analytic pragmatism. The main interpretive point for our understanding of the globalization of memory is a shift from assumptions of homogeneous time and attempted hegemonic memory to the political and cultural validation of noncontemporaneous and fragmented memories.

Notes 1. For a detailed account of this theoretical synthesis, see Larissa Buchholz and Daniel Levy. ‘World society, cosmopolitanism and the transformation of sovereignty.’ 2. While the merits of this approach are not bound by specific historical periods, they seem particularly suited to the twenty-first century, when the popularization of memory, that is, the memory boom itself, is becoming part of a global memory culture, with a high degree of reflexivity.

References Adam, Barbara. 2004. Time. Cambridge: Polity Press. Assmann, Jan. 1997. Moses the Egyptian. The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

30

Internationalization of Memory Cultures

Beck, Ulrich. 2004. ‘Cosmopolitan realism: on the distinction between cosmopolitanism in philosophy and the social sciences.’ Global Networks 4(2), pp. 131–56. Beck, Ulrich. 2006. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich and Natan Sznaider. 2006. ‘Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: a research agenda.’ British Journal of Sociology 57(1), pp. 1–23. Buchholz, Larissa and Daniel Levy. ‘World society, cosmopolitanism and the transformation of sovereignty.’ Manuscript in preparation. Diner, Dan. 2003. Gedächtniszeiten. Über Jüdische und andere Geschichten. München: C.H. Beck. Foucault, Michel. 1975. ‘Film and popular memory: an interview with Michel Foucault.’ Radical Philosophy 11, pp. 24–9. Gross, David. 2000. Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper Colophon. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger (eds). 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Times. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider. 2006a. ‘Sovereignty transformed: a sociology of human rights.’ British Journal of Sociology 57(4), pp. 657–76. Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider. 2006b. The Holocaust and Memory in a Global Age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider. 2010. Human Rights and Memory. Philadelphia, PA: Penn State University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Maier, Charles. 1993. ‘A surfeit of memory? Reflections on history, melancholy and denial.’ History and Memory 5, pp. 137–51. Meyer, John W., John Boli, George M. Thomas and Francisco O. Ramirez. 1997. ‘World society and the nation-state.’ American Journal of Sociology 103(1), pp. 144–81. Nora, Pierre. 1989. ‘Between memory and history: Les Lieux de Mémoire.’ Representations 26, pp. 7–25. Nora, Pierre. 2002. ‘The reasons for the current upsurge in memory.’ Transit 22, pp. 1–6. Olick, Jeffrey K. 2007. The Politics of Regret. On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. London: Routledge. Olick, Jeffrey K. and Daniel Levy. 1997. ‘Collective memory and cultural constraint: Holocaust myth and rationality in German politics.’ American Sociological Review 62, pp. 921–36. Olick, Jeffrey K., Vered Vinitsky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy. 2010. The Collective Memory Reader. New York: Oxford University Press. Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Torpey, John. 2006. Making Whole What Has Been Smashed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

2 Misremembering the Holocaust: Universal Symbol, Nationalist Icon or Moral Kitsch? Ross Poole

In recent years, a number of theorists – I will focus on Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2006), but see also Jeffrey C. Alexander (2002) and Helmut Dubiel (2003)1 – have argued for what I will call the ‘universalization scenario’ about the memory of the Holocaust. This scenario has two aspects. The first is that the Holocaust has come to function not merely as a name for a specific historical crime, but as a universal signifier for the systematic violation of human rights in general. It has been ‘transformed into a generalized symbol of human suffering and moral evil’ (Alexander 2002, p. 6), denoting ‘moral evil itself’ (Dubiel 2003, p. 59). At the same time, and this is the second aspect of the scenario, the memory of the Holocaust has ceased to be the particular possession of the members of those states and groups which were directly involved in the Holocaust, but has become universalized in the sense that it has become the common property of everyone (or at least of everyone in what the authors call ‘Second Modernity’). As Levy and Sznaider occasionally recognize, there are two concepts of universality at work here. The first is the conceptual and normative universality of a concept that applies to a potentially infinite number of instances; the second is geographical, or perhaps political: it refers to the spread of a cultural symbol across state boundaries. The universalization scenario argues for the conjunction of these two concepts. As the Holocaust has become a (conceptually/normatively) universal signifier in a (geographically/politically) universal memory, it directs the bearers of that memory not merely toward an awareness of a specific past horror, but toward the recognition and prevention of present and future ones. In 31

32

Misremembering the Holocaust

this way, the Holocaust has come to play a crucial role in contemporary human rights practice, and is even becoming a ‘potential symbol of global solidarity’ (Levy and Sznaider 2006, p. 54). I will suggest that there are good reasons to be skeptical of this optimistic scenario. I will argue in the first section that what I call the normative status of memory depends on a much stronger connection between specific events and particular subjects than anything allowed for in this scenario. In the second and third sections I will suggest that the Holocaust, as it is currently remembered, has little universal significance. To the extent that the Holocaust has become a free-floating signifier of suffering and evil, this has more to do with moral selfindulgence than human rights. Where it has become associated with particular national projects, it has normative content but this is directed toward specific political agendas, not toward human rights (and especially not toward the rights of those in the way of these agendas). The proviso ‘as it is currently remembered’ is important. It is not my intention to deny the universal significance of the Holocaust; indeed, part of my objection to the ‘universalization’ scenario is that it distorts and trivializes that significance. In the fourth section I will suggest that the concept of a crime against humanity is a better route to understanding the universal significance of the Holocaust than anything provided by the ‘universalization scenario.’

I Memory has force. It is not merely the conduit of information (and misinformation) about the past; it is also – and primarily – the medium through which the past makes demands on us. These demands are not the abstract deliverances of reason or of universal moral law; they speak to us of episodes in our history to which we now have to respond. The voice of memory is our voice, and its demands are addressed to us. We hear its voice and recognize its authority. It is because of the force of memory that it is of concern, not just to academic theorists seeking publication, but to political leaders, publicists and activists, keen to mobilize action in the real world. It is also why disputes over memory are carried on with such intensity and vehemence: the participants recognize that memory counts. Each of us has their own individual memory. The key form of individual memory is what psychologists call ‘episodic memory,’ that is, the memory that we have of specific events in our personal past. It may be that this kind of memory is unique to the human species. In any

Ross Poole 33

event, it is crucial for our understanding of many familiar and basic features of our lives. Indeed it may be, as many have argued, that the human capacity for episodic memory is a necessary condition for our sense of ourselves as existing through time. Whether or not this is so, it involves the sense that the event remembered belongs to our past, that it cannot now be undone, that we must live with its consequences (see Hoerl 1996). Episodic memory is also autobiographical memory: we project ourselves, the current bearers of the memory, into the past. The I that remembers now is the very same I that was present then, at the event remembered. Episodic memory places us in what I will call the ‘moral field’ of the event remembered; it is on our moral agenda. Sometimes the requirement will be minimal. Witnessing usually makes few demands. But not always: in some cases I will have to describe what I witnessed; in other cases I may need to explain why I was a mere witness (‘You were there. Why didn’t you do something?’). The moral significance of memory is much greater where the event was our action. In these cases, that we remember doing something carries with it the recognition of our responsibility for it. Sometimes, this is good news: we can claim the appropriate praise or rewards. But often, it is bad news: what is due is blame, punishment or reparation. Memory may take the form of pride, but it can also take the form of guilt, shame or remorse. If, as psychologists tell us, we are more adept at remembering the bad things from our past than the good, it is more likely that our individual memory will bring us bad news than good. If philosophers, cognitive scientists, psychologists and neuroscientists have largely been concerned with individual memory, sociologists, political scientists and cultural theorists have directed their attention at social or cultural memory. While this, as it seems, extension of the concept of memory has its critics (see Klein 1999), it is hard to see how it could have been avoided. The prevalence of ‘memory talk’ in the human sciences is not just a matter of academic fashion; it is a response to ways in which issues of memory have come to play a central role in a range of important political and social issues. I will assume here that the use of memory as a social or cultural concept is justified (for a more extended defense, see Poole 2008). But on one condition: talk of memory only makes sense if we assume the existence of a subject to which the memory belongs. Memory requires a bearer. If there are social or cultural memories (I use these terms interchangeably) there must be groups, that is, collective subjects, to which the memories belong. This is not just a matter of definition. Without a proviso of this sort, the term ‘memory’ would be little more than a mushy substitute for ‘history’ (or perhaps

34

Misremembering the Holocaust

‘culture’) and social theory would be better off without it (as is strongly argued by Klein). We need the notion of social or cultural memory to explain the way in which the responsibilities of the past are transmitted to the present. And this normative role of memory depends crucially on its link with a bearer. This point is made by Jan Assmann: Cultural memory has its own outer horizon of knowledge beyond which the concept of ‘memory’ no longer applies. By this I mean knowledge that has lost every link to a collective identity, however broadly conceived, and therefore possesses neither horizon nor force. (Assmann 2006, p. 29, emphasis added; see also p. 27) The ‘therefore’ is crucial. We have all sorts of knowledge about the past. Much of it concerns peoples, states or other groups that no longer exist. This knowledge is the province of the scholar, the antiquarian or the dilettante. Such knowledge may well have moral significance, a lesson from which we should learn, but this lesson is not addressed to anyone in particular. Insofar as the knowledge is not about ‘us,’ it falls outside the horizon of memory, and the concept does not apply. The knowledge is not addressed to us, and it does not have the force of memory. Compare this with the situation in which historians uncover records of the organized brutality, expulsions and massacres that were involved in the foundation of our state. As citizens of the state, we find that this new or rediscovered knowledge is addressed to us; it falls within the ‘horizon’ of our collective memory and it places the events described on our moral agenda. If we accept the historians’ account, we may have to respond to the claims of the dispossessed people and recognize a challenge to the legitimacy of our state. More likely, we will reject the historians’ account and fall back on the established narratives of settler heroism and native perfidy. However, even this response involves an implicit recognition of the normative force of memory. The source of the normativity of memory comes from the association of memory with identity. Memory is always written in the first person. It is the past told from the perspective of those whose past it is. It is our past, and insofar as it projects our presence into the past, we find ourselves with the responsibilities that our presence brings with it. As citizens of a post-colonial state, we find ourselves in the moral field of the events of its founding, not just the heroism of the original settlers, but their injustice to the previous occupants. Memory is a form

Ross Poole 35

of subject-centered knowledge (which does not mean that it is ‘subjective’); the events that it records belong to the life of its subject, and for this reason they impose responsibilities on that subject. In this sense, the normativity of memory is always particular: it concerns the responsibilities that specific individuals or collectivities have in virtue of what they have done or failed to do in the past. It is important to recognize that not all our responsibilities derive from memory. We have many responsibilities that do not spring from what we have done or failed to do in the past, but rather from what we are able to do in the present. These are the so-called ‘natural duties’ that are incumbent on all who find themselves in a certain situation, whether or not they have done anything to bring it about. For example, groups as well as individuals have a duty to give aid to those in desperate need, to act to stop murder and so on. In the sphere of international law, we now have – largely because of the Holocaust – the concept of a ‘crime against humanity,’ a concept that was introduced to designate crimes such as that of genocide which are of sufficient magnitude to call for a response across national boundaries. I will discuss this concept at more length toward the end of this chapter. For the moment it is sufficient to emphasize that whatever the source of the responsibilities that arise from crimes against humanity, they do not derive from memory. The fact that crimes against humanity are taking place in Darfur provides a good and sufficient reason for members of the international community to intervene, whatever their past histories. It may be that a particular state has a history of involvement in the region, and some specific responsibilities might derive from this. But the sources of responsibility are distinct.

II Some of my doubts about the universalization scenario should be apparent from the above comments. If the normative force of memory rests on particularity, what sense can we make of universal memory? And since there are other sources of normativity, why do we need to appeal to memory? Let us begin with the requirement that memories must have a bearer. Who then are the bearers of universal memory? In the opening pages of their book, Levy and Sznaider criticize the ‘conventional’ understanding of collective memory as ‘firmly embedded in . . . the “container of the nation-state”’ (2006, p. 2; see also p. 31), and in the following pages, they note some of the many ways in which the unity of the nation

36

Misremembering the Holocaust

state has been diminished in what they call ‘Second Modernity,’ that is, the contemporary world in which globalized patterns of interaction decouple pre-existing political, social and cultural complementarities. However, despite their talk of ‘global solidarity,’ they do not propose new transnational identities to take the place of the nation state; indeed, they explicitly reject any notion of a transnational cosmopolis as an Enlightenment fantasy. When it comes to the point, the subjects of the new ‘universal’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ memories turn out to be those familiar historical protagonists, nation states. Their argument is not about the formation of new subjects of memory, but about transformations in the content of the memories of existing subjects – nations and their members. They argue that in recent years national memories are subject to what they call ‘cosmopolitanization,’ by which they mean a process by which national cultures are increasing permeated by global influences: [N]ational memories are transformed in the age of globalization rather than erased. They continue to exist, of course, but globalization processes also imply that different national memories are subjected to a common patterning. (Levy and Sznaider 2006, p. 3) The key element in this ‘common patterning’ is, they argue, the Holocaust: indeed they claim that ‘the Jewish genocide has become the central theme in the mnemonic structure of Second Modernity’ (Levy and Sznaider 2006, p. 45). Whether or not this strong claim is plausible, they certainly provide many examples of the way in which references to the Holocaust have proliferated in public discourse and popular culture. Some of the most important of these come from the rhetoric that political leaders have used to justify or argue for intervention to prevent genocidal horrors in such countries as Bosnia and Rwanda. But they also point to the ways in which the Holocaust has come to figure in films, television and widely read novels. At least for the citizens of the Western world (Levy and Sznaider only make desultory attempts to extend their cosmopolitanization thesis much further), the Holocaust is a known and taken for granted reference point. It has become a free-floating signifier of the extremities of horror, human suffering and evil. But what follows from this? Does it mean that these citizens have learned to ‘remember’ the Holocaust? Not necessarily, at least not in the sense that is politically relevant. As I have argued, the normative force of memory arises with episodic or autobiographical memory; that is, a form of memory that implies that its bearer – individual or collective – was

Ross Poole 37

present at the event remembered, and for that reason is within its moral field of force. The memory of a nation is precisely of this kind; it envisages a collective entity exists through time, and because of this it transmits responsibilities from the nation’s past to its present. However, the proliferation of representations of the Holocaust does not create episodic memories. It may be that for the individuals who experience these representations, they provide information (and misinformation) about the Holocaust. Insofar as this is a form of memory, it is what psychologists call semantic memory, that is, they remember that certain events occurred, but without any implication that they were involved in or even present at these events. For this reason, semantic memory does not as such have normative force. In this sense, we may remember that six million Jews were slaughtered in the Holocaust in exactly the same way that we remember that the Athenian army slaughtered the inhabitants of Melos in 415 BCE. We may, perhaps we should, draw moral lessons from these items of historical knowledge. But they are not events in which we, either individually or collectively, participated. This is not, of course, the case for Germany, Israel, Poland, Hungary and those other nations directly involved in the Holocaust; in these cases, the Holocaust is their past, and they have the special responsibilities that go with this.2 It may be argued that Levy and Sznaider’s substantive claims do not depend on the specific normativity of memory, and the cultural currency of the Holocaust as a free-floating signifier of evil is all that they need. It is certainly true that almost all of us living in Second Modernity have encountered references to and symbols of the Holocaust, and know something about it. Does this knowledge lead or even encourage us to oppose the extreme violation of human rights wherever it occurs? I doubt it. There is no doubt that our encounter with the various images of the Holocaust – the camps, the assembly points, the gas chambers, the railway trucks, the carefully labeled suitcases, the meticulous records – is associated with a genuine sense of horror. But it is not clear how much weight we can put on this response. The very specificity of the images stands in the way of generalizing this experience to all the numberless horrors of the contemporary world. To the extent that we apply the model to other cases, it is because of their superficial similarities. The most effective political use of the Holocaust in recent years has been the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but in this case the events were taking place in Europe, the participants looked distressingly like us, there were camps, death squads and so on. What was at work is resemblance in particularity, not the application of a universal standard. All too often the kinds of atrocity that occur in the contemporary world

38

Misremembering the Holocaust

involve mass killing in the context of chaotic civil wars, slow deaths through avoidable starvation, malnutrition and so on. They lack almost all the features we associate with the Holocaust: the political decision, consciously made, to eliminate a specific group of people from the face of the earth, the deliberative and planned nature of the killing, the enormous number of deaths in a concentrated time period, the systematic dehumanization of the victims, the camps themselves and so on. In my own, admittedly limited, experience the appeal to the Holocaust parallel has been politically counterproductive. For those for whom the Holocaust has an almost sacred aura (Alexander 2002, p. 27 describes it as ‘sacred-evil’; see also Levy and Sznaider 2006, pp. 52–3), the comparison is sacrilegious. For Holocaust survivors and their families and descendants, it threatens the integrity of their memories. All too often, the comparison leads to an unrewarding and trivializing competition in degree of moral horror. And it should not need saying that even where appeal to the Holocaust is politically effective, it provided a distorting prism through which to view the political history involved.3 Of course, all of us when we see films, read books and watch television documentaries on the Holocaust find it easy to assent to the thought that this must never happen again. But this assent is so easily given because, when it comes to the point, it makes no demands on us actually to do anything. To the extent that the Holocaust stands for something very specific there is little chance of it being repeated. If it stands for something very general, we find instances all around us. But in this case, our response is liable to be apathy: we know all too well that there is little that we can do – and therefore little that we need to do – to change the situation. What we are left with, let us face it, is a sense of titillation that we have come into imaginative contact with the extremities of human evil and suffering. Though we feel horror at the images, we can comfort ourselves with the secret satisfaction deriving from our own sense of moral goodness in recognizing that horror. The cultural circulation of Holocaust horrors can all too easily become moral kitsch.4 To criticize the depictions of the Holocaust in film, television and the popular media need not arise from an elitist dismissal of popular culture (as argued by Levy and Sznaider 2006, pp. 134–43); it is because too often these depictions replace a difficult and demanding encounter with a too easy sense of moral enrichment at the sight of goodness in its struggle with evil. Such depictions do not do justice to the horror of a situation whose evil consists precisely in its near successful attempt to make moral goodness impossible. When Levy and Sznaider speak

Ross Poole 39

in celebratory tones of the way in which ‘television, movies, literature and newspapers have replaced historical experts as a source of information about the Holocaust’ (Levy and Sznaider 2006, pp. 133–4; see also p. 188), alarm bells should begin to ring. It is the task of history to keep contemporary representations in some kind of meaningful contact with the past. As Paul Ricoeur (2004, p. 21) remarked: ‘To memory is tied an ambition, a claim – that of being faithful to the past.’ This means that the deliverances of memory must always be subject to correction by the practice of history. If we rely on the media to provide us with our memory of the Holocaust, we will find ourselves increasingly lodged in a self-referential present: our experience will not be of the past but of the now.5 If, as Levy and Sznaider maintain, our representations of the Holocaust are to guide contemporary human rights practice, it is all the more important that they are not merely expressions of contemporary taste and desire. We must attempt the task of being faithful to the past. To aim at anything less is to invalidate what must on any account be the fundamental point of Holocaust memory: to provide some form of recognition to those millions who perished. The role of Holocaust memory is not merely to serve present purposes, however noble. Commemoration is the minimal response to the claims of the past on the present. If Holocaust memory is a duty, it is not because it is necessary for world peace, social solidarity or whatever, it is because of our responsibility to keep those who died from sinking into the historical anonymity to which the Third Reich wished to assign them. It is for this reason above all that the practice of memory cannot give up on the ambition of being ‘faithful to the past.’

III Levy and Sznaider’s analysis is intended to apply generally to the contemporary Western world (‘Second Modernity’). However, much of their detailed discussion is concerned with three countries, Germany, Israel and the USA. These countries are atypical in many respects, one of which is crucial: each country understands the Holocaust to be an event in its own history. That is to say that the way in which the Holocaust figures in the national memory of each of these countries is episodic (or autobiographical). In contrast to the free-floating ‘memories’ we have been considering in the previous section, these memories place their bearer – the nation – at the scene of the Holocaust. This means that each nation recognizes that the Holocaust, the specific historical event, is on its moral agenda.

40

Misremembering the Holocaust

This may seem obvious for Germany, which makes a point of Holocaust remembrance. But a moment’s thought shows that it need not have been so obvious. After all, for some 40 years, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) conceived of itself as discontinuous with the Third Reich, and not obliged to assume responsibility for its crimes. Even the Federal Republic (West Germany) was institutionally distinct from the Third Reich, and in different circumstances might also have denied involvement in the actions of the predecessor regime. But the Federal Republic, now Germany, came to accept responsibility, initially through the payment of reparations, but eventually and more significantly through political statements, ritual actions of apology (Willy Brandt’s kneeling at the Warsaw Ghetto Monument in 1970 was an iconic moment), and a practice of commemoration. These should be understood as having a performative dimension. Each act of taking responsibility not only presupposes an existing identity; it also contributes to it. Of course there were continuities (and also discontinuities) between the Germany of the post-war years and the Germany of the Third Reich. By assuming responsibility, Germany transformed those continuities into an identity. They were acts of (self-) identification. Something similar also happened in the case of Israel. Strictly speaking, it did not exist at the time of the Holocaust. Those who died were not Israeli citizens. Many would not have wanted to be (some were communists eagerly awaiting the arrival of Soviet troops). Nevertheless, Israel claimed the right to speak in the name of the victims of the Holocaust and to commemorate them as its own. These claims – acts of identification – were recognized by the international community, with West Germany leading the way by designating the State of Israel as the appropriate recipient of Holocaust reparations. Here again, we should recognize that there is an element of perfomativity: identity over time is constituted by various acts of identification – of taking responsibility for the past, mourning the loss and so on. But it is also important that the acts be recognized by other parties involved, in this case by other states. The case of the USA is different again. The USA was not a direct participant in the Holocaust, and it occupies a relatively minor place in its national history. Despite this, the Holocaust seems to play a central role in the US collective memory. Considerable energies have been devoted to Holocaust commemoration, including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, located strategically on the Washington Mall; it has been a central concern of the US cultural industry, and it is a largely uncontested presence in political debate and rhetoric. Its cultural and political influence is at least commensurate with that of African-American

Ross Poole 41

slavery, and much greater than that of Native Americans, two issues that one might have thought to be more central to American national memory. The presence of a large Jewish community within the USA and the political influence of various pro-Israel organizations are clearly part of the story. Of more immediate relevance is the way in which the USA has been written in the Holocaust narrative. As Levy and Sznaider note, its primary role is that of liberator. Though they arrived late on the scene, American troops freed the prisoners from the camps, provided food and medical aid and worked toward the punishment of the perpetrators. (The fact that most of the camps liberated by American troops were for political prisoners, and that many more Jews were liberated by Soviet troops than by the USA is conveniently forgotten.) But, as Levy and Sznaider also note, there is an important secondary role allotted to the USA: that of failing to act early enough to prevent or mitigate the horrors. The USA turned away Jewish refugees; it failed to publicize what it knew about the slaughter; and its air force did not bomb the railway lines and camps. In these ways, both in its achievements and its failures, the USA finds itself involved in the Holocaust story. These events are now on its national agenda, as are the responsibilities they incur. In Levy and Sznaider’s account, the national memories of these countries show a movement toward universality, that is, toward conceiving the Holocaust as an instance of something more universal. My guess is that Germany provides the most plausible case for this scenario. Partly because it bears specific responsibility, not just for the Holocaust, but also for World War II as a whole, there is perhaps a readiness to move from the Holocaust to other evils. Certainly, there is a greater degree of reflectiveness in commemorative practice in Germany than in most other countries (see Young 1993). But there is little evidence of anything like this in Israel. It is in terms of its particularity that the Holocaust plays its role in Israel’s national self-understanding and it is because of its uniqueness that Israel has a special claim on the world. But even more significant is the fact that it is because of the Holocaust, and the history of anti-Semitism that it expresses, that Israel claims the need for a Jewish state, that is, a state in which Jews have a special legal and political status. This means that there are significant structural limitations to the movement toward universality.6 But there are others. Holocaust memory involves much more than the recognition of and mourning for the six million dead. It ties together a number of distinct narratives about the event. And, since it is part of Israel’s self-understanding that it provides the necessary political response to the Holocaust, it is not surprising that a number of these

42

Misremembering the Holocaust

narratives connect the Holocaust to the policies of the State of Israel, policies that, in the eyes of the state, are necessary to fulfill its historic mission. If we are to understand the role of the Holocaust in Israel’s national memory, we must begin to unpack some of those narratives. One is that the anti-Semitism that found such murderous expression in the policies of the Nazis was a manifestation of an age-old, indeed universal, hatred of Jewish people. Although anti-Semitism might diminish in the right circumstances, it was always liable to recur, and it would always remain a threat to the Jewish people. Another narrative relates the vulnerability of the European Jews. Though they were the innocent victims of this hatred, they were certainly naïve in not recognizing and taking appropriate steps to lessen their vulnerability. Though there were many acts of heroism, too many Jews were slaughtered without organized resistance. And when it came to the point, the Jews were alone. Though it was the victory of the Allies that saved those Jews who had not yet been imprisoned and killed, the Allied powers had long been aware of the threat to the Jews, but had done little about it. They had been reluctant to accept refugees; they had not publicized the existence of the death camps even when they became aware of them; and they had not taken the opportunity to bomb the camps or the railroads even though they had the capability to do so. (We have already come across this in discussing the role allotted to the USA.) What this showed was that in the last resort, Jews can only rely on each other. A land that they could call their own, a political identity and a military capability were essential if Jews were to have a refuge from anti-Semitism and the ability to protect it. Because of the horrors they had faced, and the horrors that resurgent anti-Semitism would bring, the Jewish people had both the experience and the moral position to work out what was necessary to be done for their own protection and the right to act on that knowledge. The State of Israel embodies that knowledge and that right. Of course this account is overly simple. National memories are always subject to contestation, and that of Israel is no exception. For every memory, even the memory of the Holocaust, there are counter memories trying to make themselves felt. And though there has been, at least since the late fifties, a good deal of agreement about the place of the Holocaust in Israel’s public culture, it is not without its critics (see, for example, Burg 2008; Zertal 2005). But it would be difficult not to discern its main elements in the commemorative practices, the political rhetoric and the self-understanding of Israeli leaders. One also finds this structure at work in the intensity with which certain historical disputes are carried out. Did the British and Americans have the knowledge and the

Ross Poole 43

ability to stop the slaughter by bombing Auschwitz? Was the Holocaust a fulfillment of Hitler’s long held plan or a more ad hoc response to the circumstances of 1940–41? These are not merely matters of scholarly dispute but bear on the self-understanding and political agenda of the State of Israel. For Levy and Sznaider, the USA is the land of universality, and this finds expression in the way in which it interprets the Holocaust as a universal catastrophe rather than a historically specific one (Levy and Sznaider 2006, pp. 12–13, 109–10). The best evidence of this that I can find is a certain ambiguity in Holocaust commemorations. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example, not only provides an astonishingly rich resource for the historical understanding of the Holocaust, it also makes a genuine effort to link the Holocaust to other global catastrophes. And yet the main message of the exhibition itself – and there are very few museums that so rigorously control the order and direction in which they are experienced – is that the visitors should, as Americans, recognize an involvement in the Holocaust as part of their history and heritage. The final experience for the visitor is the settlement of the survivors in Israel, a settlement that if not redemption is at least a solution to the terrible hatreds that have threatened Jews in their years of exile and ultimately found expression in the Holocaust. The Holocaust functions here not as a universal symbol of horror but as the final tragic episode in the history of the Jewish people prior to the foundation of their own state. Holocaust memory presents the USA and Israel as partners in the final resolution of a tragic history.

IV Let us return to the summer of 1945. The Holocaust was almost over, though it had yet to receive its name. It is now the conventional wisdom that the destruction of European Jews did not receive the attention it deserved at the end of the war and the immediately subsequent years. There is some truth in this, though it should be borne in mind that some 40 million perished in the European theater of war. Be that as it may, the slaughter of the Jewish population of Europe received some attention at the London Conference as it attempted to set up the legal framework (the ‘London Charter’) through which those most responsible for the atrocities of the Third Reich might be tried. It was as an implicit acknowledgment that the notion of a War Crime was not adequate to grasp the nature of the enterprise, that it introduced the category of ‘Crimes against Humanity.’ This term had been used at least once before,

44

Misremembering the Holocaust

significantly for an act of state-sponsored genocide: Allied leaders had accused the Ottoman Empire of crimes ‘against humanity and civilization’ for the Armenian slaughter in 1915. In the event, this concept played a relatively minor role in the Nuremberg Trials, where the judges elected to rely on the concept of a War Crime for which there was more legal precedent. This is not to say that it played no role: it was explicitly used in their judgment. Perhaps more important was the precedent this established. In part because of this, together with the publicity given to Nazi atrocities in the European war, the term found its way into public discourse and eventually into the courts. It is now a key concept in international law. For Hannah Arendt, the concept of a crime against humanity was an attempt to come to terms with what she considered to be a crime without precedent, but which in the conditions of the modern world might too easily become a precedent for other atrocities. She thought, I believe rightly, that this concept captured something very important about the Holocaust. It was one of her worries about the Eichmann trial that the court chose to focus on the notion of a crime against the Jewish people, rather than – as she put it – a crime against humanity committed on the ‘body of the Jewish people’: Had the court in Jerusalem understood that there were distinctions between discrimination, expulsion and genocide, it would immediately have become clear that the supreme crime it was confronted with, the physical extermination of the Jewish people, was crime against humanity, perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people . . . . (Arendt 1994b, p. 269)7 We can understand the point of this notion if we consider more ‘normal’ crimes, such as theft, violence, rape, murder and so on. In each of these cases there is a victim: someone who is the target of the crime and who suffers because of it. In a law-governed society, however, the community takes upon itself the responsibility to deal with these acts. It establishes a body of law that defines certain acts as crimes, and provides the resources necessary to discover those responsible and bring them to justice. Arendt argues strongly that when the court acts so as to punish the wrongdoer, it does so on behalf of the community, not the victim (Arendt 1994b, pp. 260–1, 272). No doubt, Arendt goes too far here. As her worried, and somewhat inconsistent, reflections on the right of an Israeli court to try Adolf Eichmann show it is hard to deny that there is some special right of the victim that is taken over and represented by the

Ross Poole 45

court (more or less conceded by Arendt 1994b, pp. 286–7). But her main point is that in a civilized society, certain acts must be treated as crimes against the community at large, not simply against the specific victim. In the case of the Holocaust, we have left ‘normality’ far behind. The problem is not just that the crimes were committed by the state, that is, by the body that should be in the business of preventing and punishing crimes. It is also because the crime was of such enormity, that it was not just a crime against the local community, but against humanity as such: [J]ust as a murderer is prosecuted because he has violated the law of the community, and not because he has deprived the Smith family of its husband, father, and breadwinner, so these modern, stateemployed mass murderers must be prosecuted because they violated the order of mankind, and not because they killed millions of people . . . . The point . . . is that an altogether different order is broken and an altogether different community is violated. (Arendt 1994b, p. 272) Arendt clearly believed, along with her friend Karl Jaspers, that an international court would have been more appropriate than an Israeli court to try such a crime. But unlike Jaspers, she did not deny the rights of local courts to proceed in these matters, so long as it recognized that they were not representing specific group of victims, but humanity at large. Arendt sometimes refers to crimes against humanity as ‘crimes against the human status.’ Characteristically, Arendt is not so much concerned with the number of victims, but the nature of the crime. For her, the essential feature of humanity, its human ‘status,’ was what she sometimes called ‘plurality’ – that is, the diversity, the difference between people, not just as individuals, but also as groups. It is this both natural and normative ‘order of mankind’ that was threatened by genocide – the original, and perhaps the primary reference of ‘crime against humanity.’ This kind of crime, directed as it is against an essential feature of human life, is of such extremity that it is of concern, not just to the local authorities (who may anyway be implicated in them), but to everyone. It justifies legal or political intervention across state borders, either to prevent such crimes, or, as in case of Eichmann, to punish the perpetrator. What is required, and was absent in the Eichmann case, is the existence of appropriate institutions and procedures that are capable of taking action and making judgment on behalf of the human community. Without these, crimes against humanity will not be prevented,

46

Misremembering the Holocaust

and will likely remain unpunished when they occur. And, Arendt was convinced, there was every reason to suppose that they would occur. In Arendt’s account, the concept of a crime against humanity (albeit one performed on the body of the Jewish people) provides the conceptual universality in terms of which we can understand not only the Holocaust, but also other crimes of a similar order of magnitude. In encountering new atrocities, whether in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Rwanda or Sudan, or in reconsidering old ones, such as European colonization, slavery, the expropriation and slaughter of indigenous peoples all over the world and so on, we need not engage in counterproductive comparisons (how many died? with what intentions? what about the camps? and so on) with the Holocaust. Of course we need examples, if for no other reason than to engage our compassion and fire our anger, but this does not mean that the Holocaust will always be the most appropriate one. Indeed, in the conditions of the contemporary world, we may well suppose that more typical crimes against humanity will involve enforced starvation, massacres occurring in the conditions of the civil war, than the relatively well-organized dehumanization and murder that was the Holocaust. But, as Arendt also recognized, conceptual universality is not enough. The moral recognition of a distant horror, whether it is the Holocaust or mass murder, rape and starvation in Sudan, can easily lead to apathy or, perhaps worse, moral self-indulgence (‘This is awful; we cannot do anything about it; but at least we feel bad about it’). What are required are institutions through which humans can work together to put an end to these atrocities. To some extent, these institutions are legal ones: local or international courts with the resources and authority needed to identify crimes against humanity and take action against those responsible for them. However, courts can only respond after the event, and when there is the political will to do so. Ultimately, there need to be political structures and agencies put in place, both to prevent – by force when necessary – mass violations of fundamental human rights, and to provide the framework within which the courts may operate. In other words, the conceptual and normative universality of the concept of a crime against humanity must be supplemented by the political and legal universality necessary to prevent and punish such crimes. In an important early essay written in the last days of the war in Europe, Arendt (1994a, p. 131) wrote: ‘For many years now we have met Germans who declare that they are ashamed of being Germans. I have often felt tempted to answer that I am ashamed of being human.’ This

Ross Poole 47

‘elemental shame,’ as Arendt referred to it, was ‘what finally is left of our sense of international solidarity.’ It involved the recognition that the Holocaust was a crime that was not simply of concern to perpetrators, victims or local authorities; it was of concern to all humans. It contains an insight into ‘the terror of the idea of humanity,’ the recognition in ‘fear and trembling . . . of what man is capable.’ But she insisted that this insight is without force if it remains a purely individual response; it must be given an appropriate political expression. Elemental shame, the shame of being human, invokes a sense of international solidarity. But this sense remains impotent, perhaps even an indulgence, unless it is provided with a political voice and political agency. For Arendt in 1945, the need for a political program to provide this voice and this agency is the ‘precondition of any modern political thinking’ (Arendt 1994a, p. 132). As far as I know, Arendt never provided much detail about what such a framework might look like or how it might be brought into existence. But let us suppose that as a response to the horrors of the Holocaust and the fear that it foreshadowed further horrors, men and women had worked together to create the kind of transnational political structure through which some notion of international or global solidarity could be expressed and developed. Among other things (though perhaps not too many other things) this structure would have the capacity to move against crimes against humanity, wherever they occurred and to support the enforcement of international law and punishment of those who transgressed. What this organization would provide is the institutional realization of the moral universality expressed initially in Arendt’s notion of ‘elemental shame’ and later, more legalistically, in the notion of a ‘crime against humanity.’ If such an organization had been brought into existence, one might imagine that the Holocaust would be counted as its founding moment, and it would be recognized as such in the collective memory of the organization. But the Holocaust could only be a founding moment; the organization must have learned to move beyond the Holocaust if it were to deal effectively with the horrors that the world is able to produce. However, this organization would provide a way, and perhaps the only way, in which the Holocaust might become an effective universal memory. This is, of course, a fantasy. We are as far, probably further, away than the world was in 1945 from heading in this direction. But it is a good deal less a fantasy than Levy and Sznaider’s claim that, without major political change, the Holocaust will come to function as a ‘symbol of global solidarity.’ In the present dismal circumstances, those

48

Misremembering the Holocaust

concerned with human rights would be better off forgetting about the Holocaust and focusing their attention on building the political and legal institutions necessary to respond to crimes against humanity.

Notes 1. Levy and Sznaider’s book was originally published in German in 2001. Both Alexander and Dubiel acknowledge its influence on their work. For a more recent account on the internationalization of memory, see Levy’s chapter in this volume. 2. It may be that the Holocaust represents a moral catastrophe of such worldhistoric magnitude that everyone should recognize their involvement in it. But this involves, first, an enormous transformation of collective selfunderstanding and, second, the formation of political institutions that embody this self-understanding. These conditions go well beyond the common recognition that the Holocaust was something truly awful. I say something about this possibility in the final pages of this chapter. 3. According to Dubiel (2003, p. 65), ‘the casting of the Arabs in the role of the new Nazis was the decisive step in the divorcing of the concept of the Holocaust from the historical reality with which it was born.’ For Dubiel, this is a good thing because it is part of the transformation of movement of the Holocaust into a universal signifier of ultimate evil. Whether or not this is remotely plausible (see the third section for arguments why it is not), it is worth pondering its disastrous impact on political understanding of the situation of Israel in the Middle East. 4. I follow Milan Kundera (1999, p. 251, emphasis added), though with a reversal of affect: ‘Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.’ 5. Levy and Sznaider rightly criticize Pierre Nora (1989) for his nostalgia for a pre-modern world of ‘true memory.’ But they show no sensitivity to Nora’s argument that in the modern world, sites of memory (‘lieux de mémoire’) have become increasingly self-referential, no longer depictions of the past but expressions of the concerns of the present. Nora is ready to apply this insight to his own memory project: we moderns have lost contact with the past, and the role of sites of memory is to provide an illusory substitute for that loss. 6. Levy and Sznaider suggest that the recent debates about Israel’s early history, and especially the exposure of some of the more unseemly aspects of the struggles in 1948 and 1949, ‘are part and parcel of a new conception of the national citizen, which is to take the place of the old, ethnically determined idea of what it means to be Israeli’ (Levy and Sznaider 2006, p. 124). This will no doubt come as a surprise to the Arab citizens of Israel, and also to their families waiting for an opportunity to immigrate. It will also come as a surprise to the many Jewish citizens of Israel worrying about the growth of the Palestinian population. It is of course political nonsense. 7. Part of Arendt’s concern here was that the agenda of the prosecution (and of the government) to present the Holocaust as an episode in the history of antiSemitism led to a failure to recognize the unprecedented nature of the crime.

Ross Poole 49 She also notes Karl Jaspers’s view that the ‘crime against the Jews was also a crime against mankind.’

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2002. ‘On the social construction of moral universals: the ‘Holocaust’ from war crime to trauma drama.’ European Journal of Social Theory 5(1), pp. 5–85. Arendt, Hannah. 1994a. ‘Organized guilt and collective responsibility.’ First published in 1945. Republished in Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 121–32. Arendt, Hannah.1994b [1963]. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books. Assmann, Jan. 2006 [2000]. Religion and Cultural Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Burg, Avraham. 2008. The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dubiel, Helmut. 2003. ‘The remembrance of the holocaust as a catalyst for a transnational ethic.’ New German Critique 90 (Autumn), pp. 59–70. Hoerl, Christoph. 1999. ‘Memory, amnesia and the past.’ Mind and Language 14(2), pp. 227–51. Klein, Kerwin Lee. 2000. ‘On the emergence of memory in historical discourse.’ Representations 69 (Winter), pp. 127–50. Kundera, Milan. 1999 [1984]. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. New York: HarperPerennial. Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider. 2006 [2001]. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Nora, Pierre. 1989. ‘Between memory and history: Les Lieux de Mémoire.’ Representations 26, pp. 1–21. Poole, Ross. 2008. ‘History, memory, and the claims of the past.’ Memory Studies 1(2), pp. 149–66. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Young, James E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Zertal, Idith. 2005. Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3 Memory and History from Past to Future: A Dialogue with Dori Laub on Trauma and Testimony Dori Laub and Federico Finchelstein

World-renowned psychoanalyst-psychiatrist Dori Laub, in conversation with historian Federico Finchelstein, discuss the central scholarly debates on Holocaust memory, trauma and testimony that were foundational not only to the field of Holocaust studies and the relatively new field of memory studies, but also impacted much of the historical, juridical, political and philosophical scholarship, practice and policy produced and enacted since that pivotal event changed the world forever.1 In a conversation held and recorded specifically for this volume, Laub and Finchelstein examine the changing role and position of survivors’ testimony in public debates as a link between past and future, while moving beyond the assumed tension between their respective disciplines: psychoanalysis and history. Testimony highlights many of the key questions about the role and importance of the future in memory studies, such as the movement between personal trauma and healing, collective responsibility and juridical justice, and atrocious pasts and more peaceful futures. The growing legitimacy of victims’ testimonies in the public sphere that Laub and Finchelstein trace is an avenue for future research which is at the core of the field of memory studies. Federico Finchelstein: One thing that we talked about in the conference that I wanted to ask you about again is this relationship between history and memory, or sometimes the lack of a relationship between the two. There is this traditional dichotomy, at least as presented in the work of historians like Pierre Nora or Raul Hilberg, between history and memory: history being presented as inhabited by the subject (the historian) who makes the interpretation, and memory being the historian’s object of study. 50

Dori Laub and Federico Finchelstein

51

This is basically a very traditional idea, and it’s highly conceptual, perhaps in the wrong sense; that is to say that it is a concept that really doesn’t relate to the actual immediacy of the phenomena, the contextual relationship between history and memory. Thus, for historians like Dominick LaCapra (1998), the two (history and memory) are mutually dialogical and as LaCapra argues it is very difficult but necessary for historians to fully grasp their subject position; that is, to recognize and elaborate on their own implication in the object of study and how their own voices are part of the memory process. So, the first idea is that history and memory are really detached. Methodologically this might work for many historians in that the historian seems to be liberated from the pressures of both the context of the past and the context of the present. But this dichotomizing approach is especially compromised when historians begin to think about the particular pieces of memory and history involved in the interviewing of testimonials from the Holocaust. The historian participates in this process in a variety of complex ways. It is in this particular sense that history and memory are combined as ongoing processes of interpretation and remembering. Understanding these processes unmakes the dichotomy between history and memory, but at the same time maintains the central distinctions between history and memory. A more nuanced picture emerges from this unmaking. It is here that an opportunity arises for historians to engage with your work on the complexity of the testimonial moment in memory and in history. I want to ask you how you see or where you see this connection with history in your own work? And by history I mean, specifically the work of historians. Dori Laub: First, I think that when it comes to trauma, in particular, this is an artificial dichotomy. Let me speak first about memory. I speak from the perspective of a psychoanalyst for whom memory is conflicted – a process wrought with conflict. It gradually and sometimes exponentially emerges, but there is no immediate conscious memory. It’s one that’s in the making. From this perspective of an evolving memory, the presence of history is crucial. If you do not know something about historical reality, you don’t know how to listen, you don’t know how to hear and you don’t know what to ask. I remember an interviewer once asked a survivor, ‘were there mattresses on the bunks?’ The survivor was generous and continued to talk, but could well have said, ‘if you don’t know that such things didn’t exist, I have nothing to say to you.’ So a certain level of [historical] knowledge is very crucial. When survivors remember, they

52

Memory and History from Past to Future

talk from within their own frame, and expect you to know certain facts. Not only the shades of the feelings and of the experience, but also certain facts. There is an example: a woman talks about trying to smuggle a baby through a selection before a transport, and the baby is in a bag and starts crying. The German asks for the baby to be handed over and she does. After that, she completely forgets that she had a baby. She arrives in a cattle car in another town, another ghetto, and her physician asks, ‘what happened to your baby?’ and she says, ‘what baby?’ It helps to know that in the ghetto from which she was sent, pregnancies were forbidden and having children was forbidden. Once you know that you can understand the context of her having a forbidden baby, protecting it, trying to smuggle it through the selection and the baby being taken away from her. So, it’s this very knowledge of the historical fact, which takes such effort to put together and to construct, that allows the person who listens (or the psychoanalyst) to expand and to ask for the nature of the experience. Without historical work, testimony couldn’t take place. This is one side of the equation. On the other hand, there is also the reverse. I think that the testimonial process contributes aspects to historical work, to which historians who do not include testimonies do not have access. For example, there are events for which no record exists; the revolt in Auschwitz on 7 October 1944 was not documented, to my knowledge, by Germans, and it was testimonies of survivors that really did create this event, or the memory of this event. I remember a video program I saw on Dachau,2 in which a group of Israeli filmmakers accidentally meet a man who would pose for photographs in front of the camp. They joke with him, and they eventually accompany him home, and it turns out that he’s a Jew married to a German, and he starts reciting Jewish prayers. He begins to talk about things in Dachau which are not common knowledge: the execution wall, the tree on which people were hanged, also gas chambers, which are not historical fact. When the filmmakers went to Yad Vashem and examined footage of the time, they found corroboration of many of the things this man had been talking about. The tree, the execution wall; what remained unresolved, I think, was the episodic use of the gas chambers. Finchelstein: Yes, the common knowledge is that they were not used. Laub: Yes, but there is still something to his testimony. Now I briefly want to touch on events that for conflicting reasons do not make it

Dori Laub and Federico Finchelstein

53

into history and not even into memory. I learned this directly from clinical experience with a patient; this was in 1989 and the patient was in analysis. He was the son of an Auschwitz survivor and a Mischling – a mother whose father was a Jew and whose mother, a gentile, was Prussian nobility. They spent the war years in Berlin, and because of this mixed heritage they had some degree of protection. According to Raul Hilberg (1961), 95 per cent of German Jews who survived, that is, 28,000, were intermarried. The patient tells me that there is a story in the family that the Gestapo came and arrested the grandfather. The grandmother goes to the Gestapo, bangs her fist on the table and says, ‘I’m a better German than you are. Let my husband go.’ And the Gestapo officer gets very nervous, clicks his ball pen (now in 1943 there were no ball pens – so I already was somewhat doubtful), and says, ‘take him, take him, go away.’ At that time I said to the patient, ‘look, why don’t you read Raul Hilberg. If there is any mention of such a fact then we will consider it a historical event; if not, it’s a family myth.’ For a number of years, it was very fruitful to work with the myth of a gentile mother who protects, guards and saves, until in 1992 at a family Bar Mitzvah, a distant cousin who is a historian said to me, ‘well, did you read the last issue of the Atlantic Monthly?’ There was an article there about German communal resistance and three events are mentioned, one of which is the demonstration of women – the gentile wives and mothers of 2000 men arrested by the Gestapo in February 1943. These women demonstrated day after day, demanding to get their husbands back, and in a week or ten days, the Gestapo began to release them, until every single one of the 2000 was released, including 23 out of 25 who had already been sent to Auschwitz. An American doctoral student, Nathan Stoltzfus (1992), was the author of the article. He had interviewed many of the women who had demonstrated and his extensive historical research culminated in the publication of his book Resistance of the Heart in 1996. But until his work, very little attention was paid to the Rosenstrasse demonstrations, although they had been mentioned in Goebbels’s diaries. It is still debated today by German historians. A film on the effectiveness of the Rosenstrasse demonstrations was produced by Margarethe Von Trotta in 2003. But how do you understand that the successful demonstration of hundreds, maybe thousands of women in Berlin is completely unnoticed and not remembered. We know of

54

Memory and History from Past to Future

various writings published over the years that only mentioned this huge event in one or two paragraphs. When I read this article by Nathan Stoltzfus, I made a copy, gave it to my patient and apologized, ‘It is not a family legend; it’s true. There is the possibility that your grandmother really got your grandfather out from the Gestapo,’ and we started working differently. But to this day there is a Historikerstreit in Germany about the Rosenstrasse, with historian Wolf Gruner (2005), supported by Wolfgang Benz, claiming that this whole arrest was not intended to send people to Auschwitz, that they were only arrested in order to select replacements for the other Jews who were sent to Auschwitz in the Fabrikaktion of 1943 that intended to make the whole of Berlin judenrein as a gift for the Fuhrer for his 54th birthday on 20 April 1943. But this doesn’t make much sense, as there were children among those arrested and, as mentioned before, a certain number of those arrested were actually sent to and subsequently returned from Auschwitz. Evidently, it is so hard to live with that memory, though I don’t want to go into psychological interpretation of why it’s so hard. To this day, it’s a contested memory. So here is testimony, and maybe it’s a quick take on testimony, that is an important contribution to historical knowledge. Finchelstein: Before, I was talking about the moment of differentiation between history and memory, and basically we agreed that emphasizing the question of experience would imply a critique of uncontextual dichotomies. Now, what is history and what is memory is an entirely different question. One way to approach the issue could be to think about memory as the act of remembering, whereas history represents an interpretation of that act of remembering, as well as the interpretation of a broad spectrum of sources from ‘raw’ factual data to individual recollections of experiences, fantasies and traumatic events for all actors. In that particular sense, history is not necessarily something that belongs to those who have been in history; that is, history is not the exclusive property of victims, bystanders or perpetrators. Then, of course, historians are those who are professionally trained to make those informed interpretations. But that doesn’t preclude the possibility for non-historians to engage in historical interpretation. I want to raise this idea of history as the discipline that is concerned with gathering the factual background to a particular situation in the past. And that gathering includes, or should include,

Dori Laub and Federico Finchelstein

55

not only documents from that time, but also testimonies. I would like to mention that many present historians of the Holocaust (from Saul Friedlander to Amos Goldberg, Zoe Waxman or Dominick LaCapra among others) are doing that, as opposed to the past when there was a kind of historiographical inquisitorial ban against approaching testimony from a historical perspective. History, through its new engagement with testimony, in a way transforms itself to something else. A history that is critically attentive to testimonies is able to complement the act of gathering facts or information with what could be defined as the history of experience. Experience is represented by the subjects either as a mythical construction (a fantasy about the lived past) or as a closer rendering of the reception of an actual event. In both cases the history of experience involves both testimony and facts as sources. Experiences of the past were historical even when they were a mythical formation emerging from the subjects who lived them. Experiences become the past when historical processes have transformed these experiential formations into a narrative that accounts for certain dimensions of the past. But for many contemporary historians, the history of mythical representations is part of history in the more specific sense of the mental representation of the time past, even if this past was a family myth. In other words, it is the representation of a collective belief rather than actual events. That is, in my opinion, a very interesting way in which history can be connected to psychoanalysis. Of course, history is coming from a different place, in that having before been engaged in this rather positivistic sense with the sources, in the past two decades history has been more attentive to the history of the enacting of mythical representations. Because at the end of the day, what is Nazism but a mythical representation of both the past and the present, a mythical representation which puts into practice a genocide in order to materialize the future as they saw it in ideological terms. So this is the myth transforming reality as it happened during Nazism. But psychoanalysis – and I think, for example, of Freud’s work on Moses among other examples of his work as a ‘historian’ – was involved before historians in that connection between myth and history. Freud, a historian will say, might not have been that attentive to differences between history and memory; for him that was the point, because he was stressing how these conceptual experiences, these collective mythical configurations, were historical as

56

Memory and History from Past to Future

well. This is totally correct, or rather, some historians would agree with this in the sense that these representations were created within a specific context. In other words, they were historical rather than transhistorical. On the other hand, most historians traditionally focused less on the study of memory processes of mythical framing and more on what they saw as the factual background to those formations. In a way the last two decades, particularly in Holocaust history, represent a moment of implosion in which these two possibilities have been combined. You were working on this issue before it emerged, in the eighties, and this brings me to ask what you see as the moment of restoration. The act of witnessing by a witness or by the interpreter, actually by both, provides for the witness a restoration, but at the same time provides for the historian a further comprehension of what went on in a given past. This, in principle, is counterintuitive for historians, although it shouldn’t be. It is thought of as counterintuitive because a more traditional historian would say that the farther one is from the past, the less able one would be to tear apart true from false in a particular testimonial or other documentary source. Documents should also be as close to the evidence as possible. Your presentation at the New School (Laub 2009a) constituted a historical analysis or a historicization of your experience as an interviewer – of the moment of restoration in which one’s account is integrated with the previous accounts and one can see a more complete picture of the past. That is a very interesting area, not of conflict, actually, but of analytic complementation between history and psychoanalysis. Laub: The concept of restoration is one way of looking at it and one concept to use. What the experience of trauma does is fragment the observing ‘I,’ and the experience itself is no longer a whole. What we are left with are traumatic fragments. I have listened to one of the testimonies that the American-Jewish psychologist David Boder took in 1946, in DP camps in Europe, given by Abraham Kimmelman – a testimony that lasts over four hours. It was extraordinarily told, in detail, in self-reflection and in its integration; but it was exceptional because most of the other testimonies Boder recorded consisted of unintegrated fragments. I don’t think that in perpetrators’ testimonies the fragments have come together; they may never come together. But for survivors, the fragments came together and here the process of testimony continues in the dialogical engagement with the ‘other’; it allows for the fragments to find

Dori Laub and Federico Finchelstein

57

the frame of reference, and that becomes their support. Therefore you can have a narrative. I think that the historian is now in a position to be able to witness those fragments that have come together and to integrate them with facts that she has from other sources. So there is definitely a complementarity, and almost an enrichment in what is taking place now. What is striking to me is that more than 60 years after the event, it is so passionately researched, read and watched, and I don’t think this is a pathological fascination. I think there’s an interest because there is more capability to absorb it, to see the whole, and to create a certain distance now. In that sense, the metaphorical document needs time in order to come into existence. And I am not talking about the written document here, but the testimony that lives, grows, becomes differentiated and, most of all, engages oneself, the other, and the community that cares about it. Regarding the gathering of factual information, it is also done through certain lenses. What is factual information: numbers, places? You rightly said it has something to do with the history of experience. Sometimes the experience is absolutely essential to really grasp the factual information. Without the experience, it’s bare. And the experience is what determines future action and responses. It’s not the factual history, it’s the experienced history that has an effect on for whom you vote as prime minister in Israel or as president in the United States, or whether you go to war or not, or whether you take precautions or not. So the history of the experience has a very powerful impact on the present, and through the present on the future. Finchelstein: Very early in the history of experience, there is your famous analysis of the question of how many chimneys were in Auschwitz at one particular moment in the extermination process. You made reference to a woman who was presented by historians as not remembering accurately the number. In this context you argued that ‘The woman was testifying . . . not to the number of the chimneys blown up, but to something else, more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence. One chimney blown up in Auschwitz was as incredible as four. The number mattered less than the fact of the occurrence. The event itself was almost inconceivable. The woman testified to an event that broke the all compelling frame of Auschwitz, where Jewish armed revolts just did not happen, and had no place. She testified to the breakage of a framework. That was historical truth’ (Felman and Laub 1992,

58

Memory and History from Past to Future

pp. 59–60). Your reflection became so famous that sometimes it’s not even given reference anymore. This is one of the iconic cases of the analysis of representation. Yet there is a kind of hyperbole in this statement by stressing that this or that is the truth, right? In terms of the history of perception, which is focused on the experience of the victims, it doesn’t matter how many chimneys were actually in this particular situation, but what is significant is the act of remembrance by a survivor, namely how she experienced the particular act, which is considered the truth. However, in terms of the history of perpetrators, it does matter how many chimneys were in a given camp. This is a question of different spheres of knowledge. If we talk about that moment of hyperbole through rhetorical emphasis, I don’t see in your work at large that you pay special emphasis to how truth claims made by victims should be integrated with other truth claims. What is particularly interesting in that statement of yours is that you made it at a time when there was a kind of a historiographical dismissal toward the experience of the victims. If the survivor did not remember correctly – correctly without quotations marks in terms of the factual information, the phenomenology of the camps – her testimony would have been excluded from the corpus of historiographical research. If you think about the history of testimonies as providing something at least equally important to, say, the particular architecture or even organizational structure of Auschwitz, at least of equal importance to that is the question of how Jewish victims experienced the particular events. Again, going back to the psychoanalytic emphasis on the history of myth, which is equally truthful. That’s how I read your moment of hyperbole that you emphasized in a particular context. Laub: Events like the revolt in Auschwitz, where only three SS men were killed or the Warsaw uprising, where about thirty Germans were killed, didn’t change the course of the war, but these experiences had power which effected the establishment of the State of Israel – as to whether the nations of the world considered it worthy of statehood. In the view that Jews had of themselves and in that of other nations, these events carried an enormous amount of weight. So when I say ‘that is true’ I don’t exclude other truths; it’s a matter of prioritization. I emphasize what I believe is central: not the number of chimneys, but the extraordinariness of a Jewish revolt in Auschwitz is what is unheard of. There was the revolt in

Dori Laub and Federico Finchelstein

59

Sobibor; it didn’t make it into memory as clearly, though it was testified to, and Lanzmann made a film about it. But the Auschwitz revolt, maybe because of the uniqueness of Auschwitz, made it into the center, and even more so, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. So when I say a certain truth is at the center of gravity in historical events, I don’t exclude other truths. Finchelstein: This early refusal by historians to engage in testimonial documentation is quite symptomatic. I wouldn’t say that it’s only the result of an artificial distinction between a historiographical approach that emphasizes positivism and one that is imbued with memorialization, particularly in the case of historians who also had the subject position of the victims. To be sure, this is part of it, but refusal to engage the testimonial literature is also a mechanism of defense, of neutralizing one’s own subject position vis-à-vis the traumatic charge that seems to emanate from victims’ testimonies. And in that particular sense, one could argue, it might be ‘easier’ to hear the perpetrator’s testimony: one can be more detached, or at least believe she might be less affected by the equally traumatic but substantially different charge that is emitted in the testimonies of perpetrators. Going back to the question of where it stands as historical truth: there is this now relatively old debate from the nineties between Hayden White and Carlo Ginzburg, which was published in this almost canonical book, Probing the Limits of Representation (1992). In that debate White, who was known for seeing history as much more related to tropes and myths and less related to a more grounded notion of what happened, and Carlo Ginzburg, who said that there is this extermination camp (Belzec) where we had only a few survivors and even if there was – following the title of his essay – just one witness, that would be enough for historians to grapple with the past, in terms of what happened in that camp. I don’t think it will be possible to argue with that argument as it was made. Particularly as he or others relate these testimonial materials to the Jewish tradition of witnessing, of bearing witness to the act of chronicling in terms of the past as an act of witnessing for the future. That is also related to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which as you know, was not done to defeat the Nazis; it was an exclusive act of history writing. It was a historical statement for the future. I see that this dimension of history, memory and the future relates to a central intervention of your work, which is your very particular understanding of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, which is not related, as I recall, to the

60

Memory and History from Past to Future

particularities of the numbers, or the particularities of the genocide at large, but again, to the experience. In this context, the notion of the experience refers not only to Holocaust testimonies as they emerge from the victims, but also from the Nazis themselves. This is the idea of the ‘open secret,’ in which history should be transformed into a nasty myth, which, as you know, sometimes even becomes a reality for the victims within the concentration camp system – and Primo Levi has observed the same – he recognized this myth of the secret to the extent that victims internalized it as a way of surviving the camps and therein it was not only a traumatic event for them but also a historical victory for the Nazis because they wanted this myth to become the overpowering narrative of the experience of the camps. The secret was to be shared by perpetrators and victims only. Within the camps, silence about ongoing events, the trauma of witnessing, and suffering, torture and death, remained a constant pattern. Because the Nazi view of history – the myth – was transformed into the present and, as the Nazis saw it, into the future, the victims were made to be silent and they were expected to consciously accept that silence as reality. In this context a perpetrator said to Levi, ‘here there is no why.’ This is a central symptom of the past as written or rewritten by the experience of ordered silence and the Nazi ban on causal inquiries. This ban on reasoning in the camps also relates to the memory process of the camps as you approach it in your work. That is, your particular stress on that aspect of the peculiarities of the Holocaust and on how to see this emphasis on silence as a part of a very explicit attempt to rewrite history, to transform history into a myth, and how even the victims were made into active participants of that. That was, in a way, one of the ultimate Nazi victories during the time of the Holocaust which also presented an obvious contrast with the moment of restoration that we have been talking about. Historians, engaged in interpretation of the past, run the risk of sharing that silence which is often reframed as the impossibility of representing the events of the Holocaust. In a way, it’s a history that has not only to be written, but also rewritten, insofar as there was a very explicit Nazi attempt to erase the experience of the victim and to inscribe it within a myth, which became history for them and, paradoxically and even unintentionally, for those professional historians who only rely on documents produced by perpetrators. I see a central aspect of your work as a constant reminder of the need to put that silence in question, the need to represent the experience of

Dori Laub and Federico Finchelstein

61

the past, and I wanted to ask how you connect that with something that you have presented as the latency of the testimonial encounter. Laub: I think you refer in particular to one notion which psychoanalyst Lou Micheels has written about in ‘Bearer of the secret’ (1985), and I’ve heard this from other survivors and testimonies a number of times. There was some sense that there was a covenant between the Nazis and the Jews never to tell anybody what transpired. And the covenant should have lasted forever so the victims don’t talk, don’t tell, and the testimony doesn’t come into existence. One telling caveat is the Nazi guard saying to the inmate, ‘you can’t tell what happens here; nobody will ever believe you.’ So there is no point to knowing and telling. This is a Nazi imposed myth, where the Jews continue their existence as an exhibit in the Prague Museum only, and in no other way. The liberation from a Nazi imposed myth of a ‘non-event that never happened’ – of nonexistence and of silence – is a matter of struggle and of resilience that needs to continue to ensure conditions in which both physical and emotional survival are possible. External historical reality as well as ‘the history of the experience’ had been condemned to extinction – along with the extinction of the Jewish people. It is this totalitarian verdict, contained in the Nazi myth that I suspect continues to impact historical discourse on the Holocaust and needs to be fought against relentlessly. The concept of latency indicates that certain experiences, while registering, do not come into full awareness until particular conditions are (re-)established. One can think about testimony in the same way; in testimony, the conditions are of re-establishing connection, the human connection, which had been traumatically severed. The severance of the empathic connection led to an interruption of dialogue with oneself internally and with others outside, who had indeed ceased to exist, so that no generation of knowledge could take place. In testimony dialogue is resumed and the formation of narrative and of the experience of ‘knowing’ begins to occur. Sometimes this takes decades or generations. Some survivors have refused to bear witness when I asked them in 1980, and they repeated their refusal when I asked them again in 2005. They allowed me to approach them, but their answer was no. Finchelstein: What do you think about that moment in which discussions of memory emerge in the public sphere and in academia? There is a shifting status attributed to survivors’s testimony by different disciplines. The analysis of these testimonies is often critical

62

Memory and History from Past to Future

and contextual for historians and more empathic or positive for psychoanalysts. This is a different understanding of the position of the historian and the psychoanalyst toward the victims; it is, of course, a question of subject position. Of course, in the particular situation in which clinical concerns are foremost, historians generally should not be concerned, because the historian seeks a different thing. That poses a problem, of course, in the sense that the historian has to be very careful not to affect those who are being interviewed. For example, in Lanzmann’s Shoah, there is the very famous example of the barber, which LaCapra (1998) cogently analyzes in terms of acting out, suggesting that Lanzmann forced him to enact the situation in ways that may not be related to or may not lead to an elaboration of the trauma. The suggestion is that the best way to remember the past is not necessarily to act out the situations physically. It is ambiguous in its historical implications because one wonders whether that was the right thing to do to a survivor in order to extract the truth, but today you have that account and you might not have had it without Lanzmann’s lead. Laub: The purpose is to help survivors, not to injure them even if testimony elicits pain. I did a study in Israel with the testimonies of 26 psychotic survivors in hospitals who didn’t have the words and didn’t have the memory, but were desperately struggling to form them. I had to speak much more and to reconstruct; that is, to say, ‘is that what you remember?’ or ‘is this what happened?’ They would then choose the narrative that felt right to them. If somebody doesn’t want to talk, we did not force them, and I think this is widely true with perpetrators – they don’t want to know anything. And if the witness doesn’t want to enter her experience, she will not. For example, the Hungarian-Viennese-British journalist, Gitta Sereny, made it her life work to interview perpetrators, Albert Speer being the best known, and to write books about them. In her book (1975) on Franz Stangl, who had been the Kommandant of two extermination camps, Sobibor and Treblinka, and was held responsible for the murder of between 400,000 and 1.4 million Jews, she describes her interviews with him in the Düsseldorf prison between April and July 1971. Stangl had been extradited from Argentina and sentenced to life in prison; he had appealed his sentence and was awaiting retrial. Sereny spent more than 20 hours interviewing him, trying to understand the man, the child he once had been, his motives for carrying out the killings, and his reflections on them now. Most of what she

Dori Laub and Federico Finchelstein

63

heard was about his relentless attempts to be relieved of his duties as Kommandant and transferred to another post, and about how he mechanically performed his duties as a mere instrument of the Nazi government, without any intent of his own. There are survivor testimonies that clearly contradict this statement, describing Stangl as a personal, cruel killer who drove his car and rode his horse into crowds, crushing people in his path. Eventually, Sereny’s persistence forced Stangl to begin to face his guilt. ‘ “I never harmed anyone willingly myself,” says Stangl in a different, less energetic voice . . . he remains silent for a long while. “But I was there,” he says with resignation, in a curiously dry, tired voice. It takes him almost half an hour to whisper these few sentences and, finally, almost inaudibly: “Therefore, in reality, I have my share of guilt, yes . . . because my fault . . . my fault . . . it is only during these conversations . . . now that I have said it all, for the first time . . .” Stangl then stops talking’ (Sereny 1974, p. 391, quoted in Rosenblum 2009, p. 1327). As his guilt begins to dawn on him, Stangl wants to conclude his interviews with Sereny by seeing her one more time on the coming Tuesday. He makes this statement on a Sunday and on the following day – Monday – he dies of a heart attack. Finchelstein: There is this recent article of yours, in History and Memory (2009), which is a response to an article by Thomas Trezise (2008) that addresses your work in a very critical way and starts by posing a conflict between history and psychoanalysis. Your response indicates that there is a complex and sometimes even contested relationship between history and psychoanalysis, but not necessarily an all or nothing conflict. To me the idea of an essential conflict is rather problematic, and in a way I think we have both been trying to find more confluences. But I would like to ask what you see as dramatically different between history and the secondary experience of interviewing survivors, because, while it is problematic to see this as a platonic conflict between history and psychoanalysis, we might also learn from the differences. Laub: I propose three separate trends to be followed in the reconstruction of historical trauma: the first trend pursues a certain accuracy and completeness in reconstructing the past, through combining as many perspectives as possible and arriving at a multidimensional gestalt through the integration of differing perspectives. This is ideally the historian’s technique – ideally, because it is a multidisciplinary approach that relies on culture, myth,

64

Memory and History from Past to Future

anthropology and so on, and does not limit itself to traditional historiographical methodology. It is inconceivable to attempt to construct the past through the use of a single methodology. The second trend is the informational trend. Its goal is to reconstruct an event in order to transmit it. The interest here lies less in the accuracy of the event than in the effectiveness of the transmission. In Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Bomba the barber is a powerful message and so are Srebnik, the survivor’s song, his boat ride, the religious procession from the Chelmno Church and the organ player Kantarowsky’s speech. Lanzmann’s presence and his questions facilitate things happening that are a re-enactment of historical truth. The third trend is the testimonial (psychoanalytic) trend, which aims at the fullest possible reconstruction of the ‘personal history of the experience.’ That personal history is imbued with a sense as to where the center of gravity lies. While there are many concurrent historical facts, there can be one particular aspect of the experience that constitutes the center of gravity for the testifying survivor, and such centrality may or may not reflect the magnitude of the historical event itself. A strain is thus created between historical factuality and survivor testimony that we need to recognize, live with and carefully investigate. The woman who testified that she felt uplifted and liberated by witnessing the failed Auschwitz revolt testified indeed to an extraordinary moment in history in which a truth evolved that had far-reaching implications. Irrespective of her factual distortions it was a moment of ‘history writing’ as you so compellingly put it. I do not see the inherent conflict between history and testimony here. Detached polemics on this subject can of course artificially produce it. Finchelstein: Thank you. Laub: It was your present to me that you were the witness.

Notes 1. The inspiration for this conversation came out of discussions initiated between Dori Laub and Federico Finchelstein at the conference, ‘Memory and the Future,’ held at the New School for Social Research, 26–27 February 2009. This dialogue was recorded especially for this volume at the New School for Social Research on 15 May 2009. The recorded conversation lasted 2½ hours and was transcribed by Carole Ludwig Transcription Services (New York). It

Dori Laub and Federico Finchelstein

65

was edited to its present form by Federico Fincehlstein, Dori Laub and the editors of this volume. 2. Alexandrowicz (1999).

References Alexandrowicz, Ra’anan. 1999. Martin. First Hand Films. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub (eds). 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge. Friedlander, Saul (ed.). 1992. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution.’ Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gruner, Wolf. 2005. Widerstand in der Rosenstrasse: Die Fabrik-Action und die Verfolgung der ‘Mischehen’ 1943. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer. Hilberg, Raul. 1961. The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago, IL: Quandrangle Books. LaCapra, Dominick. 1998. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Laub, Dori. 2009a. ‘The evolution of testimony: a personal and societal process.’ Paper presented at the Memory and the Future Conference, 26–27 February, New York. Laub, Dori. 2009b. ‘On holocaust testimony and its “reception” within its own frame, as a process in its own right: a response to “between history and psychoanalysis” by Thomas Trezise.’ History and Memory 20(1), pp. 127–50. Micheels, Louis J. 1985. ‘Bearer of the secret.’ Psychoanalytic Inquiry 5, pp. 21–30. Rosenblum, Rachel. 2009. ‘Postponing trauma: the dangers of telling.’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90(6), pp. 1319–40. Sereny Gitta. 1974. Into that darkness. London/New York: Deutsch. [1975. Au fond des te’ne’bres, Audry C, translator. Paris: Denoel.] Stoltzfus, Nathan. 1992. ‘Dissent in Nazi Germany.’ Atlantic Monthly 270(3), pp. 86–94. Stoltzfus, Nathan. 1996. Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany. New York: W.W. Norton. Trezise, Thomas. 2008. ‘Between history and psychoanalysis: a case study in the reception of holocaust survivor testimony.’ History and Memory 20(1), pp. 7–47. Von Trotta, Margarethe. 2003. Rosenstrasse. Studio Hamburg Letterbox Filmproduktion.

4 Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow: The Internationalization of a New Commemorative Paradigm Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro

Even before the end of World War II and the liberation of all of the Nazi concentration camps, the camp at Majdanek, Poland, was turned into something of a ‘museum,’ intended to document what had happened there, honor the victims who had perished and stand as a grim reminder to the world of the atrocities that human beings are capable of (Young 1993). Though the Holocaust did not yet have a name, its memory was already invoked in the name of what would become the Holocaust’s greatest mantra: ‘never again.’ In another world region, the city government of Hiroshima, Japan, decided to create a set of memorials to victims of the atomic bomb that was dropped on 6 August 1945. These memorials would serve as ‘reminders of the past and contributions to a future of lasting peace.’1 Across the globe and over 50 years later, the hills of Rwanda are dotted with churches and schools that were the sites of some of the worst massacres of the 1994 genocide. When the Hutu majority turned on the Tutsi minority, many Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered at these houses of learning and of God where they sought shelter and protection. Today, 16 years later, most of these sites are preserved in some way as memorials to the victims who were brutally killed there and as constant reminders to Rwandans today about the dangers of divisive ideologies. More than sites of mourning and grief, they are intended to prevent such violence from occurring again (Figure 4.1). On yet another continent, a former navy mechanics school used by the Argentine junta as a center for detention and torture of the dictatorship’s enemies before they were disappeared today stands as a ‘Space 66

Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro

Figure 4.1

67

Nyamata Memorial, Rwanda

Amy Sodaro

for Memory and for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights.’2 It is preserved as a reminder of what came before and explicitly links past to present and the future in which such human rights abuses are not possible: the school and its grounds are being transformed into a multifaceted and complex site of memory in which a museum, offices of human rights organizations and memorials together compose a vibrant community which draws on the power of the grim memory of the site as a form of future-oriented activism. These few examples from around the world indicate a new, futureoriented paradigm of commemoration that seeks to use knowledge of the past – and especially its traumas and violence – to create a better present and future. Emerging out of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, this new memorial paradigm has spread around the world as countries emerging from dictatorships, civil wars, oppression and genocide struggle to come to terms with the past and prevent the repetition of violence in the future. And while the Holocaust might provide some sort of model for those wishing to come to terms with the past (see Levy in this volume), the proliferation of human rights abuses subsequent to the Holocaust and the responses to them, particularly the international human rights movement that grew up in Latin America in the 1980s and in other parts of the world, including South Africa, in the 1990s,

68

Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow

have also helped to shape this new model for remembering that seeks to integrate past with present and future (see Poole in this volume). In this chapter, we examine the emergence of this new paradigm of memorialization that, we argue, has gained in strength and prominence, especially over the past 25 years, and we examine its internationalization and application in contexts as diverse as Morocco, Liberia, Cambodia, Chile and the USA.3 The new form of memorialization points toward a broader shift in the relationship of past, present and future: increasingly today the past – and especially that which is negative in the past – is very much on the agenda of social and political actors in the present, such as human rights and democracy activists, who hope that by confronting the past, they will be able to make real and concrete contributions to building a better future. Before examining this growing trend of confronting the past with an eye to the future, however, we begin with a historical analysis of some of the traditional rationales for memorialization, such as nation building, strengthening group identity and public mourning, demonstrating how the paradigm of memorialization has shifted throughout the second half of the twentieth century. We then move on to focus on the logics employed by protagonists (creators, designers, commissioners) of these new memorials and the alternative rationale of memorialization that has been in ascendancy and which these new ‘memory entrepreneurs’ embrace: to teach about the past in order to avoid repetition in the future. Examples of strategies employed by memorials around the world demonstrate how this rationale relies (implicitly) on a theory of change concerning democratic learning and the very modern belief that an accumulation of knowledge can help to shape a better future. However, there may be cause for skepticism. While a widely held belief today is that teaching about the past is what makes many memorials of past atrocity successful, we are interested in understanding why it is also assumed that this will lead to prevention of violence in the future. We conclude the chaper by raising questions about this causal relationship that has such a firm hold on our imaginations today, as well as consider how we might measure whether these memorials do indeed ‘work.’

Confronting the past The twentieth century was one of unprecedented violence and atrocity which spawned and spurred a global human rights movement, as well as successive waves of democratization from Europe to Africa, to Latin America and Asia. As dictatorships rose and toppled, civil wars

Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro

69

and genocides commenced and ended, and victims and activists began to demand that their rights and suffering be recognized, societies, states and regimes have increasingly been compelled to face their pasts, however traumatic and terrible they might be. Whether as the perpetrating party, such as in the case of Germany or Japan, as those that were victimized or had large percentages of their own populations killed, as in the case of Israel or Rwanda, or as a new regime promising a break with the past and a better future free from violence and oppression, such as South Africa or Argentina, states and societies are increasingly focused on acknowledging and coming to terms with the negative, terrible and traumatic aspects of their pasts. As more and more societies, especially those transitioning from conflict, dictatorship and authoritarianism, fixate on the past in their effort to face it, move forward and gain acceptance into the (liberal democratic) international community,4 a proliferation of new commemorative forms have emerged and spread around the world that are devoted to remembering, explaining and educating about past atrocities, conflicts and trauma in the effort to learn the lessons of the past and apply them to the strengthening of democratic culture in the present and – especially – the future. Political legitimacy in the contemporary world often relies upon coming to terms with the past (Olick 2007; Torpey 2003), and memorials are essential mechanisms for addressing the past and legitimating nations or groups in the eyes of the international community: either by recognizing past victimization or perpetration of crimes, or demonstrating a new regime’s willingness to learn from history. Together with truth commissions, criminal trials and reparations programs, memorials are today considered to be part of the transitional justice ‘tool kit’ and are widely used around the world as one among several strategies for confronting the past (Bickford 2004). Collective memory is an inherent part of every culture (Halbwachs 1992) and there has been an ongoing search for the best educational and social instruments for dealing with and transmitting memory between generations, especially memory of past trauma. The multitude of new memorials that have been built tells us something about how present societies attempt to come to terms with past trauma. However, as their central goal is to educate visitors in a way that they see as linked to the prevention of violence and atrocity in the future, these new memorials also tell us a good deal about the relationship of past to future – how the past is always bound up in how we are capable of imagining and conceiving the future and how our visions of the future determine what we remember from the past and how.

70

Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow

Why do we build memorials? Addressing the needs of the present We have made the argument that there is a new paradigm of public memorialization that is emerging and gaining strength. The global human rights movement – which over the last 25 years has demanded, in the words of one of its most significant early protagonists, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the interlocking triad of ‘Truth, Justice, Memory’ (Brysk 1994) – has been one of the great catalysts of this new approach to the way we remember past atrocity, though not the only one. The new commemorative paradigm emerges from the complicated history of the twentieth century and the broader project of modernity and what Levy and Sznaider (2006) refer to as ‘Second Modernity.’ Later in the chapter, we will return to the arguments for memory articulated not only by the Madres but by hundreds of other groups and human rights leaders in the last few decades. But before doing so, it is worthwhile exploring some of the classic rationales for memorializing, which remain relevant today in different ways, at different times and in different contexts. Nation building Public monuments have been around for as long as history has been recorded; they celebrated great triumphs and memorialized the dead. However, it was not until roughly the nineteenth century that memorials began to emerge in the traditional forms that we recognize today, such as equestrian figures, obelisks and triumphal arches (Michalski 1998, pp. 8–10). The profusion of monuments erected in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were built primarily in service of the nation state, and were an integral part of what Benedict Anderson (1991) deems ‘official nationalism.’ They were triumphant and celebratory – symbols of a nation’s glorious past, intended to educate the population about the nation state’s past victories, and to create a grand and imposing sense of shared history for a population being consolidated around the idea of the nation. They were intended to encapsulate a moment or event from history, condensing the moral lessons learned from the past and tying up loose ends so that the present could move on along its steady path of progress (Savage 1994). Because monuments and memorials of this era were intended to inculcate a unified sense of history, difficult or controversial subjects were avoided: ‘this kind of commemoration sought to purify the past of any continuing conflict that might disturb the carefully crafted national

Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro

71

narrative’ (Savage 1994, p. 2). The purpose of monuments during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not to memorialize the dead as individuals or remember the tragedy of their deaths, but to celebrate their sacrifice for the great nation and to create a sense of national identity which unifies the people in a single ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991). Memorials would ‘work,’ according to this approach, if they succeed in contributing to the creation of a unified community of nationals who are willing to fight, die and pay taxes for the sake of the nation. In order to achieve this goal, memorials must essentialize a dominant or hegemonic view of the nation, and then capture these iconic or archetypical forms in figures of public art. This explanation is prevalent among traditional theorists of nationalism such as George Mosse (1990), who sought to explain the creation of World War I and II memorials as conscious, or perhaps subconscious, efforts by nation states to consolidate a post-war national identity. A slightly different version of this argument is narrower and more straightforwardly instrumentalist: that the government of the day (Edkins 2003), especially one that has been victorious in war or leads a newly democratized state with high levels of legitimacy stemming from a successful transition, uses memorialization as a tool to rally together its subjects. More recent theorists of democratic transitions, for example, argue that ‘all new regimes must create their own myths in order to refound the nation, either through recycling already existing material or through the creation of new commemorations, that is, by organizing new celebration dates and building new monuments through which to express attachment to the new regime’ (Fernandez and Humlebaek 2002, p. 121). The ‘invention’ of these new ‘traditions’ often is aided by the construction of national memorial sites that incorporate versions of the past that reflect the new regimes hopes for the future (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). The idea that memorialization efforts are most likely a component of a larger nation-building strategy is especially relevant when the state is involved in building public memorials. For example, the ceremony at the inauguration of the Freedom Park Trust in South Africa (2000) was clearly aimed at creating a sense of a new democratic, post-Apartheid national identity. As then Deputy President Jacob Zuma put it: ‘Today’s event is but one of the many processes that our government has engaged in since 1994, with a view to creating and fostering a new national consciousness among all South Africans of the common legacy that binds us a nation.’5 Similarly, the Minister of Public Lands in Chile, Romy

72

Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow

Schmidt, who also oversees the Bureau of Chilean National Monuments, in extensive public comments about the reclassification of a clandestine mass grave site called Patio 29 into a ‘historic monument,’ repeatedly emphasizes that ‘historical memory’ requires that ‘we provide recognition and official protection’ to ‘public patrimony’ that is associated with the ‘enormous pain of the past.’6 The implication of these statements is to disassociate the present government from the past, to signify that the current government continues to reject the authoritarian past and to rally the populace around the new government and its program of unity. When civil society organizations drive the process, in contrast, the nation almost vanishes as an object of interest, as protagonists focus on, for example, the victims and their experiences (such as the Trojan Horse Monument in Cape Town or the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park in Chile); the evilness of the regime (such as the Paraguayan Memory Museum project); or the damage caused to the local or municipal community (such as the K’laat Maguna and Agdiz prison memorialization efforts in Morocco).7 Moreover, protagonists of the new paradigm of public memorialization are likely to be suspicious of state-run memorialization efforts, assuming that they will inevitably follow a nation-building logic and end up prescriptive, depicting the past via the entrenched, uniform narrative of the nation state. And there is reason for suspicion: over a century ago, in 1873, Nietzsche recognized the fact that in order for the past to be used as a tool for national unity and pride, ‘how violently what is individual in it would have to be forced into a universal mould and all its sharp corners and hard outlines broken up in the interest of conformity’ (Nietzche 1997, p. 69). This discomfort that Nietzsche felt persists today; anxiety about the potential for memorialization to reinforce hegemonic national narratives is reflected in the ways that protagonists of the new memorial paradigm often create small, human-scale, local memorials. Remember us: memory and identity or the democratization of memory An explanation for memorialization that is closely related to nation building has to do with identity more narrowly defined – ethnic, political, gender or racial identities, for example. That is, groups, sub-national and smaller, self-consciously seek to create symbols that emphasize their self-definition and give meaning to shared experiences that tie them together and, by extension, that differentiate them from others. This concept of memorials as a form of recognition related to subnational identity has its roots in the World War I memorial projects,

Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro

73

which began to move from a focus on the state to a new attention on the individual, especially integrating names into memorials, grave sites and documentation (Laqueur 1996; Winter 1998). This new attention to the individual indicates what could be construed as a democratizing trend in memorialization. Unlike the monuments that came before, with which only those great doers were commemorated, after World War I memorials began to display a greater sense of equality and inclusion. Rather than the individual as merely a part of the grander continuum that is the nation, the everyday individual began to be recognized as worthy of commemoration. The sheer scale of death during World War I and the emerging importance of the individual contributed to a new element of memorializing: naming the victims, which today has become an essential part of remembering. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is the quintessential example of the centrality of naming to memorialization, yet other more recent memorial projects also testify to its importance around the globe. Memorial walls listing names of victims of dictatorships, many of them directly inspired by Lin’s memorial, have appeared in Argentina (Parque por la Paz), Chile (Villa Grimaldi) and Uruguay (Figure 4.2) (Monumento a los Desaparecidos), for example, as well as numerous other post-authoritarian or post-genocide contexts, such as Rwanda (Kigali Memorial Center). On a broader scale, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and educational center in Jerusalem, has undertaken a massive effort to gather the names of all six million Jews killed as an essential part of remembering the dead and restoring dignity and humanity unto them.8 And it is nearly impossible to imagine a September 11 memorial that does not list the names of those killed. The relatively new emphasis on naming each individual marks a shift from remembering for the sake of the nation or the victors, to remembering for the sake of the victims. This form of public recognition has extended beyond the individual throughout the course of the twentieth century, however, and public memorials today provide essential platforms for recognition of groups and are increasingly linked to group identity. Just as a shared past can help to establish the ‘imagined community’ of the nation, such a shared past can provide coherence and bolster the identity of various ethnic, religious, racial, gender and other groups. Together with the recognition of a shared identity that memorialization provides, today’s privileged status of the victim (Barkan 2003; Cairns 2003) means that minorities or other groups that have been victimized have even more stake in gaining public recognition in the form

74

Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow

Figure 4.2

Monumento a los Desaparecidos, Montevideo, Uruguay

Louis Bickford/International Center for Transitional Justice

of memorials. This kind of reasoning appears in the mandates and missions of many of today’s memorials, especially when ethnic or other minorities were severely victimized, such as the Halabja Memorial in Kurdistan, which highlights the traumatization of Kurds under Saddam Hussein. Indeed the planning of this memorial by the Kurdish authorities explicitly focused on strengthening Kurdish identity and honoring Kurdish experience (Worth 2006). There are numerous memorials that seek to bring a specific experience of a group that had been oppressed on the grounds of identity into the national public conversation. Obviously this is the case with

Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro

75

the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (and Holocaust memorials more generally), but it is also the case with the nearby Monument to Homosexual Holocaust Victims as well as Berlin’s Sinti and Roma memorial, both of which represent and remember groups that are currently struggling for public recognition and finding in a past of shared victimization a platform upon which to enact today’s struggle for recognition and equality. That said, however, except to the degree that ‘victims’ are a distinct identity, many memorials examined here do not focus on sub-national groups and indeed an ethnic or group focus has the potential to ignite rather than defuse tensions and conflict. Hence, we see deliberate efforts against memorials as platforms for identity politics. For example, a major memorialization effort in Lebanon to be built in Martyrs’ Square in downtown Beirut, now abandoned because it was upstaged by the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War, was explicitly aimed at the experiences of all Lebanese who suffered during the civil conflict, seeking to mute ethnic identify in favor of the shared identity of victimization.9 Even in the case of Srebrenica in Bosnia, where one might expect to find ethnic identify foregrounded, it is quite conspicuously not. In the establishment of the Foundation of Srebrenica-Potoˇcari Memorial and Cemetery, the justifications for creating the memorial are legal and moral with no mention of ethnicity or nationality at all; it is so conspicuously absent, in fact, as to suggest it was a quite conscious omission. One fascinating, if complicated, example in Bosnia-Herzegovina is the Bruce Lee Statue in Mostar,10 a small statue of the martial arts hero and movie star erected in the middle of India Square that is intended to transcend identity. The designers of this conceptual art project understood it as a representation of commonality among them – the fact that Bruce Lee is ostensibly a hero that everyone can agree on – and, as such, a repudiation of ethnic tension and violence. Although not exactly a public memorial, this statue was seen by the designers as an effort, drawing on satire, to learn from two elements of the past: first, a celebration of a shared childhood when everyone of a certain generation was watching and enjoying Bruce Lee movies and, second, a rejection of the violence of a more recent past when those same people were hating and even killing each other. In spite of these observations, it is certainly true that memorials can be at their most dangerously provocative when they do highlight identities – when, in Tilly’s (2008) words, they concern either ‘credit’ or ‘blame’ for one group over another. Interviews in Kosovo of Kosovo Albanians suggest that the monuments to fallen Kosovo Liberation

76

Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow

Army (KLA) fighters that dot the landscape of Kosovo were very much about ethnic identity – unabashedly claiming Kosovo as an ethnic (Albanian) territory.11 One doubts that the Serbian minority in Kosovo feels comfortable with so many public heroic representations of Kosovo Albanians. And in fact, the potential explosiveness and power of monuments and memorials in politics is yet another reason for the intense attention paid to memorializing efforts during transition and in fragile democracies today. Memorials are becoming an object of study because the stakes are high: they can exacerbate ethnic conflict or cause tension as easily as they can assuage these impulses. Public mourning Of course, at the heart of any effort to memorialize and commemorate is perhaps the oldest rationale for creating memorials: that of mourning the dead. All memorial initiatives have their roots in graveyards, burial practices and other rituals practiced throughout human history as a way of mourning the dead, honoring the lives of those gone and coming to terms with loss. Today’s memorials are no different: from Jerusalem to Berlin and from Kigali to Lima, one of the core functions of memorials built in the last few decades is honoring the victims and providing a space for solace, reflection and comfort for the living. However, what we see emerging in the memorials of World War I and subsequent commemorative projects is that mourning in the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries takes on a very public form. Put next to efforts to unify the nation state or bolster identity, this function related to public mourning is the ‘private’ side of public memorials, and it is this public privateness that indicates, perhaps most clearly, the victim-driven emphasis on memorialization today and the particular importance of public acknowledgment and recognition in dealing with the past and its victims. When considering genocides that take millions of lives, dictatorships and totalitarian regimes under which all of society lives in fear and is somehow touched by the trauma, and the sheer scale of civil wars and destructiveness of conflict in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it becomes obvious that mere private mourning is not enough to acknowledge the losses. Rather, and this is the impetus behind memorials that span the globe and that are constructed as a form of ‘symbolic reparation’ for groups, societies and nations, public recognition of suffering and acknowledgment of victimization is essential to coming to terms with the past. When civilians are targeted, when entire populations are wiped out or fractured, public acknowledgment is one of the only

Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro

77

modes of repair; for this reason, one central goal of today’s memorials is to serve as places of mourning, but this mourning is public in a way that is unprecedented.

Remembering for the future: the new memorial paradigm While these examples have helped to historically contextualize the emergence of the new paradigm of memorialization, as well as describe some of the classic reasons around building memorials, perhaps the most notable and prominent feature that ties together memorial efforts as diverse as the small Trojan Horse memorial in the Athlone neighborhood of Cape Town in post-Apartheid South Africa, the new programs at the Tuol Sleng Museum of genocide in Cambodia, the commemoration of a mass grave site at Duport Road in Monrovia, Liberia, and the Monument to the Disappeared in Montevideo, Uruguay, is their stated goal to educate visitors in the hope that learning from the past will help to create a better future. Echoing George Santayana’s famous – and overused – maxim that ‘he who does not remember the past is destined to repeat it,’ this is a very modern concept with roots in the Enlightenment (Cushman 2003), which assumes that the more knowledge and understanding we have, the better we can shape the future. The goal is to inspire in the individual some sort of moral transformation that will encourage them to work to prevent future violence and promote democratic values. The core of this idea is best summed up in the great aspiration of so many commemorative efforts – Never Again! Never again The idea of preventing future atrocity has not necessarily been a dominant component of many traditional memorials, as we have discussed above. However, at least since the advent of Holocaust memorials, attention to the ‘never again’ potential of memory has increased (Carrier 2005). In the cases examined for this chapter, all of them have emphasized ‘never again,’ attempting to harness the potential of memory to act as a means of prevention or deterrence and setting this as a primary goal. Of course, this is a lofty aspiration, and there is good reason to be skeptical, as Peter Novick (2000) has been of Holocaust commemoration.12 And, indeed, measuring ‘never again’ would be extremely difficult to do. Nevertheless, what is interesting is that the protagonists, creators and commissioners of many of the public memorials under examination here apparently believe that prevention is indeed possible. They see this as possible through some of the following means.

78

Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow

Education Clearly, and as explicitly put forth by the creators of many memorials, education is central to the notion that learning from the past can enable or ensure non-repetition of its mistakes. By educating younger generations about what transpired before, the hope is that they will be fundamentally changed in the present in a way that will encourage them to work to prevent violence in the future. Thus, the new generation of memorials being constructed around the world put pedagogy and education about the past at the very center of their missions. It is not enough for the memorials to be sites of mourning and quiet reflection; they must in some way convey the story of what happened, impart understanding of (often complex) past events and, at their most ambitious, draw connections between past, present and future in a way that makes the past relevant to an audience that may not be directly affected by it. The numerous Holocaust museums around the world – from Houston, Texas to Cape Town, South Africa – are perhaps the best example of commemoration as education. These institutions tend to have not only text-heavy exhibitions, augmented by video, artifacts and photographs, but also robust educational programming. Especially as the generation that directly experienced the Holocaust slowly disappears, the perceived need to find effective ways to transmit knowledge and understanding of the past to present and future generations is becoming more urgent. And this need is spreading around the globe and creating an international exchange of methods and strategies. For example, the Holocaust’s lessons have been translated for American school children in Los Angeles at the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Tolerance, which uses games, interactive exhibits and examples from very recent history to impart its lessons. The Center for Tolerance, in turn, inspired a renovation of the Anne Frank House and Museum in Amsterdam (Richard 2006) that mimics some of the strategies to make the lessons of the increasingly distant Holocaust salient today. What is interesting is that the particular instance of the Holocaust has been recast for American audiences in a way deemed effective enough to recast it yet again for European audiences, who in fact could be argued to have a stronger claim to this past. However, this educational drive is also very evident in memorials to much more recent and painfully felt traumas, such as the Rwandan genocide. In Kigali, the government, with the aid of a British antigenocide organization, created a memorial that would serve to educate not just visitors to Rwanda, but its own people – those who lived

Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro

79

through the genocide and those who are growing up now with only peripheral knowledge of it – about the causes and consequences of not only the Rwandan genocide but twentieth-century genocide more broadly. Inspired by Yad Vashem and other Holocaust memorials and museums, the Kigali Center uses the same pedagogical tactics – text, video and photographs that contextualize the genocide and put it into a narrative that has a beginning, middle and end – in the effort to promote education as the way forward for this devastated nation (Sodaro forthcoming). The pedagogical impulse does not only exist at museums or other large, state-sponsored or sophisticated memorial sites, however. Increasingly, all kinds of historic sites are being used for educational purposes: prisons where political and other prisoners of conscience were held, like Robben Island in Cape Town and the Stasi Prison in East Berlin, have been opened to the public and offer tours that tell detailed histories of the prisons’ use;13 clandestine torture centers in Morocco are being transformed into sites of ‘mémoire historique’ by the Moroccan government; and mass grave sites in countries as diverse as Bosnia, Cambodia, Chile and Liberia are being preserved and interpreted in order to draw historical lessons (Figure 4.3). Simultaneously, memorials that are largely intended to provide an emotional experience of reflection and/or mourning, such as Srebrenica-Potoˇcari Memorial and Cemetery in Bosnia-Herzogovina, or the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, have incorporated information or education centers intended to augment the emotional experience with a pedagogical one. Experience According to designers and proponents of the new memorial paradigm, the best way to ensure that the educational aspects of the commemorative site are absorbed is to impact the visitor emotionally: to make them ‘experience’ the past for themselves (Huyssen 2003; Young 1993). Thus, not only do we see new types of memorials that emphasize historical education about the past, but that also attempt to go beyond word and image to take the visitor ‘back in time’ to experience it for themselves. At former prisons that are now museums or open to the public, like the House of Terror in Budapest or the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius, Lithuania, visitors are encouraged to enter the cells that were used to torture prisoners – for a moment understanding what it was like to be imprisoned by a totalitarian regime. In other memorial sites, like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), visitors are taken through

80

Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow

Figure 4.3

Choeung Ek, Cambodia

Louis Bickford/International Center for Transitional Justice

a reproduction of the Warsaw Ghetto, to ‘transport’ in an actual train car from Poland to a reconstructed barracks in Auschwitz; and like the Jewish museum in Berlin and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, both of which provide a particular ‘experience’ for the visitor, the architecture of the space itself at the USHMM is intended to invoke claustrophobia – a sense of being trapped – again, bringing the visitor that much closer to ‘experiencing’ the past. Other memorial initiatives offer an even more immersive experience. For example, the village of Oradour-Sur-Glane, southern France that was destroyed by the Nazis in 1944 has been left in ruins. Visitors to the village today walk silently through the ruins; left in situ are the burnt out cars and shells of homes and businesses, as well as personal items of those who were killed: watches that stopped at the moment of the massacre, children’s toys, broken crucifixes. Visitors are haunted by the sense of the devastation wrought on this small town. Similarly, throughout Rwanda genocide memorials show bodies preserved as they were found, bones, clothing and personal effects piled haphazardly, charred buildings with bits of bone and clothing still strewn about the floor; all

Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro

81

of this to impart to the visitor a sense or experience of the horrors of the genocide. Through experiential learning, the educational impact of these memorials – and its translation into action and/or prevention – is thought to be strengthened. Empathy Lynn Hunt (2007), in Inventing Human Rights, surmises that empathy as a human experience is at the root of the invention of human rights; for Hunt the emergence of empathy and the concomitant ability to identify with others is at the heart of the concept of universal human rights. Through the use of educational and experiential techniques, the new memorial paradigm seeks to make the visitor identify with the victims and thus to teach them empathy: by feeling empathy for the victims, and by bringing the past into the visitor’s present, so that it is not only not distant but is also in a way real and tangible, the hope is that the visitor will be transformed morally and internalize the imperative ‘never again.’ As we have shown, the naming of individual victims does much to make them human in the eyes of visitors and to inspire some form of identification. But many of today’s memorials go further: the Kigali Center not only has rooms of clothing (a Cornell sweatshirt, a Superman sheet) and personal effects (a pipe, a rosary) and family photographs, but also has a children’s memorial which consists of photographs and facts about children murdered in the genocide (favorite food, best friend, favorite sport, last words . . .). At the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, the mug shots of the prisoners are displayed, at once making the victims individual human beings, and demonstrating the scale of the atrocities. By looking into each victim’s frightened, defiant or resigned eyes, the visitor cannot help but empathize and identify with the victims. Smaller scale memorials also attempt to put the viewer in the victim’s shoes: in Berlin, for example, throughout the city, small plaques are set into the sidewalk at the homes of people killed in the Holocaust. Though they have little information – name, dates of birth, deportation and death – these small memorial plaques individualize those people who disappeared from the very streets where one is strolling today. Theodor Adorno (1998) believed it was the ‘coldness’ of reason that lay at the heart of modern society and its most damning moment – Auschwitz; today’s memorials are attempting, through the particular experiences that they create for their visitors and the knowledge that they impart about the violence of the past, to educate against this

82

Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow

coldness and to inspire empathy in their visitors in order to prevent similar atrocities from occurring again.

Conclusion While understanding and identifying this new paradigm of memorialization is relatively easy, measuring its effectiveness and the success of these memorials is notoriously difficult. As we have already pointed out, measuring ‘never again’ is next to impossible; all we need do is look at the history of the twentieth century to have serious doubts as to whether genocide or other mass crimes can be prevented or even stopped. Yet, this seemingly worldwide consensus that to learn from the past is to promote a better future suggests that perhaps there is something more to it or at the very least that it is important to consider whether never again is indeed a plausible goal for memorials to set and whether this new memorial paradigm might ‘work.’ To this end, the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) in 2007 organized a survey of visitors to the Choeung Ek killing fields outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The site itself, essentially a mass grave with a memorial stupa and scant narrative explanation of what happened at the site, focuses on the brutality of the deaths that occurred at the killing field and is one of the ‘must-see’ tourist destinations of Cambodia, together with Angkor Wat, the National Museum and Royal Palace. As such, many of the visitors to the site are international tourists with little knowledge or understanding of the Cambodian genocide. The ICTJ’s survey of approximately 80 visitors, most of whom were international, determined that indeed there was learning occurring at the site. Visitors came away with the very clear message that the Cambodian genocide happened and that it was horrible in its brutality and breadth. However, the simplicity of the message, and the lack of deeper interpretation and education at the site, means that much context is not conveyed: the Khmer Rouge regime, the Cold War context and especially the identities and individuality of the victims and the perpetrators are left out of the lesson. So, while learning does occur, the question remains whether knowing that a genocide occurred in Cambodia is enough to inspire transformation in visitors to the memorial, and in fact in the international community that is largely responsible for preventing and stopping atrocity and genocide. While this and other studies conducted by the sites themselves and by outside groups and scholars are helpful in beginning to determine whether indeed memorials can ‘work’ to prevent future violence, they

Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro

83

may raise as many questions as they answer. What is clear, though, is that there is no slowdown in constructing these new, pedagogical, experiential memorials that are intended explicitly to use the past in the service of a better future. And while we remain skeptical that learning about the past will lead to non-repetition in the future, we see that memory is used in the new memorials in a way that reflects present desires and ideals for the future; only the future itself will reveal whether they are successful.

Notes 1. See http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/frame/Virtual_e/tour_e/guide2_4.html (accessed 3 January 2010). 2. The Argentine National Congress passed a law designating the site as such in 2004. For more on the Escuela de Suboficiales de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), see http://www.memoriaabierta.org.ar/eng/camino_al_museo3.php (accessed 3 January 2010). 3. Many of the cases examined in this chapter were compiled by the International Center for Transitional Justice’s Memory, Memorials and Museums Project, headed by Louis Bickford. The Memorials project collected data on approximately 50 international public memorials between 2002–09, including most or all of the following for each memorial: (1) mandate and terms of reference; (2) relevant legislation; (3) newspaper articles and clippings; (4) images of the memorial, either in video or photographs; (5) interviews with key actors; (6) scholarly articles; and (7) other supporting materials about the history and development of the memorial. Research assistance for the Memorials project: Tal Avivi, Jon Connolly, Samantha Hinds, Ana Jelenkovic, Sarah Kellner, Lisa Moore, Brigitte Sion and Amy Sodaro. Additional case studies are chosen from dissertation research by Amy Sodaro. For more information on the cases examined here and others, see http://www.memoryandjustice.org (accessed 11 January 2010). 4. Examples of the link between dealing with the past and acceptance in the international community abound: for example, both BosniaHerzegovina and Serbia’s bid for European Union acceptance rely strongly on cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (see http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/press_corner/keydocuments/reports_oct_2009_en.htm (accessed 29 January 2010)); it is also well known that Turkey is under tremendous pressure by the European Union to acknowledge the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians in 1915, and that perhaps its accession may depend upon facing this past (see http://europa.eu/bulletin/en/200609/p136002.htm (accessed 29 January 2010)). In other parts of the world it is equally important: Rwanda, for example, is a darling of the international community and receives a great deal of aid in large part because the current Kagame regime is believed to have done a satisfactory job of dealing with the past (Gourevitch 2009); however, in other cases such as El Salvador (see Santamaria-Balmaceda in this volume),

84

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow while there was international pressure to address the past in the form of a UN truth commission, such efforts are not necessarily successful. http://www.info.gov.za/speeches/2000/000601217p1001.htm (accessed 29 January 2010). See ‘Se firmo el decreto que declara monument historic el patio 29 del cementerio general’ on the website of the Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales de Chile: http://www.monumentos.cl (accessed 26 September 2007). An excellent examination of these questions in Morocco is Susan Slyomovics’s 2005 The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press). For more information on the Yad Vashem naming project, see their website: http://www1.yadvashem.org/remembrance/names/site/home_names.html (accessed 5 January 2010). Mémoire pour L’Avenir, a group headed by Lebanese journalist and public figure Amal Makaram, floated this proposal (author interview, December 2005). This discussion of the Bruce Lee memorial comes from Louis Bickford’s interviews with Veselin Gatalo, co-founder of Urban Movement, which created the Bruce Lee memorial, in Mostar in June 2005. See also http:// memoryandjustice.org/article/discussion-of-mostars-bruce-lee-statue (accessed 5 January 2010). These emerge from interviews with staff members of the Kosovar Research and Documentation Institute (KODI) and the Humanitarian Law Center in Kosovo (HLC) during the Bickford’s visit to Pristina, where he was invited by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) to discuss memorialization initiatives, June 2005. Novick (2000) has a particular method of measuring ‘never again,’ however, which may or may not be useful, depending on the situation. He asks the question ‘has Holocaust remembrance led the US government to intervene to stop genocides?’ and then looks to the many examples where this has not occurred, concluding, therefore, that he has ‘doubts about the usefulness of the Holocaust as a bearer of lessons’ and is ‘skeptical about the so-called lessons of history’ (Novick 2000, p. 261). Although, transforming major national prisons such as Alcatraz or nineteenth-century Australian prisons is common, many of these efforts were more ‘antiquarian’ than ‘critical.’ That is, these prisons were transformed to teach people what the past was like, but they do not necessarily make strong links between past and present prison conditions, for example.

References Adorno, Theodor. 1998. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. New York: Columbia University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. Barkan, Elazar. 2003. ‘Restitution and amending historical injustices in international morality,’ in John Torpey (ed.), Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 91–102.

Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro

85

Bickford, Louis. 2004. ‘Transitional justice.’ Macmillan Encyclopedia of Genocide. http://www.ictj.org/static/TJApproaches/WhatisTJ/macmillan.TJ.eng.pdf (accessed 5 January 2010). Brysk, Alison. 1994. The Politics of Human Rights in Argentina: Protest, Change, and Democratization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cairns, Alan. 2003. ‘Coming to terms with the past,’ in John Torpey (ed.), Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 63–90. Carrier, Peter. 2005. Holocaust Monuments and National Memory: France and Germany Since 1989. New York: Berghahn. Cushman, Thomas. 2003. ‘Is genocide preventable? Some philosophical considerations.’ Journal of Genocide Research 5(4), pp. 523–42. Edkins, Jenny. 2003. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fernandez, Paloma Aguilar and Carsten Humlebaek. 2002. ‘Collective memory and national identity in the Spanish democracy: The legacies of Francoism and the Civil War.’ History & Memory 14(1/2), pp. 121–64. Gourevitch, Philip. 2009. ‘A reporter at large. “The Life After.”’ The New Yorker, 4 May. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger (eds). 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge Cambridge University Press. Hunt, Lynn. 2007. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W.W. Norton. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Laqueur, Thomas W. 1996. ‘Memory and naming in the Great War,’ in John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 150–67. Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider. 2006. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Michalski, Sergiusz. 1998. Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997. London: Reaktion Books. Mosse, George. 1990. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. Untimely Meditations. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Novick, Peter. 2000. The Holocaust in American Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Olick, Jeffrey. 2007. The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. New York: Routledge. Richard, Sandell. 2006. Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference. New York: Routledge. Savage, Kirk. 1994. ‘The politics of memory: Black emancipation and the civil war monument,’ in John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 127–49. Sodaro, Amy. Forthcoming. ‘Sixteen years later: remembering the Rwandan Genocide in the Kigali Memorial Center,’ in Cynthia Milton and Erica Lehrer (eds.), Curating Difficult Knowledge. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

86

Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow

Tilly, Charles. 2008. ‘Memorials to credit and blame.’ The American Interest 3(5), pp. 64–74. Torpey, John. 2003. ‘Introduction,’ in John Torpey (ed.), Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 1–34. Winter, Jay. 1998. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worth, Robert F. 2006. ‘Kurds destroy shrine in rage at leadership.’ New York Times, 17 March. Young, James E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Part II Forms and Genres Narrative, Oral History and Visual Memory – How the Form Serves the Aim

This page intentionally left blank

5 The Role of Conversations in Shaping Individual and Collective Memory, Attitudes and Behavior Jonathan Koppel and William Hirst

Memory often serves as the foundation or impetus for our opinions and actions. This holds at both the individual and group levels. On the individual level, Pillemer and colleagues have documented, in a series of book chapters and papers, the directive function of autobiographical memory (for a review, see Pillemer 2003). Pillemer gives the example of a woman who, at her parents’ high school reunion, was initially too shy to speak to the other guests. At her parents’ prodding and encouragement, however, she eventually did interact with a number of other people, and subsequently enjoyed herself. Since then, upon finding herself in other social situations involving unfamiliar people, she draws upon this memory as a reminder that she need not be intimidated, and to encourage herself to approach others. Just as autobiographical memory shapes behavior at the individual level, so does collective memory shape attitudes and behaviors at the group level. For instance, Robert Kaplan’s political and historical travelogue, Balkan Ghosts (1993), illustrates the pervasive influence of collective memory on the modern-day Balkans. Kaplan views Balkan society as steeped in the past, and he endeavors to elucidate contemporary attitudes and behaviors by contextualizing them within the history of the region. By Kaplan’s telling, the Serbian revolt against the Yugoslav federation in the late eighties was motivated by the Serbs’ identification of Yugoslavia with the Ottoman Empire of the fourteenth century, which had effectively ended Serbian influence by defeating the Serbian army in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. The Serbs viewed Yugoslav nationalism as an anti-Serbian plot, just as the Ottoman Empire had plotted to, and succeeded in, rendering Serbia powerless 600 years earlier. In mobilizing the Serbs against the Yugoslav federation, Serbian President 89

90

Conversations, Memory and Behavior

Slobodan Milosevic appealed to the fear of defeat and powerlessness that had been engendered in his countrymen through their collective memory of the Battle of Kosovo (see Sadowski 1998 for a critique of Kaplan’s assertions). Indeed, in Kaplan’s (1993) telling, the influence of the past is strong enough that emotions engendered by it are impervious to modern events that might mitigate them. For instance, Hungarians and Romanians in the city of Timisoara found common cause in demonstrating against Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu’s attempts to evict Hungarian pastor Laszlo Tokes. The protests became a full-fledged antigovernment revolt and led to Ceausescu’s overthrow and execution. This unity between Romanians and Hungarians was not achieved in Transylvania, however, where hostilities between the two groups have historically run especially high due to the shifting balance of power between both parties. There, Hungarians and Romanians were unable to unite in revolt; the weight of their past hatred was too great to overcome. Given how memory is conjoined with attitudes and behavior, to understand attitudes and behavior one must account for the factors that play a role in shaping memory. One such factor is social influences on memory. The central aim of the present chapter, then, is to elucidate how social influences, through their effect on memory, influence our attitudes and behaviors. Social influences on memory can be categorized into two broad types. The first type is public representations of events, such as museums, monuments, textbooks or the media (for a review, see Hirst and Manier 2008). The second type is private interactions about an event – that is, conversations. To streamline discussion, we leave aside the role of public representations, and focus on conversations.

The influence of conversations on individual and collective memory, attitudes and behavior In recent years, psychologists have studied the mnemonic consequences of conversations in some detail. They have found that not all conversations are created equal: some conversations exert a relatively strong impact on the individual and collective memory of its participants, while others exert a relatively weak one. In the following section, we review the variables bearing on the influence a given conversation will eventually hold over the memories of its participants. In doing so, we need to recognize two points about conversations. First, conversations do not take place in a vacuum, but, rather, the

Jonathan Koppel and William Hirst

91

mnemonic consequences of a conversation are affected by conversational dynamics and the relationships between conversational partners – for instance, if one individual is in a position of power over the others. In the foregoing, we attempt to account for such factors. Second, a particular conversation does not necessarily hold similar mnemonic influence over each interlocutor. Specifically, we divide conversational partners into two categories, speakers and listeners. A given conversation may differentially affect the memories of speakers and listeners. For instance, listeners may find their memory substantially altered and reshaped by a conversation, while the same conversation may merely serve to reinforce speakers’ pre-existing memory. Therefore, we take up separately the effect of speakers on speakers, and the effect of speakers on listeners.

The effect of speaker on speaker Research on the saying-is-believing effect has shed light on the ways in which speakers’ statements regarding the past shape their subsequent memories (for a review, see Higgins 1999). In short, in describing a target subject (in existing studies, most typically another person), speakers tend toward adopting their audience’s attitude. In the standard saying-is-believing paradigm, a participant reads an essay containing ambiguous information about a target subject (for example, that he or she uses coupons or buys things on sale). Such information can be interpreted either positively (that the target subject is frugal) or negatively (that he or she is cheap). The participant is then asked to describe the target subject to an audience who, the participant is told, either likes or dislikes the target subject. When the participant believes the audience likes the target subject, they describe the subject favorably; when they believe the audience dislikes the target subject, they describe the subject unfavorably. This process of tailoring one’s message to the audience’s perspective is known as audience tuning (Higgins 1992). Audience tuning has mnemonic consequences. The speaker’s subsequent memory of the target reflects how they described him or her to their audience. Speakers come to remember and believe what they said about the target, rather than what they originally read about him or her. This saying-is-believing effect is not an inevitable byproduct of audience tuning. In order for speakers to come to believe their own description of a target, two conditions need to be met: (1) speakers need to be motivated to create a shared reality and (2) any effort on their part to create a shared reality must be experienced as successful. Where either

92

Conversations, Memory and Behavior

condition is not met, then neither a shared reality between speaker and listener nor the saying-is-believing effect will occur. Consider those cases in which the first condition is not met. The desire to create a shared reality with one’s audience is likely the default motivation for a speaker to audience tune. However, Echterhoff et al. (2008) designed several manipulations providing speakers with alternate motivations to audience tune. In one such manipulation, speakers were asked to speak to an out-group member. Specifically, German college students were asked to speak to a Turkish student from their own university. The authors reasoned that, in this case, though speakers would still audience tune, they would do so more out of politeness than a desire to forge a shared reality. Indeed, speakers did audience tune. However, underscoring the importance of motivation to create a shared reality to the saying-is-believing effect, speakers’ subsequent recall was not biased in the direction of their message. Even where speakers are motivated to create a shared reality, they may still perceive their efforts to have failed. In these cases, as well, the saying-is-believing effect will not occur. For instance, Echterhoff et al. (2005) had participants go through the classic saying-is-believing paradigm. Participants were told their audience personally knew the target person and would be asked to identify him based on the participant’s description. They were later given feedback that the audience’s identification of the target was either successful or unsuccessful. The saying-isbelieving effect occurred in the successful identification condition, but not in the failed identification condition. Further analyses revealed that the effect of successful or failed identification was mediated through the speaker’s experience of shared reality with the audience, as operationalized by their level of trust in the audience’s judgment of other people.

Implications for attitudes and behavior We have established that (1) memory shapes attitudes and behavior and (2) a speaker’s recounting to an audience influences their subsequent memory, but only when the conversation results in the creation of a shared reality between its participants. From these tenets, it follows that a speaker’s recounting will, likewise, shape their later attitudes and behavior, but only in those cases where a shared reality is formed. For instance, a speaker will later think and act in a manner consistent with dialogue they held with an in-group member, but not with dialogue they held with an out-group member. If we apply this principle to the mutual animosity that Kaplan (1993) describes between Hungarians and Romanians, a Hungarian’s

Jonathan Koppel and William Hirst

93

hostility toward Romanians would be exacerbated through talking about Romanians to a fellow Hungarian. The Hungarian in this case would audience tune by describing Romanians in unflattering terms. Since this conversation would result in the creation of a shared reality between speaker and listener, the speaker’s distaste for Hungarians would be solidified through the conversation. In contrast, were a Hungarian to discuss Romanians with another Romanian, even though he or she would likely audience tune by describing Romanians positively, no shared reality would emerge as a consequence of this conversation. Therefore, the conversation would have no impact on the speaker’s subsequent attitudes.

The effect of speaker on listener Speakers shape their listeners’ memories in at least two discrete ways: through social contagion and induced forgetting. In social contagion, the speaker either implants an entirely new (that is, false) memory in a listener, or reshapes the listener’s memory for something he or she has experienced. In either case, the speaker has transmitted his or her recollections into the listener. In induced forgetting, the speaker’s recollections cause the listener to forget other material. Here, speakers shape their listeners’ memories not by adding new memories, but by rendering inaccessible a selection of those memories the listener already holds. Both social contagion and induced forgetting shape individual as well as collective memories. In social contagion, collective memories are formed as group members’ memories converge around the same information or material. In induced forgetting, a similar convergence takes place, not by the group remembering the same information, but by their forgetting the same information. One can readily deduce the relevance of both social contagion and induced forgetting to future attitudes and behavior: if memory shapes thoughts and behavior, then memories that are transmitted from a speaker to a listener will hold such consequences as well. Similarly, a speaker’s erasure of a listener’s memories also possesses attitudinal and behavioral ramifications, albeit in negative form: where a listener’s memories would have shaped future thoughts and behavior, the erasure of those same memories means the thoughts and behaviors following from them will never come to fruition. Social contagion Psychologists have found social contagion for material participants study in a laboratory, as well as for autobiographical events. In

94

Conversations, Memory and Behavior

laboratory settings, a typical social contagion paradigm (Wright et al. 2000) involves having dyads study specific source material, such as pictures or stories. Though the pair has been led to believe they have each studied identical source material, there are in fact differences in what individual participants have studied. The partners then discuss the source material with one another. Social contagion is considered to have occurred in those cases where, on a later recall task, participants falsely recall the source material according to how their partner described it, rather than what they actually studied. The induction of false autobiographical memories represents a particularly dramatic form of social contagion. Loftus and colleagues have pioneered work along these lines (for a review, see Loftus and Bernstein 2005). In one well-known, representative study (Loftus and Pickrell 1995), participants were asked to describe four events that were supplied by a family member. Three of the events were true, and one was false. In some cases, participants subsequently took on memories for the spurious events. Social contagion is by no means an unusual or rare phenomenon, as one study estimated that, across the literature on social contagion for false autobiographical memories, such attempts are successful in approximately 30 per cent of participants (Lindsay et al. 2004). Nonetheless, several factors impact the degree to which social contagion occurs. Here, we will focus on two such factors: conversational dynamics and characteristics of the speaker. Conversational dynamics – one constraint on levels of social contagion is that shared memories are introduced into conversational remembering with greater frequency than unshared memories (Stasser and Titus 1985). This shared-memory bias arises for purely mathematical reasons: if the probability of a single group member recalling a memory is equal for all memories – shared and unshared – then the odds of a given memory being mentioned are higher when the memory is held by two or more group members. Nonetheless, this dynamic obviously inhibits social contagion in that social contagion requires that listeners be exposed to new information. Where conversations consist primarily of shared memories, they will serve to reinforce memories held before the conversation, rather than as a mechanism for social contagion. There are, however, exceptions to the shared-memory bias. In particular, as illustrated in several studies on group remembering conducted in our laboratory, a dominant Narrator often emerges in group discussions (Hirst and Manier 1996). Dominant Narrators are individuals who

Jonathan Koppel and William Hirst

95

contribute to group recounting to a disproportionate degree. Because they dominate the discussion, these individuals are more likely to introduce their unshared memories into group recounting than are nonNarrators. Thus, the existence of a dominant Narrator facilitates social contagion, as dominant Narrators expose their listeners to information they did not previously possess. Rather than merely serving to reinforce previously held memories, conversations with a dominant Narrator transmit the dominant Narrator’s unique recollections into the memory of individual group members, and, by extension, the group’s collective memory. Characteristics of the speaker – we noted earlier that power relationships between conversational partners are an important consideration in discussing the mnemonic consequences of conversations. One form a power dynamic can take is represented by cases in which speakers are perceived as holding expertise regarding the topic under discussion. Such speakers induce social contagion at especially high rates (Brown et al. 2009; Smith and Ellsworth 1987). In the experiments examining the effects of speaker expertise, speakers generally do not truly hold special expertise, but, rather, listeners are misled into thinking they do. The mere perception that the speaker is an expert is sufficient to render him or her a more effective transmitter of social contagion. Extrapolating to larger groups – although the research we describe was conducted on pairs or small groups, we expect these findings to apply to the formation of collective memories in larger groups, such as cultures or nations as well. The reader may object that this extrapolation is unwarranted. We meet such objections with two counterpoints. First, there is no obvious reason to expect these dynamics to vary across groups of different sizes. Second, we would hardly expect the collective memory of a small group to stay confined within that group. Rather, we would expect group members to spread the group’s collective memory by sharing it with other individuals outside the group, who in turn will share it with still more individuals, ad infinitum (Harber and Cohen 2005). In this way, what starts as the collective memory of a small group could progressively become the collective memory of an exponentially larger and larger group. To be sure, cultural groups and nations bring to bear a host of cultural norms and expectations when discussing their shared past, as well as visions of both the present and future. These factors may all mitigate or moderate social contagion. It is highly doubtful, however, that they render either the effect, or the influence of conversational dynamics and social contagion, nonexistent.

96

Conversations, Memory and Behavior

Implications for attitudes and behavior Social contagion shapes attitudes and behavior by providing individuals and groups with new memories from which to form opinions and on which to act. At the individual level, the literature on eyewitness memory provides the starkest illustration of the power of social contagion to subsequently shape behavior. Social contagion for events pertaining to a crime scene can lead a witness to falsely describe what transpired by, for instance, incorrectly identifying the supposed perpetrator (Wright et al. 2009). At the collective level, group behavior can likewise be shaped through social contagion. In the witch hunts of early modern Europe and seventeenth century Salem, for example, the induction of false beliefs about others – which we can consider a type of semantic memory – spurred behavior on a massive scale (Russell, 2007). More recently (c. 2002), we can view the widespread belief in the US populace that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) as a false semantic memory induced through social contagion. In this case, social contagion enabled the commencement of a war. Just as a speaker’s message will shape their behavior only under those conditions conducive to the saying-is-believing effect, social contagion will have the strongest implications for attitudes and behavior under those conditions most favorable for its occurrence (for example, when the speaker is a dominant Narrator or expert). For instance, at the individual level, a dominant Narrator or expert is best positioned to induce social contagion regarding a crime scene and, thus, to bias eyewitness testimony. Similarly, at the group level, the US government’s induction of the false semantic memory that Iraq possessed WMDs was facilitated by the high level of credibility the government was perceived as holding on the issue.

Induced forgetting Just as the transmission of a memory from a speaker to a listener results in mnemonic convergence between the two, the same is true if a speaker induces shared forgetting in both themselves and a listener. Our concern here is with what Zerubavel (2006) has referred to as ‘silences,’ the material that goes unmentioned in a conversation. Whether such silences are intentional or not, our interest is in the mnemonic consequences of those silences. Clearly, mentioned information is most likely to be remembered subsequent to a conversation due to the benefits of rehearsal. A related

Jonathan Koppel and William Hirst

97

question, however, is whether unmentioned material is subsequently forgotten – and, if so, if there are systematic patterns regarding which unmentioned material is most vulnerable to forgetting. Anderson et al. (1994) explored this issue by distinguishing between unmentioned material that is semantically related to rehearsed material and unmentioned material that is unrelated to rehearsed material. The question, in their case, was whether there are differences in how well individuals later recall related, unmentioned material versus subsequent recall for unrelated, unmentioned material. Toward that end, Anderson et al. (1994) had participants study category-exemplar pairs such as animal-dog, animal-cat, vegetable-broccoli and vegetable-pea. Afterwards, they received retrieval practice by completing stems (for example, animal-d___). This retrieval practice was selective, so that some pairs were practiced (animal-dog), but not other related pairs (animal-cat), while whole sets of pairs were excluded entirely (for example, all the vegetable pairs). This procedure created three types of items: practiced items (Rp+; animal-dog), unpracticed items related to practiced items (Rp−; animal-cat) and unpracticed items unrelated to practiced items (Nrp; the vegetable pairs). On a final recall task, participants, as one would expect, remembered Rp+ items the best. More to the point, Rp− items were remembered less well than Nrp items. Anderson termed this phenomenon retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). Anderson et al. (1994) attributed RIF to participants inhibiting related items during the retrieval practice phase; in order to retrieve the stem animal-d____, Anderson et al. theorized, participants must inhibit related items, such as animal-cat, in that these items compete with the sought-after item. There is, however, no need to inhibit unrelated items, such as the vegetable pairs, since these items are not in competition with the correct answer. Following from Anderson et al. (1994), RIF has since been found in numerous and diverse studies, employing a wide range of stimulus material (for a review, see Anderson and Levy 2007). Given that RIF is found in speakers, and across a wide variety of settings, two related issues are whether RIF arises out of naturalistic contexts (such as conversations), and whether RIF applies to listeners as well as speakers. If both conditions were true, then RIF would carry profound implications for the mnemonic influence of social interaction. If a speaker wishes to induce forgetting in a listener, after all, they appear to have two strategies at their disposal. They can either (1) ignore a particular topic entirely or (2) discuss the topic, while omitting any reference to the one specific piece of information they want the listener to forget. For instance, if a husband wishes his wife to forget a hurtful comment

98

Conversations, Memory and Behavior

he made while they were on vacation, he can either avoid mentioning the vacation at all, or, alternatively, he can discuss the vacation while not referring to the specific comment he wants her to forget. If conversations induce RIF, and if this applies to listeners as well as speakers, then the latter course would be the more effective method of inducing forgetting in one’s listeners. We investigated this issue by extending Anderson et al.’s (1994) findings across several experiments (Cuc et al. 2007). In the experiment most relevant for our purposes (Experiment 3), we created a conversational analogue of Anderson et al.’s original paradigm. We employed stories as stimulus material, with the stories consisting of a number of discrete episodes each containing several specific events, thereby creating episode-event pairs equivalent to Anderson et al.’s category-exemplar pairs. Furthermore, in lieu of the guided retrieval practice of Anderson et al., participants simply recounted the stories to one another. Following the conversation, both speakers and listeners had better recall for material related to that which they discussed (from the same episode), relative to unrelated material (from different episodes). That is, the conversations produced RIF in speakers as well as listeners. We termed RIF in the listener socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (SS-RIF), and recast RIF in the speaker as within-individual retrieval-induced forgetting (WI-RIF). Although our findings demonstrate that conversational interaction yields SS-RIF, we would not predict this to be true of all conversations. SS-RIF, by our reasoning, is contingent on the monitoring strategies of a listener or the social context of a given interaction. This relates not to the cognitive mechanisms underlying SS-RIF, which we take to be identical to those underlying RIF in the speaker. Rather, it pertains to the observation that RIF is, by definition, a product of retrieval. Task demands require that speakers invariably engage in retrieval of the information they are recalling. WI-RIF should, therefore, represent an inevitable consequence of any social interaction. Listeners, however, need not necessarily concurrently retrieve with a speaker in all cases. The extent to which they do so depends on their monitoring strategies, or the goals of a given conversation. Where accuracy is imperative in a conversation, for instance, a listener would be expected to monitor a speaker quite closely. Subsequently, they would co-retrieve along with the speaker. In these cases, we would expect listeners to demonstrate SS-RIF. Where accuracy is of lesser priority, however, listeners may not engage in co-retrieval, and, consequently, may not demonstrate SS-RIF.

Jonathan Koppel and William Hirst

99

Indeed, in one experiment in Cuc et al. (2007; Experiment 1), we manipulated the listener’s level of concurrent retrieval. Rather than looking at SS-RIF as a product of conversational interaction, this experiment simply extended Anderson et al.’s (1994) original paradigm to include pairs of participants. In short, as our framework would predict, we found SS-RIF where listeners were compelled to closely monitor the speaker, but did not find it where listeners were not compelled to do so. Although, in the conversation experiment in Cuc et al. (2007) described above, listeners received no specific monitoring instructions, we presume that the listener’s implicit, default task demand in collaborative recounting is to monitor for accuracy. This would account for why listeners evinced SS-RIF. However, our findings suggest that SS-RIF would not extend to conversations in which different goals are operative (for example, where conversational partners are merely trying to amuse one another). Nevertheless, inasmuch as monitoring for accuracy appears to be listeners’ default listening strategy, we would expect SS-RIF to emerge as a consequence of a wide variety of interactions. Indeed, though we have just begun to explore the possibilities of the SS-RIF paradigm, it appears to be a robust phenomenon. For instance, we have found SS-RIF, through conversations, for autobiographical memories (Stone et al. in preparation), scientific texts (Meksin and Hirst in preparation), and for both the salient elements and the peripheral details of a story (Stone et al. 2010). Perhaps most intriguingly, we have found that reaction times for one’s flashbulb memories for the attacks of September 11 can be slowed through SS-RIF as well (Coman et al. 2009). Therefore, even consequential, personally important memories can be rendered less accessible – if not completely forgotten – through SS-RIF. Clearly, SS-RIF holds important ramifications. To return to our original question as to the strategy speakers should employ in order to induce forgetting in a listener, the existence of SS-RIF indicates that the optimal strategy would be to discuss information related to what they want the listener to forget, while excluding the specific information they wish to be forgotten. The robustness of the SS-RIF effect indicates that this strategy should be successful across a range of contexts. At the same time, given that SS-RIF is contingent on the listener’s closely monitoring the speaker, this strategy may not be as effective when the listener is disinclined to do so. Extrapolating to groups – although there has not been any research probing for SS-RIF in groups greater than two, we suspect the

100 Conversations, Memory and Behavior

phenomenon extends to groups of various sizes. Our justification for extrapolating SS-RIF to larger groups parallels our rationale for similarly extrapolating social contagion to larger groups. Namely, there is no obvious reason why the processes resulting in SS-RIF (that is, the retrieval of information leading to the inhibition of related information) should have differential consequences for groups than they do for individuals. Furthermore, just as social contagion spreads from smaller groups to larger ones, so should induced forgetting spread across progressively larger groups: if a small group is induced to forget about an event through SS-RIF, then each individual in that group will fail to mention the event to others. This will induce forgetting for the event in a new set of individuals, who, in turn, will induce forgetting for the event in people they speak to, by again failing to mention it. In this way, as with social contagion, we imagine SS-RIF tends to spread quickly across large groups.

Implications for attitudes and behavior Just as social contagion shapes individual and group attitudes and behavior by providing individuals and groups with new memories, we posit that induced forgetting shapes individual and group attitudes and behavior through the opposite means: as memories of individuals and groups are erased, where these memories would have once formed the basis of opinions and set specific behaviors in motion, now they will fail to do so. In our initial example of the husband who wishes his wife to forget about his hurtful comment, we can imagine that the wife’s memory of the comment would, in turn, anger her and trigger corresponding behavior; perhaps, it would lead her to insult him in kind whenever she recalled the comment. However, if the husband induces his wife to forget the comment, neither her anger, nor any actions following from it, will take place. Similarly, though the literature on eyewitness testimony has focused on how social contagion shapes such testimony, one can easily imagine induced forgetting having the same effect. Someone who has witnessed a crime, for instance, only to have their memory of the scene weakened through SS-RIF, may subsequently give incomplete or inaccurate testimony regarding it. This faulty testimony may enable the perpetrator to be acquitted, or result in the wrongful conviction of an innocent individual. At the group level, where groups come to forget about an event through SS-RIF, then that event will no longer exert an influence

Jonathan Koppel and William Hirst

101

over collective attitudes and behavior. For instance, in Kaplan’s (1993) account of the animosity between Serbs and the Yugoslav government, if the Serbs had been induced to forget about the Battle of Kosovo, they would not have viewed the Yugoslav government with such hostility and would not have risen against it. Lest the reader object that one could not possibly induce forgetting for an event as momentous as the Battle of Kosovo, we again note that Coman et al. (2009) found that accessibility of even flashbulb memories of September 11 can be hindered through SS-RIF. Moreover, totalitarian regimes appear to have had success in eradicating certain people, facts and events from their country’s collective memory, by deleting any reference to them in textbooks and other historical materials (Ferro 1984). Socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting, in that case, may represent a powerful tool for any leader: if a leader wishes to obviate the mnemonic and behavioral influence of an unfortunate event, he may need only to induce collective forgetting of it through SS-RIF. Additionally, just as levels of social contagion, and its ensuing ramifications for attitudes and behavior, are contingent on conversational dynamics, the same is true of induced forgetting. Although WI-RIF appears to hold regardless of conversational setting, SS-RIF should be found only in accuracy-focused conversations in which listeners closely monitor the veracity of the speaker’s recollections. Therefore, though speakers’ actions should be shaped through induced forgetting as a consequence of any interaction, listeners’ actions will be shaped only by relatively sober-minded, accuracy-focused conversations.

Conclusion Two themes have shaped the present chapter: (1) that our memories are a product of social interactions and (2) that memories influence future attitude and behavior. Both the memories of speakers and listeners are shaped and reshaped as conversations unfold, and the effect of these conversations linger for a long time after the conversations themselves are only a distant memory. This interplay between social interaction, memorizing and remembering underscores how the simple, quotidian acts of conversational remembering that dominate our daily social interactions cannot simply guide, but determine the future. People no doubt know at some level that future attitude and behavior is influenced by what they remember. They may even be aware that memories are not a reappearance of stored trace, but an active

102 Conversations, Memory and Behavior

reconstruction based in part on social interactions. But what the research we have presented here underscores is that it is terribly easy for even a single conversation to remold a memory, not just of the individual who does the remembering, but also for those listening to the remembering. This observation holds for rather dry and arcane material, such as a list of word pairs, or for something as rich, complex and emotionally charged as memories of the terrorist attack of September 11. Moreover, the degree to which a conversation can change the content of a memory will vary as a function of the nature of the conversational interaction, the character of both speaker and listener and the social relationships between speaker and listener. Simply put, social factors have a way of asserting themselves into the process of memorizing and remembering. In his classic study of collective memory, Halbwachs (1992 [1925]) emphasized the social nature of memory. The research we have reviewed provides a fairly detailed account of how the psychological mechanisms of memorizing and remembering are structured by social interactions such as conversations and, as a result, these mechanisms tie the future not simply to the past, but to the social fabric stretching across past and present and into the future.

References Anderson, Michael C. and Benjamin Levy. 2007. ‘Theoretical issues in inhibition: insights from research on human memory,’ in D.S. Gorfein and C.M. MacLeod (eds), Inhibition in Cognition. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, pp. 81–102. Anderson, Michael C., Robert A.Bjork and Elizabeth Bjork. 1994. ‘Remembering can cause forgetting: retrieval dynamics in long-term memory.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20(5), pp. 1063–87. Brown, Adam D., Alin Coman and William Hirst. 2009. ‘The role of narratorship and expertise in social remembering.’ Social Psychology 40(3), pp. 19–29. Coman, Alin, David Manier and William Hirst. 2009. ‘Forgetting the unforgettable through conversation: socially-shared retrieval-induced forgetting of September 11 memories.’ Psychological Science 20(5), pp. 627–33. Cuc, Alex, Jonathan Koppel and William Hirst. 2007. ‘Silence is not golden: a case for socially-shared retrieval-induced forgetting.’ Psychological Science 18(8), pp. 727–33. Echterhoff, Gerald, Tory E. Higgins and Stephan Groll. 2005. ‘Audience-tuning effects on memory: the role of shared reality.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89(3), pp. 257–76. Echterhoff, Gerald, Tory E.Higgins, Renè Kopietz and Stephan Groll. 2008. ‘How communication goals determine when audience tuning biases memory.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology 137(1), pp. 3–21.

Jonathan Koppel and William Hirst

103

Ferro, Marc. 1984. The Use and Abuse of History, or, How the Past is Taught. London: Routledge. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992 [1925]. On Collective Memory. Translated by L.A. Coser. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Harber, Kent D. and Dov Cohen. 2005. ‘The emotional broadcaster theory of social sharing.’ Journal of Language and Social Psychology 24(4), pp. 382–400. Higgins, E. Tory. 1992. ‘Achieving “shared reality” in the communication game: a social action that creates meaning.’ Journal of Language and Social Psychology 11(3), pp. 107–31. Higgins, E. Tory. 1999. ‘ “Saying is believing” effects: when sharing reality about something biases knowledge and evaluations,’ in L.L. Thompson, J.M. Levine and D.M. Messick (eds), Shared Cognition in Organizations: The Management of Knowledge. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 33–48. Hirst, William and David Manier. 1996. ‘Remembering as communication: a family recounts its past,’ in D.C. Rubin (ed.), Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 271–90. Hirst, William and David Manier. 2008. ‘Towards a psychology of collective memory.’ Memory 16(3), pp. 183–200. Kaplan, Robert D. 1993. ‘Balkan ghosts.’ A Journey through History. New York: St Martin’s Press. Lindsay, D. Stephan, Lisa Hagen, Don J. Read, Kimberly Wade and Maryanne Garry. 2004. ‘True photographs and false memories.’ Psychological Science 15(3), pp. 149–54. Loftus, Elizabeth F. and Daniel M. Bernstein. 2005. ‘Rich false memories: the royal road to success,’ in A. Healy (ed.), Experimental Cognitive Psychology and its Applications. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press, pp. 101–13. Loftus, Elizabeth F. and Jacqueline Pickrell. 1995. ‘The formation of false memories.’ Psychiatric Annals 25(12), pp. 720–5. Meksin, Robert and William Hirst. ‘Socially-shared retrieval-induced forgetting for educational material.’ Manuscript in preparation. Pillemer, David B. 2003. ‘Directive functions of autobiographical memory: the guiding power of the specific episode.’ Memory 11(2), pp. 193–203. Russell, Jeffrey B. 2007. A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans, 2nd edn. New York: Thames and Hudson. Sadowski, Yahya. 1998. The Myth of Global Chaos. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Smith, Vicki L. and Phoebe Ellsworth. 1987. ‘The social psychology of eyewitness accuracy: misleading questions and communicator expertise.’ Journal of Applied Psychology 72(2), pp. 294–300. Stasser, Gerald and William Titus. 1985. ‘Pooling of unshared information in group decision making: biased information sampling during discussion.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53(1), pp. 81–93. Stone, Charles B., Amanda Barnier, John Sutton and William Hirst. 2010. ‘Building consensus about the past: schema consistency and convergence in socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting.’ Memory, (2), pp. 170–184. Stone, Charles B., Amanda Barnier, John Sutton and William Hirst. ‘Socially-shared retrieval-induced forgetting for autobiographical memories.’ Manuscript in preparation.

104 Conversations, Memory and Behavior Wright, Daniel, Amina Memon, Elin Skagerberg and Fiona Gabbert. 2009. ‘When eyewitnesses talk.’ Current Directions in Psychological Science 18(3), pp. 174–8. Wright, Daniel, Gail Self and Chris Justice. 2000. ‘Memory conformity: exploring misinformation effects when presented by another person.’ British Journal of Psychology 91(2), pp. 189–202. Zerubavel, Eviatar. 2006. The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life. New York: Oxford University Press.

6 Re-Presenting Victim and Perpetrator: The Role of Photographs in US Service Members’ Testimony Against War Kimberly Spring

Since Mathew Brady and his team used the glass-plate camera to document the lives and deaths of soldiers in the US Civil War, photographs have been pivotal to the way we collectively know and remember war. The image of five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the US flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima and that of five Vietnamese children running from a napalm attack near Trang Bang are notable, not just for their aesthetic value, but also for the symbolic meaning they have in the representation of the heroic struggle of the GI in World War II and the brutal tragedy of the Vietnam War. Historically, the visual recording of war has been the purview of journalists; yet, today, the pervasiveness of digital cameras among military service members has transformed the representation of war, to the extent that the photographs of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, taken by Army soldiers Lynndie England and Sabrina Harmon, have had a greater influence on the collective memory of the Iraq War than any other image. The public appearance of these images is also momentous because it has made visible a culture of subjugation and dehumanization within the military, where photographs serve as trophies that celebrate the identity of the service members as oppressors. The images are most shocking to the US public, not because of the abuses portrayed, but because of the apparent enjoyment conveyed through the smiling faces of the service members. For a group of US service members who have taken a public stand against the practices of the military, particularly in relation to the Iraq War, the use of photographs to objectify others and boost morale has become symbolic of a misogynistic and racist militarism that corrupts 105

106 Re-Presenting Victim and Perpetrator

service members. Through their accounts of their personal experiences in the military, these service members integrate photographs from their time in Iraq into a form of testimony that I refer to as ‘public atrocity witnessing,’ a social practice that emerged after World War II in which victims of systemic discrimination and violence present public testimony of their suffering as part of an effort to reveal and rectify the injustice of the system. The practice emerges out of the inclusion of the testimony by Holocaust survivors in the 1961 trial of Nazi SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, not for the purpose of providing direct evidence of Eichmann’s guilt, but in order to recognize publicly the suffering caused by the system that he supported. Since then, the practice has been particularly prevalent in the activities of post-conflict truth commissions, such as the hearings on human rights violations during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. More generally, the practice is based on the moral dichotomy of victim (one who unjustly suffers from the system) and perpetrator (one who carries out the violence sanctioned by the system). The validity of this moral dichotomy is based on the denial of equal rights for the victim and the experience of suffering that results from the violation of the individual’s physical and mental integrity. In the case of military service members, the conventional understanding of victim and perpetrator is unsettled, as they present themselves as witnesses not only to the suffering of others, but also to the suffering that they experience as perpetrators. In this way, the testifiers attempt to show how the military’s system of beliefs and practices, as unjust and discriminatory, dehumanize both service members and the Iraqi population. While the attempt by perpetrators to offer public confessions of remorse in authoritarian contexts are most often met with skepticism and derision (Huggins et al. 2002; Payne 2008), the apolitical and self-sacrificing image of soldiers in democratic regimes provides a distinctive, albeit not entirely uncontentious, space for perpetrators to speak as public atrocity witnesses. The practice of public atrocity witnessing is based on the presentation of personal accounts of the past; however, the intention of the practice is to bring those experiences into the present in order to reveal systemic inequity and establish an ethical order based on the recognition of human equality in the future. The event of public atrocity witnessing thus serves as a liminal period in which both witness and audience (re-)experience the suffering of the past, recognize a shared humanity in that experience and construct a vision for a future in which such suffering will not recur. The testifiers serve as witnesses, both in the legal

Kimberly Spring

107

sense of reporting events that they observed and the moral sense of using one’s body as a spectacle of pain to affect the conscience of the listeners, transforming them into witnesses of the witness and moving them to action (Peters 2001). As military service members assume this role of witness, they establish themselves as authorities through their experiences as perpetrators, yet simultaneously construct a narrative of self-realization that allows them to criticize past actions and assert the correct role of the ‘ethical soldier.’ In this process, the photographs from their combat deployments serve a key role in the representation of victim and perpetrator. The reality portrayed through the images brings the past into the present with ‘the always stupefying evidence of this is how it was’ (Barthes 1977, p. 44, emphasis in original) in order to compel the spectator to serve as a witness for the social and human need to transform the military.

A case study As an illustration of how US service members use photographs through public atrocity witnessing, this chapter examines the accounts of 50 veterans who testified at an event in March 2008 in the suburbs of Washington, DC, known as ‘Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations’ (WSIA).1 The event was inspired by the Vietnam War era ‘Winter Soldier Investigation,’ a veteranorganized public hearing during which over 100 veterans of the Vietnam War presented eyewitness testimonies of war crimes. However, the organizers of the 2008 event, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), sought to create, not a public hearing, but ‘a spiritual . . . uninterrupted space for veterans to work out their issues’ (personal interview). The immediate audience to the event consisted of several hundred people, mostly fellow veterans, friends and family, and members of veterans and antiwar organizations, while the testimonies were broadcast via alternative media outlets, such as Pacifica Radio, and streamed online through IVAW’s website. Providing the testimonies to the general public was one aim of the organizers; however, their primary goal was for the candid accounts of the testifiers to influence active duty and veteran service members with similar perspectives in order to recruit them in resistance efforts. The heart of the event was a moral critique of the conduct of war that was aimed, not at the unjustness of war, but the unjustness of a military that sanctions inhumane acts. The testifiers were organized into panels that addressed a number of issues, including proper healthcare for veterans, gender and sexual

108 Re-Presenting Victim and Perpetrator

discrimination in the military, and the political and economic aspects of US foreign policy; however, the event centered around five panels organized around the themes of racism and the absence of clear rules of engagement, during which 33 of the veterans testified about their experiences in combat deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The organizers of WSIA had encouraged these testifiers to show photographs and videos as a way of providing evidence in support of their testimony. Of the 33 veterans that testified on these panels, 14 presented photographs, while another six spoke about the practice of taking photographs. Through an analysis of the photographs presented and the language employed in the testimonies, I demonstrate how individual accounts collectively form a shared speech event that critiques the ways in which military practices cultivate a form of militarism that dehumanizes both service members and the enemy. The analysis builds on previous work on the social role of the traumatic photograph (Barthes 1977; Goldberg 1991; Sontag 2003; Zelizer 2004) while engaging in a critical discourse analysis that examines how the language used in public atrocity witnessing is embedded in relations of power and dependent upon particular social practices (Anthonissen and Blommaert 2007; Katz 1998; Verdoolaege 2008). In the case of the US service members, we see the interplay between the discourse of the military and that of human rights. The event is particularly significant for the way in which it unsettles the moral dichotomy of victim and perpetrator. The service members attempt to demonstrate that systemic discrimination creates not only victims but also perpetrators by manipulating individuals’ patriotic desire to serve and normalizing intolerance and violence. In this way, the service members are victims as perpetrators and the testifiers at WSIA serve as witnesses to the harm and suffering that results.2

Photography as a military practice While photography has played a central role in the experience of war for over a century, the presence of digital cameras today has transformed the influence of photographs on how service members experience and remember war. Foremost in this transformation is the development of the ‘trophy photo,’ a variation of the recurrent wartime practice of taking trophies from the defeated. As the photographs are shared among service members, they come to serve as cultural objects that reinforce collective memory and group identity (Halbwachs 1980). Within the military, these images reinforce the paradigmatic values of the warrior

Kimberly Spring

109

as an intrepid, powerful and dedicated fighter who uses violent force to defeat the enemy. By introducing the photographs into a public forum, the testifiers at WSIA violate the exclusivity of that group identity, and by juxtaposing the images in relation to the discourse of atrocity witnessing, reveal the dialectical relationship between the image of the warrior and the cruelty and oppression that results from the use of violent force. The testifiers speak about the practice of taking graphic photographs of dead or injured Iraqis within the frame of a broader tendency among service members to dehumanize others through violence. Not only do the images within the photographs portray the consequences of acts of physical violence, the act of taking the photograph is itself a type of symbolic violence, a violation of the integrity of the individual. As a form of objectification, the photographs ‘turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed’ (Sontag 2003, p. 81). When the trophy photo contains graphic images of injury and death, it disrupts the expectation that the traumatic image ought to be ‘the photograph about which there is nothing to say’ (Barthes 1977, p. 30). The testifiers, to the contrary, portray jovial service members who engage in the communal and common practice of taking the trophy photo. As an Army specialist, Hart, recounts of a time when his unit came across a dead body while on patrol:3 My friends jumped off and started taking pictures wi- with big old smiles on their faces (. . .) and they say ‘Hey [. . .] you want your picture with this guy?’ (.) And I said no (.) but no not in the context of (.) that’s really messed up because (.) it’s just wrong (.) on an ethical basis (.) but I said no because (.) it wasn’t my kill, (.) you shouldn’t take trophies of things you didn’t kill (..) I mean, that’s (.) that’s what my mindset is- was back then. The striking element of Hart’s description of this event is the apparent enjoyment of the soldiers who had ‘big old smiles’ as they took the pictures. In his explanation for why he did not participate, we see how the practice of taking trophies operates according to a moral code – it is right to commemorate the act of killing but wrong to take a picture of a person one did not kill. However, in his testimony, he critiques this military code by subsuming it under the proper ethical way to understand this practice as categorically wrong ‘on an ethical basis.’ When he mistakenly uses the present tense, Hart suggests that this mindset has an encompassing quality, while the immediacy and emphasis with

110 Re-Presenting Victim and Perpetrator

which he corrects himself by using the past tense indicates his desire to distance himself from that code. Other testifiers speak of the amusement that members in their units had in taking pictures of dead Iraqis and the ways in which these macabre scenes were used to boost morale. Those who revel in the gruesome images are viewed as ‘hardcore.’ A Marine, Vincent, illustrates this as he relates the practice of taking trophy photos to other abuses that occurred when his unit came across corpses while on patrol: When encountering these bodies, standard procedure was to run over the corpses, sometimes even stopping and taking pictures with these bodies (..) which was also standard practice whenever we encountered the dead. [. . .] On one specific occasion after I had shot a man (.) in the back of the head after we had run him down from (.) planting an IED (.) device [. . .] we subsequently left his body there to rot in the field [. . .] There was also a picture- pictures taken of- of (.) this gentleman and for me personally it was (.) um very hard when- when our squad returned back to the uh to our main base (.) after I had killed the man (.) his picture was on (.) the backdrop of the laptop for a screensaver (.) of one of our more (.) motivated marines. Vincent’s testimony was prepared, and he relates this story matterof-factly and with little hesitation. He uses the passive voice when describing the act of taking the pictures, insinuating that those responsible were the members of his unit, and he attempts to establish a distance from the practice by stating that ‘personally, it was very hard,’ and referring to the man who he killed as a ‘gentleman.’ His reaction is in contrast with that of the ‘more motivated Marine’ who degrades and objectifies the dead man by using the image as a screen saver on his computer. Vincent concludes his testimony by stating that ‘these are the consequences of sending young men and women to battle’ and asking the listeners to imagine what it would be like to have a loved one put in a similar position. In this way, he asserts that the real perpetrators are those who send the service members to war. Even as the testimony relates abuses committed against the Iraqis, the testimony is focused on the emotional, psychological and moral harm to the service members that occurs in the objectification of the trophy photo.

Witnessing through photographs While the descriptions of the practice of taking trophy photos is an effective means for demonstrating the abuse and dehumanization of

Kimberly Spring

111

the Iraqis, the presentation of photographs alongside the testimonies are particularly affective through the interaction between oral testimony and visual image. The photographic image serves as ‘perfect analogon’ of the past, arresting the moment and capturing the reality of the event in a visual frame (Barthes 1977, p. 17). The image exists within a spatial and temporal disjuncture that allows the viewer to reflect on its meaning, making photographs a mechanism for recovery from trauma (Zelizer 2002) or critical examination of social practices (Sontag 2003) that converts the spectator into a witness. The polysemic quality of photographs, or the presence of multiple, and potentially conflictual, meanings, allows one to use linguistic messages to fix the photograph with a particular meaning, either through anchoring the image with nomenclature or relaying the meaning through a story or anecdote (Barthes 1977, p. 39). In the case of the testimonies at WSIA, the testifiers actually draw out the polysemic quality of the photographs through narratives that highlight the duality of the powerful and dedicated warrior and the physical and psychological trauma of violence. When the photographs are presented through the practice of atrocity witnessing, the testifiers engage in a reinterpretation that draws one forward toward recovery by identifying and attempting to rectify the factors that made that past possible. The relationship of the image to the narrative is central to the interpretation of the interplay of the photograph’s literal and symbolic meanings; however, the force of the image, and its capacity to affect the viewer, is located in what Barthes refers to as the ‘third meaning.’ Barthes’s definition of the third meaning is rather vague, as he intends it to refer to the obtuse and elusive qualities of an image that defy articulation. In her study of ‘about-to-die’ photographs, Zelizer (2004) uses Barthes’s notion of the third meaning to identify what she calls the ‘subjunctive voice,’ or the impulse to see in a photograph the world, not as it is, but as it could be (Zelizer 2004, p. 163). Yet, the third meaning captures more than the moment of uncertainty that leads us to ask ‘what if?’ It is better understood not as a singular message but the paradox of multiple meanings, or the presence of one meaning that is disguised in its opposite. The third meaning is situated within the image but it is dependent upon the interpretive frame of the viewer, and, therefore, is never permanently fixed, and the image draws us in not just because of its internal expressiveness, but also because of the way in which it refers us to our own lived experience of paradox and uncertainty. For example, as Barthes illustrates, the third meaning in the Eisenstein picture of a weeping peasant woman is contained in the tenuous dialogism of the

112 Re-Presenting Victim and Perpetrator

nobility of the expression of the woman’s grief and her clownish appearance that is attributed to her low-lying headscarf (Barthes 1977, p. 57). The photograph affects Barthes because he recognizes in his viewing of the image an elitism that denies the dignity of grief to the uneducated, lower classes. In the case of the photographs from US service members, the third meaning is located in the tension between the allure of power and the repugnance for suffering. In presenting the traumatic images conveyed through trophy photos, the testifiers make explicit the gratification that service members take from possessing these images of death, which validate their role as a warrior. For the audience, the revelation of the symbolism of the trophy photo for those in the military is shocking precisely because one expects that images of trauma should defy symbolic meaning. However, the force of the trophy photo during the event arises out of the interaction between the images and the testimonies, for both the photographs and the testifiers present us with images of suffering. Both have the capacity to disturb us because we find ourselves evocatively drawn to the image of human suffering, a condition that Seltzer (1997) defines as ‘wound culture,’ or ‘the public fascination with torn and opened bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma and the wound’ (p. 3). Yet, we are also confronted by the need to reconcile the conflict with the service member as one who testifies to their suffering and one who has caused the suffering of others, symbolized through the trophy photo. In the testimonies, the photographs enforce the testifiers’ assertion that the experience of combat radically intensifies the ‘ambition to inhabit a place of total affect and to be drained of affect altogether, to possess the obscene vitality of the wound and to occupy the radical nihility of the corpse’ (Foster 1996, p. 166, emphasis in the original). This desire has been exploited and corrupted by a misogynistic and dehumanizing form of militarism, yet it is inherently a human characteristic. Thus, the testifiers maintain that they are the same as everyone else, yet have a unique authority to speak as victims who suffered as perpetrators. The presentation of a series of graphic images of the faces of dead Iraqi men by an Army sergeant serves to illustrate how photographs reinforce the misogyny and dehumanization of militarism, thereby intensifying the trauma of acting in the role of perpetrator. The sergeant, Kristofer, recounts an event during which he and another member of his unit were tasked with documenting the exhumation of over a dozen bodies from a mass grave. He tells us that the men had been tortured and murdered by unidentified perpetrators, and that his role was to photograph the

Kimberly Spring

113

bodies so that they might be identified. Kristofer’s memory of the event is directly framed by the act of taking photographs of the corpses: While I was taking those pictures (..) I never looked directly at the bodies. What I did was I held the camera out in front of me. I had a digital camera (.) and I held it out in front of me and I looked at the two and a half inch screen, and I flashed the photo and as that flash went off (..) that image was burned into my mind, every one of these pictures is burned into mind. I remember. I could draw them to the T. The faces, still not yet decomposed, are variously bloody, blindfolded, bruised, and in one case, so badly damaged that the skin has been removed, exposing the skull. In his account, Kristofer speaks with palpable trauma and says that he felt ‘violated’ and ‘repulsed’ while taking the pictures, a trauma that was intensified when he discovered that the photographs were not used to identify the bodies, but to serve as ‘trophies of war for people who didn’t have to experience that death.’ He suggests his own ethical failure when he notes, ‘This is what we nicknamed the faces of death (. . .) and it was a joke while I was over there.’ Yet he also distances himself from that mindset by using the past tense, and the trauma that he has suffered as one who had to experience those deaths further distinguishes him from those who used the images as trophies. He concludes the story by emphasizing the humanity of the dead men, a humanity denied to them by the use of the photographs as trophies. He asserts, ‘This is somebody’s brother. This is somebody’s husband. This is somebody’s son,’ an ostensibly self-evident claim that is meaningful precisely because, among service members, it is not self-evident (Figure 6.1). While Kristofer explicitly details and condemns the circumstances surrounding the photographs of the corpses, the testimony of Jon, a Marine lance corporal, is notable for its austerity. He relies on implicature and allows the graphic images of several photographs to communicate the meaning of his testimony. For example, after describing the destructive force of a 50-caliber bullet, Jon shows a photograph of a person, seated in the driver’s side of a vehicle, whose head has been, literally, blown apart. He narrates the photograph with a blunt statement: ‘This is what happens when you get hit with a fifty-caliber.’ He then shows another photograph of an obscure image of flesh and blood on a car seat, and remarks with equal candor:

114 Re-Presenting Victim and Perpetrator

For those of you who don’t know that is brains. Um, that was not my kill that was one of my friend’s (.) but uh that did happen on (.) my deployment to Iraq (. . ..) and afterwards it just goes to show you that (.) th- the mistakes we did make we had no respect for (.) their bodies afterwards.

Figure 6.1 One of the photographs taken by an Army sergeant of the bodies of Iraqi men exhumed from a mass grave that were used as ‘trophies of war’ by others in his unit Courtesy of Kristofer Goldsmith

Kimberly Spring

115

Jon’s testimony reveals the way in which service members talk about such incidents, referring to the dead person as a ‘kill’ and the actions that led to the man’s death as a ‘mistake.’ He also implies that he and the members of his unit felt no empathy for the victim and the photographs he presents are examples of trophy photos. A deep disquiet underlies the terse and impassive tone of the testimony, and the photographs, as blatant images of gore, punctuate a raw trauma that is present but unspoken until the conclusion of his testimony, when Jon states, ‘I just wanted to say that I am sorry for the hate and destruction that I’ve inflicted on innocent people (. . . .) At one point (.) it was okay (..) but reality has shown that it is not [. . .] I am sorry for the things that I did. I am no longer the monster that I once was.’ In this apology, the previous narrative is framed as an act of confession by which Jon marks a break with the person he used to be and asserts a self-realization that allows him to serve as an ethical and authoritative witness to atrocity. In another example of how the trophy photo serves as a point of reference in the narrative of self-realization, Adam, a Marine sergeant who served as part of a civil affairs unit, shows a series of photographs taken following a checkpoint shooting. While not present at the time of the shooting, he relates how the Marines at the checkpoint reported that a car had approached the checkpoint at ‘a high rate of speed,’ leading them to open fire on the vehicle. The bullets struck the driver so forcefully that his seat broke backward and ultimately caused the car to catch fire. The automobile, with the charred driver still inside, was later pulled into the Marine base, where, the following morning, Adam and others took photographs. In one of the photographs, Adam is leaning against the hood of the car in an otherwise desolate scene. His stance is relaxed, with hands folded in front, but the smile on his face appears posed, giving the image the quality of a tourist photograph. The banality of the pose conflicts with his dominant position to the burned-out car that serves as a temporary coffin for the driver inside. Adam notes the discomfort he felt in posing for the picture, stating (Figure 6.2): It felt funny because (.) not because what we were doing was (.) morally wrong, but because I wasn’t the one who killed this guy. And there was a group of us Marines that (.) that all took turns taking pictures (.) an- and posing like this. In this explanation, Adam creates a temporal distance from the person he was at the time of the photograph. He, and the others who had

116 Re-Presenting Victim and Perpetrator

Figure 6.2 A photo taken of a Marine sergeant, who poses on the hood of a car destroyed during a checkpoint shooting; the body of the driver lies prone inside the car Courtesy of Adam Kokesh

joined him in this communal practice, had erringly followed a military code that might circumscribe when a trophy photo ought to be taken, but ultimately condones it. He later blames the cause of this ‘morally wrong’ behavior on the US government, which puts service members ‘in a situation where this kind of thing is (.) normal.’ In this way, Adam and the other testifiers assert that the practice of taking trophy photos is not wrong simply because it objectifies those in the photograph; it also causes psychological and emotional harm to those who, unable to recognize the real meaning of the photograph, not only dehumanize the other, but also themselves. While the presentation of the trophy photo underscores the tension between the role of the warrior and the dehumanization of war, photographs that contain portraits of the service members are used to mark the testifiers’ transformation into an ethical person. The portraits typically portray the testifiers during their deployment to Iraq,

Kimberly Spring

117

in their combat uniform with their assigned weapons. The presence of the weapons, which are central fixtures during their deployment, is visually conspicuous in images that otherwise tend to imitate tourist photographs. The images express the pride service members feel in an identity that is associated with sacrifice, bravery and strength. The paradigmatic image connotes confidence, power and intensity. The facial expression tends to convey determination or self-satisfaction. We find the third meaning for the photographs in the dialectic of the strength and dedication of the fighter and the cruelty and oppression in the use of violent force. The images evince a mix of emotions and memories that draw out this tension, as the anguish and trauma of war disrupt the idealistic image of the honorable and courageous warrior. The photographs are evidence of that betrayal and loss which is both distant and present, while the image of the soldier or Marine serves as a visual representation of the past, which is distinct from the individual who is present as a testifier. For example, Kristofer marks this break as the loss of youth and innocence when he begins his testimony by showing a photograph of himself as a young boy, and states: ‘This is a picture here of me when I was about ten years old (.) wearing all camo (.) havin’ a pair of dog tags and givin’ my Boy Scout’s salute (. . . .) That boy died in Iraq.’ He emphasizes this rupture by turning the photo face down and the eager young boy is contrasted with other images shown of Kristofer as an enthusiastic soldier and his presence at the event as an ‘emotionally broken’ individual. Another testifier, Mike, uses several portraits taken during his time in Iraq to make an explicit contrast between his past self, as a specialist in an Army Military Police unit, and his present identity. In one photograph, taken in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, Mike stands in the middle of a large hall, next to a ring of ornate chairs and a large, opulent chandelier. He describes the photograph by stating, ‘I’m pointing to my American flag (.) thinking to myself (..) good job (.) I’m being very proud of my country at this point. This slide highlights (.) the arrogance (.) that I had at this point in my life.’ He asserts that this feeling of self-importance allowed his unit ‘to do harm to the Iraqi people (.) and treat them as second-class citizens.’ The photograph, as a visual representation of who he had been, serves as the departure of Mike’s testimony, which includes several events in which Iraqis were abused. As he concludes his testimony, Mike tears up a Bronze Star Citation he received for his actions in Iraq, punctuating his rejection of his past identity. In constructing this discontinuity, Mike re-presents himself and

118 Re-Presenting Victim and Perpetrator

asserts an ethical autonomy that frames his actions in the present and future.

Testifying for the future The photographs shown at WSIA evoke emotions and memories that attest to the trauma of war and the anguish that disrupts the idealistic image of the honorable and courageous warrior. While the testimonies problematize the conventional categories of victim and perpetrator by showing how the military system dehumanizes both Iraqis and service members, the photographs serve as a mechanism for drawing the reality of war into the present and insist that the spectator become a witness to that reality. Accompanied by the service members’ testimony, the meaning of the photographs is fixed in an ethical critique of the way in which they are used by service members to celebrate their role as the perpetrators of that suffering. The primary message for those willing to bear witness to this reality is the imperative to rectify the system of inequity and discrimination within the military that harms service members by turning them into perpetrators. Through narratives of self-realization, the service members assert a particular authority that arises out of their experience as perpetrators to establish the proper ethical code for members of the military. This code, which continues to venerate the ideals of the warrior while insisting on the essential integrity of every person, must deal with the fundamental tension between the discourses of the military and atrocity witnessing. Yet, it remains central to the efforts of these veterans to come to terms with their own culpability and establish a new self for the future. By serving as public atrocity witnesses, they claim a new meaning to their past actions: no longer part of a system of subjugation, they become symbols for the need to end militarism. Collectively, the testifiers and the audience use this meaning in their efforts to end the war, transform military practices to end dehumanization, and present an ideal for a just future.

Notes 1. The primary source of the data presented in this chapter an ethnographic study of the series of events known as Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan. The chapter focuses on the first and largest of these events, the nationallevel gathering that occurred over a period of four days in March 2008. In addition to participant observation, I use audio and video recordings and transcriptions from the event to analyze the testimonies and photographs

Kimberly Spring

119

presented by the service members. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sub-sample of participants and organizers over the course of approximately six months following the event to provide supplemental data. The material was analyzed using content and discourse analysis, coding the use of photographs and the narratives that surrounded their presentation to identify themes in the relationship between the photographs and the testimonies. 2. It is important to keep in mind that this was a public event and the testimonies are selective accounts that are intended to convey particular messages. The stories presented here are not intended to be representative of service members’ experiences, although the testifiers often claim that the experiences that they recount are commonplace in the military. 3. Transcription conventions are as follows: (.) pause, each period denotes one second . pause with falling tone , a brief pause with a rising or falling tone interruption or stammer [. . .] omitted text underline spoken with emphasis

References Anthonissen, Christine and Jan Blommaert (eds). 2007. Discourse and Human Rights Violations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. Foster, Hal. 1996. The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Goldberg, Vicki. 1991. The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives. New York: Abbeville Press. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980. The Collective Memory. Translated by Francis J. Ditter, Jr and Vida Yazdi Ditter. New York: Harper and Row. Huggins, Martha K., Mika Haritos-Fatouros and Philip G. Zimbardo. 2002. Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Katz, Adam. 1998. ‘The closure of Auschwitz but not its end: alterity, testimony, and (post)modernity.’ History and Memory 10(1), pp. 59–97. Payne, Leigh A. 2008. Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Peters, John Durham. 2001. ‘Witnessing.’ Media, Culture and Society, 23(6), pp. 707–23. Seltzer, Mark. 1997. ‘Wound culture: trauma in the pathological public sphere.’ October 80 (Spring), pp. 3–26. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador. Verdoolaege, Annelies. 2008. Reconciliation Discourse: The Case of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.

120 Re-Presenting Victim and Perpetrator Zelizer, Barbie. 2002. ‘Photography, journalism, and trauma,’ in Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan (eds),Journalism After September 11. New York: Routledge, pp. 48–68. Zelizer, Barbie. 2004. ‘The voice of the visual in memory,’ in Kendall R. Phillips (ed.), Framing Public Memory. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, pp. 157–68.

7 How Shall We Remember Srebrenica? Will the Language of Law Structure Our Memory? Selma Leydesdorff

Over the last years I have compared the ways that the voices of survivors of mass atrocities turn up in public debates and how the use of oral sources affects the writing of history. I worked for years on the Holocaust and during the last eight years on the war in Bosnia, in particular the genocide of Srebrenica.1 Over time, the voices of the victims have become an accepted and essential source for Holocaust historiography, but only after fierce historical debate. This is not yet the case with Srebrenica. Of course, there is a time lag, but the crucial difference may well be the way in which the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is documenting and recording history and shaping the historical representation of the war crimes in Bosnia. This is happening despite the availability of memoirs, autobiographical documents and films. In law, indictments and evidence are what counts, and history is formatted for that purpose, even outside the court. Consequently, the voices of the survivors are easily marginalized. Consider, for example, the film The Scorpions – A Home Movie (Stojanovic 2007) that showed the killing of young boys after the fall of Srebrenica, and attracted worldwide attention.2 It shows in detail how six Muslim men were shot. The film supports the accusatory and omits the individual identity of the victims. Only specialists in the field and people from Srebrenica know who the six Muslim men were, where they lived and what their family circumstances were. 121

122 How Shall We Remember Srebrenica?

Where accusatory and juridical language dominates, the personal trauma of the victim disappears and is replaced by silence. Literary scholar Shoshana Felman (2002) writes: The victim’s story has to overcome not just the silence of the dead but the indelible coercive power of the oppressor’s terrifying, brutal silencing of the surviving, and the inherent, speechless silence of the living in the face of an unthinkable, unknowable, ungraspable event. (p. 124) Although I fully acknowledge the fact that the Tribunal’s proceedings are not primarily about the victims, I want to focus here on what happens when such an institution has become the only public mechanism to deal with the past. I wonder what will happen if the transcripts of the ICTY court proceedings become the most dominant record of the past and thus are constitutive for the future collective memory of the atrocities of the Bosnian and Kosovar wars? If we take Felman seriously, we will slowly forget the victims’ silence and their inability to break through that silence even when they speak. Collective memory results from the fusion and interaction of several (sometimes contradictory) stories, in which a specific narrative eventually becomes the dominant one. Since the work of Maurice Halbwachs (1992 [1925]), we know that the construction of a collective memory is strongly influenced by political and cultural forces. The narrative of collective memory is never static and always volatile, but can be structured by the crystallized memories of specific events that have been reiterated in public discourse for such a long time that no one questions them. In some cases they eventually give rise to a ‘frozen,’ static and publicly acknowledged view of the past, which silences other interpretations. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, the Tribunal has recorded the stories of both victims and perpetrators of hideous crimes as they were told and denied in court. The proceedings of the public inquiries are published on the web, and can be followed online. The final result is millions of pages, a mountain of texts, indexed and stockpiled in the labyrinth of The Hague’s Peace Palace and on the web. The transcripts have become a ‘truth’ in themselves, and will serve as the foundation for further jurisprudence. To doubt the victims’ words after cross-examination (which is often aggressive) can be construed as challenging international justice and obstructing the creation of a new kind of international law. One wonders if anyone will muster the courage to do so, or even to open the discussion about the need to do so. The ability of international courts to listen to the victim has always been

Selma Leydesdorff

123

doubted. Devin O. Pendas (2006) and others have questioned whether the courts are the appropriate means for dealing with the traumas of past atrocities. There are many descriptions of lonely survivors who became more traumatized after testifying in court. By looking at a specific case, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial of 1963–65, Pendas has shown how juridification was socially embedded and resulted in a specific production of meaning, since everything that happened had to be described and ordered within the discursive grid of German criminal law. Defendants were treated as common criminals, Auschwitz as a crime scene and the universal language of human rights – in which guilt is defined beyond the individual criminal case and translated into moral and political terms – was ignored. The ICTY pretends to overcome the limitations of the criminal case and to be part of the discourse of human rights, yet it has failed to do so and instead focuses on individual criminal indictment (Attila Hoare 2008). The ICTY was designed as an instrument of the United Nations (UN), its purpose being to deter new crimes while punishing those recently committed. However, it has never managed to do more than to sentence individual perpetrators for specific crimes that have been ‘proven’; this is all a court is able and meant to do. Just as in the aftermath of the Holocaust, it is not possible to judge the perpetrators morally today, nor to condemn them for non-criminal but despicable ‘deeds’ such as stirring up extremist nationalist opinions. The moral judgment of such actions is totally absent, hence it is also absent from the politico-legal organization of memory.

A brief reminder of Srebrenica During the war in Bosnia, the UN created ‘safe areas’ – territories protected by the United Nations where Muslims could take refuge from ‘ethnic cleansing.’ One of these was Srebrenica, a town located in eastern Bosnia that was protected by the Dutch Army under UN command. Despite the promise of protection, the town fell into Serbian hands on 11 July 1995. Before the massacre of Srebrenica began, UN soldiers herded women, children and older men into the UN compound at Potoˇcari where they expected to find shelter. Many younger men opted instead for the risk of fleeing through the woods to territory controlled by the Bosnian Army, but few of them made it to safety. Serb paramilitary units killed most of them as they tried to cross the vast mountainous terrain. Those men who entered the Potoˇcari compound perished in the massacre (Honig and Both 1997; Naimark 2009). In the days after the fall of Srebrenica, 7749 people were killed.

124 How Shall We Remember Srebrenica?

War courts, war tribunals and truth: evidence and proof After the war in Bosnia ended, the ICTY was installed in The Hague. Although the Tribunal is keen on doing what is right for the victims from all sides and aims to punish perpetrators from all parties involved in the wars, the major accusations are against Serbian perpetrators. The Tribunal is creating history, as Nuremberg created history, albeit in a different way. At the time of Nuremberg, no one valued the voice of the victims as part of the creation of juridical and historical knowledge. The victors’ tribunal knew what had been done, and was ready to sentence the perpetrators. The victims’ stories were not needed. It was years later, at the Eichmann trial, when the suffering of the victims was publicly displayed for the first time and told by the victims themselves (Hirsch and Spitzer 2009). Before the Eichmann trial, there had been consensus on a historical truth without the voice of the Jewish witnesses, and there had been agreement on what the perpetrators were accused of. The ICTY is the result of decades of dealing with the aftermath of atrocities in a more victim-oriented way (Douglas 2006). To complicate matters further, it frequently has to deal with the voices of opposing groups of victims. What happened to the victims has become part of the court’s proceedings and hence part of history. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, the construction of history has been an urgent task because there is no generally accepted version of the history of the wars. Each party has continued to adapt its historiography to its own, often nationalistic, needs. In his groundbreaking article ‘Judging history,’ Richard Wilson (2005) has asserted that the place of the international tribunal is unique. In a field habitually dominated by the polemics of nationalist historiographies, the tribunal has taken over the task of the ‘objective super-historian.’ In The Hague, so the argument runs, history is written on the basis of evidence and accountability. The testimonies and eyewitness accounts are tailored to that purpose and have become part of an authoritative supra-national collective memory. The law dominates, while the victim struggles with the incomprehensible. Victims are required to adapt their stories to a vocabulary that is not theirs and to perform semantic feats that belong to the arcane world of international law. The victims volunteer to testify as protected and unprotected witnesses, sometimes taking enormous personal risks of revenge and of being stigmatized and/or ostracized. They do so because they have a message, a story, and they want to accomplish something. They hope their past torturers will be punished in the future, or that the people

Selma Leydesdorff

125

who helped them will be acquitted. Many of them hope that the journey to The Hague will help to disclose what happened to their loved ones. After all those years, the possibility that their beloved might still be alive keeps the victims going, even though they know it is not rational. Safija, whom I interviewed in 2004 in Grab Potok, an unpleasant refugee camp, told me: I waited till last year, hoping I would get a message they [her husband and sons] were alive. Maybe they were transported to another country and would send me a word. But when they found the body of my oldest son, I lost hope. I knew. I went to the funeral – I know where his body rests. But regarding my younger son, I still pray to God that I’ll hear he is somewhere – May God fulfill my wish, that he is somewhere, that he is alive, someplace . . . . To know and to remember are two sides of the same process: to the victims, historical knowledge and memory have become the same category. They are part of the lasting process of mourning and the need to give these horrendous events their rightful acknowledgment in history. There is a proliferation of memories, poems and plays that are published in order to remember, in order to keep the memory alive, and to combat oblivion and historical amnesia.

Lack of communication Identity cannot exist without memory. It is conditioned by a minimum of clarity about one’s place in the world. These survivors live in a chaotic nightmare where context and connections have been blurred and where one’s place in society has dissolved. It feels as if there is no ‘there’ anymore. What remains is a story of grief and loss, a story that others don’t want to hear. In the common run of things, societies don’t know how to accommodate such traumatized stories. Indeed, communication about the past, and with it the ability to sustain a meaningful identity, have become difficult. The survivors hope that going to the Tribunal may help to redefine their place in the world. Their focus is on getting answers to their questions about the war, as well as ‘official’ recognition of what they endured. Trauma narratives are not straightforwardly referential; these stories of dislocation are themselves dislocated. Whoever has interviewed trauma victims knows that chronology fails, lapses occur and confusion is common (Laub 2009). While the conventional use of narration genres

126 How Shall We Remember Srebrenica?

(Tonkin 2002) sometimes provides a welcomed escape from personal memories, especially in the large theater of the court, where the world can see and hear every minute of one’s testimony, in the international court the survivors are compelled to frame their stories according to the specific demands of the law, as it tries to establish its truth based on testimony as part of the proof.

Doomed town or site of survival? The dominance of the language of juridical truth not only distorts the histories of individual lives but also changes the picture of the collective. For example, most of what we know about daily life in Srebrenica during the siege years of 1992–95 is framed by official reports. This gives a distinct image of a town under siege and its people destined for slaughter, although they are not yet aware that they will be killed. In contrast, a closer look by the historian shows a town that was alive and full of people who believed they would survive. It was a town with sharp divisions between population groups, much like some Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland. However, in numerous passages in the ICTY transcripts, this vibrant community that was struggling to keep decency and culture alive is hidden under the shadow of its terrible future. Where is the ‘truth’ in all of this? How should the historian write the history of the years preceding the catastrophe?

‘I was a worried mother’ Here is a detailed individual example of the juridical transformation with which I am seeking to come to grips. In the lawsuit against the war ˇ criminal Krsti´c, Camila, one of my interviewees who died last year, was interrogated. At the time I interviewed her (2004), she had returned to Srebrenica. She was well known because she had negotiated on behalf of the population of Srebrenica with General Mladi´c (Honig and Both 1997; Rhode 1997) and she entered the court with an aura of fame. She told the judges how she tried to end her life when she realized that her situation was hopeless. She feared revenge for her obstinance and visibility as a representative, and did not believe that she would survive. She had confronted the enemy and defended her co-citizens. ‘. . . I was so fearful to end up in their hands. Because death is nothing, but the way one dies is what counts, because we had been hearing . . . stories about Serbian soldiers torturing people’ (Krsti´c 2000, p. 1133) she said.

Selma Leydesdorff

127

When she spoke with General Mladi´c, he assured her he would ‘take care of her children.’ But she was afraid they would be tortured to death. She returned to the crowd of thousands waiting to be deported and tried to get in a truck, but Serb soldiers chased her and prevented her from leaving the compound. She clearly had to stay, but the exact reason was unclear. This made her extremely worried. She assumed her death would be slow and painful, and visions of torture haunted her. ˇ By hanging herself, Camila hoped that her end would be quick and less painful. She told the court: ‘My brother came and I asked him to try to help me kill myself. I was afraid of falling in the hands of Serbian soldiers . . . . My brother showed me the noose he had prepared for himself, I pulled it out of his hand and I climbed to the upper floor of the UN base.’ There were a lot of children there; she asked them to go away in order not to shock them. ‘I climbed a chair and I saw two Serb soldiers with UN soldiers coming up. . . . As they were climbing down the stairs I sat on that drying rack . . . and I tightened the noose which I had already prepared, I put it around my neck, and I jumped down. And I woke up in the hospital . . . ’ (Krsti´c 2000, pp. 1117–8). ˇ As Camila’s jump into the void from her self-made gallows became tangible to those in the courtroom, even the judges shrank back. It was impossible to continue the session, and the proceedings were stopped. When the cross-examination resumed, the interrogator told her: Before I ask you some questions I should like to tell you that it is not our intention to take you back to that period of July 1995 and all that you went through. We do not wish to revive all those memories. We hope that as an educated woman and emancipated woman, you will understand that the principal objective of the defence is the establishment of the truth and all that happened in Srebrenica and that is all we have in mind. (Krsti´c 2000, pp. 1119–20) He then moved on to specific questions about the separation of the men from the women. The court could not avoid Camila’s emotions, especially when she was asked if she recognized those who separated the men and women on the buses. They asked questions that did not deeply matter to her. Her meta-story and her emotions were about fear for her children, but the judges wanted factual testimony about the separation of the men and

128 How Shall We Remember Srebrenica?

women. She answered again and again that she was so worried about her children, but the judge kept pressing her for details: Q. Those men who were making the selection who would and who would not board the bus, were they in uniforms? A. Some were uniformed and some were in civilian clothes. Q. Mrs. Omanovi´c, perhaps this is asking you to do too much, in view of the state that you must have been in at the time, but please allow me to ask you if perhaps you noticed the patches, the insignia, the flashes of the military or the police or some other units there. Do you have any recollection of that? Can you tell us something about it? A. Believe me that at that moment, whether I simply didn’t want to or whether I didn’t dare look at any man, but I cannot bring to my mind any single face. I merely held my children next to me and I was trying to board it [the bus] . . . I simply didn’t look at those men who were there. (Krsti´c 2000, pp. 1127–8) The judge wanted the accusation confirmed. She was not able to do it. The judges were not being impolite; they were simply focused on the business of law. ˇ During the many hours I spent in her home, Camila’s meta-story was the main thing. She dismissed what she had told the judges as just an effort to answer their questions – an effort that had been an enormous strain to her. But she narrated again and again about her love for her children and her family life. She had been terrified, and that was her master narrative about Srebrenica. Talking calmed her down. She did talk about the past, and about much more than those terrible days of the genocide. She spoke for hours about her good life, her parental home, a modest amount of comfort and money, and the way she got an education. We slowly followed her life story; she cried; we drank coffee and ate sweets. She told how she met her husband when she was 20. Slowly he ˇ became alive again in Camila’s faltering words in the autumn twilight of her chilly home in 2004. Her second meta-story was about the good relations with the Serb neighbors whom she later accused. War came so suddenly, she told me. When she came home from work, she and her husband were told the Serbs in town were armed. The two of them decided to go to the police to complain about such outrageous behavior. It felt as though total confusion had begun. They were completely at a loss to understand why

Selma Leydesdorff

129

the previous good relations had suddenly vanished from the face of the earth. How could old friends and neighbors behave like enemies? She talked about her amazement at this again and again. It was in her story about the identification of a corpse after the war, and it was in her story about a classmate who was with Mladi´c. The confusion in the world had turned into chaos in her head. Both of her stories have nothing to do with the language of the law. They are about the loss of a familiar and trusted world, and about how history became a dark enigma. Only the second story contained an accusation, namely, that the Serbs had not been more open about their hostility. But that kind of accusation can never be dealt with by a tribunal. To betray friendship is not a criminal act; maybe it is only irresponsible or very unkind behavior. But it is important in the memory of a person who talks about it: whether it concerns a criminal act or not, it is still referred to as a betrayal of trust and of an old friendship – and such betrayal bears a moral responsibility.

A young girl was raped Edina wanted to testify in order to help convict her rapists, and she wanted the man who helped her to be acquitted. She was a witness for the defense of Nasr Ori´c, the Muslim warlord accused of atrocities committed by Muslims against Serbs. During the siege of Srebrenica, groups of starving people looted the surrounding deserted villages. Both sides were responsible for atrocious crimes. The Tribunal had to judge whether Ori´c was accountable for the acts of the looters. The defense emphasized the dire conditions in the town and argued that citizens were forced to loot, which inevitably led to violence. Edina’s testimony was supposed to highlight the Serbs’ immense cruelty in terrorizing the Muslims mercilessly. The Serbs ‘persecuted innocent women and children from village to village until they were finally chased away to Srebrenica, a place where one had nowhere to flee from, and where their destiny was to be transported as cattle and slaughtered as lambs’ (Ori´c 2006, p. 16307). Edina’s story of how she was raped at the age of 15 in 1992–93 would strengthen the defense’s argument – even a young girl was not safe. Edina wanted to testify about her suffering, but had difficulty complying with the juridical agenda (Ori´c 2006, pp. 11037–9). She did not want to talk about general conditions, but about what happened in the house where the Serb soldiers dragged her and where she was forced to have sex with men who hit her. Before the rape, she did not know much

130 How Shall We Remember Srebrenica?

about sex. What happened to the people in the villages near Srebrenica was not her story; it was not her trauma. When she talked to me, it was not even important to her that she was also the victim of a pseudo-execution. Rape was her story, and it was already framed in a certain manner of narration. As she started to speak, the judge told her he would not be asking questions about the rape. Was that story too painful? Yes, but he was also not interested. The court wanted to know more about the situation in her village: Q. At that time, since you were 15, did you know what the former JNA uniforms looked like? A. Yes. Q. How did you know that? A. We knew because during peacetime, many young boys went to serve their military service with the JNA. Q. When you say camouflage uniform, what does it look like? A. It is grey, brown and green. Q. You mean multi-coloured? A. Yes. ... Q. The people you mentioned that you saw them in April 1992, were they armed, these Serbs? A. Yes, they were all armed. They had rifles and grenades. Some also had long, large knives. Q. You meant they wore them? Q. Apart from the people at the ramp, who you mentioned you saw in April 1992, did you see any other people in your environment, armed people? (Ori´c 2006, pp. 10981–2) She had not come to the Tribunal to talk about ‘other people,’ but about the rapists and, in particular, the man who saved her. More than anything she had not come to accuse but she wanted to save an accused. The court’s questions came from another world. She told me, still in shock, that there had been a Serb soldier: That soldier started to attack me, and ordered me to take off my clothes. I did not obey. He started to tear off my clothes and I screamed, I shouted. He raped me in that living room. Because I screamed he put a piece of paper into my mouth. Later I did not have the strength to scream or do anything. He took his gun, pointed it

Selma Leydesdorff

131

to my forehead and said that he would kill me if I screamed again. I did not have the strength to go on. I tried as much as I could to twist and free myself. It lasted until late into the night. I do not remember. I lost any sense of time. When he wanted to sleep, he stayed on top of me. He was there. He did not manage to sleep. There was a table there and handcuffs on the table. He chained me so that I could not escape in case he fell asleep. So he was all the time on me and he still had his gun in his right hand. He put the gun under a cushion. Two days later she was gang-raped. Apparently there were many soldiers after that. Edina and some other girls had an atrocious ordeal but in the end an officer of the Serb Army intervened. He hid her and the other girls in a house and took care that they were nourished. This lasted until they were exchanged for other prisoners and after this they were sent to a refugee camp. After the intervention of the hitherto unknown officer she was no longer raped and abused, she was just scared. He had saved her and other girls.

Surviving total chaos The chaos and panic in Srebrenica was deliberately created by the Serbs. Their goal was to kill as many men as possible as quickly as possible, away from the eyes of the press and the rest of the world. Men and women were separated, and the women were deported without too much turmoil. All the victims endured three days of physical aggression – killings, beatings, rape, and other atrocities too violent to describe here. The UN base of Potoˇcari, where people had tried to find shelter, was filled with the stale smell of blood. But the torture was also psychological. The men did not know if they were going to be killed, and the women did not know where the men were taken. Most of all they were afraid, because the Serbs staged a drama of horror for their victims. Factually recounting such extreme panic seems impossible; the trauma permeates the personality. In many cases it leads to dissociation (van der Hart et al. 2006) in which the narrator loses his/her sense of self in the story. If the story is told, it is at a distance and in fragments, with the help of other memories. If we look at the experience of the survivors more closely we learn that nobody knew what to expect in this state of chaos, staged to create panic. As Šida, one of my oldest interviewees, told me in 2005: My son went through the woods but my husband accompanied me to the bus, but they sent him back. . . . He wanted to go with me.

132 How Shall We Remember Srebrenica?

However, they did not let him pass. They sent him to the other side, and finished him off. Although I was so ill and needed help, he had to go with other people and could not stay with me. . . . He was old, old. And yet, they stopped him. He wanted to pass, but could not, they did not allow him. . . . Šida continued: I had five sons but they are all dead. I shall tell you what I know. Everything. I heard and saw it with my own eyes. It was a great misery, it could not have been worse. All troubles. Hunger and everything else. Fear, hunger. If only you had seen all that distress in Srebrenica! It is a miracle that we are alive. It is surprising that we did not go mad, all of us. Let God protect everybody against such misery. Nobody knows how we felt when we came to Potoˇcari. Not a drop of water to drink, nothing. We stayed there overnight. They were just taking people away and slaughtering. You could hear screams throughout the night. We tried to hide. There was a large crowd there. Women and children were screaming. Women delivering babies were crying. . . . My husband, may he find peace, thought he would go with me, but . . .. My husband thought that they would not keep him because he was old. . . . Whoever lived through it will remember it until the end of her life. Nobody wanted to save us. We did not know where to go. We were completely lost. We discussed how scared she had been: Of course I was scared, my child. Not a drop of water. When we got on the buses, we did not have any water and it was blazing hot. We also saw people lying in the meadows up there, killed. We saw people walking two in a row, with their hands over their heads. They threw stones at us when we were finally in the bus, they banged on the trucks, stopped us, beat us. How I felt? . . . It feels like I lost everything. There was screaming, crying. Sorrow. Sorrow. My child stayed behind. If I could look at him, I would not be ill. My eyesight has become very bad. I cannot see anything. And what help have I had? None. Nobody is helping me. Aiša, whom I interviewed in 2006 in Srebrenica, could only remember chaos and fear:

Selma Leydesdorff

133

They got drunk and walked around us with rifles. We were just sitting . . . we did not know what would happen. They were drunk and had blood-shot eyes. We were sitting, helpless, waiting for what would happen. We sat with our hands in our laps, and they did what they wanted to do. I sat on a concrete floor. They separated my father and my husband. They told them where they should go and that later they would come back. It is she who told me in a soft voice (after enumerating how many relatives she lost) how people were taken to the ‘white house.’ ‘They were taken there. Now they say they disappeared. They did not disappear, they were alive when they were taken from us.’ I am not suggesting that these stories are more ‘true’ than any of the court proceedings, only that they are different. They show the impact of the genocide on individual lives, and the similarities of the individual recollections. Yet the collective memory that is formed by the juridical account – with its required ‘yes or no’ answers – begins to dominate. There, even the deepest grief is reduced to a simple yes or no. Srebrenica also meant the destruction of cultural patterns and of a life that seemed homely and worth living, despite the tensions between the different minorities and the hardship of the post-communist era (Bringa 1995). The Bosnian war destroyed the very texture of this pluralistic culture. Even today there is no better example of a harmonious society in a region where cultures, religions and national identities mix than the way they did in eastern Bosnia. Knowing that the final outcome of the Bosnian case was war and mass murder makes it extremely hard to remember its positive side. Sadly enough, the present hostility is too intense and the wounds of war are too open for any initiative of reconciliation to succeed on the basis of pre-war memories. That might be explained by the fact that the genocide resulted not only in death but also in emptiness, endless waiting and hoping, and bewilderment at the dramatic and far-reaching social changes for the women. Almost no men were left, so the women had to perform tasks never assigned to them before. Often these tasks involve hard physical toil, like cutting wood and working in the fields. Some women survivors sit passively in refugee camps and in the suburbs of towns like Sarajevo and Tuzla. More and more they have begun to realize that remaining there is unbearable and has no future, and so they are returning to destroyed houses in Srebrenica and the surrounding villages. They are forced to rebuild without much help, while raising their children

134 How Shall We Remember Srebrenica?

in poverty. That is their reality: the genocide lasts well beyond the moment of killing. The killing has been judged by the court; however, their appalling living conditions have nothing to do with juridification, though it is also their history.

Juridical memory and other memories ‘The worst thing is that I am illiterate. If I could say dates, I would go and be a witness in The Hague. But I cannot say dates and so I cannot go there and witness,’ Šefika said to me. She may be illiterate, but her memory is excellent. She was able to talk for hours about the good pre-war relations with her neighbors, and how shocked she had been by their behavior. In her narrative she accused them of betraying their friendship, in particular, and the standards of civilized behavior in general. Šefika lives in a tiny house in a refugee camp. I interviewed her in 2004. Despite the fragmented nature of the interview, she made me aware of how present this sense of betrayal is in the region, and how much of its history can be described as the gradual alienation between the people living there. As Šefika said: A clever person could have noticed it. The Serbs immediately took to having their own habits, expressions, stories, ways of talking. You could feel that in buses, but not much. It came slowly, slowly, you know. It all began in 1980, when Tito died. Some changes started then. Although they were not in our village, they were our neighbors. Our people went to work for them, they came to work for us. Our boys went with their boys of the same age to work in Belgrade. She continued: Well, we felt that something was in the making, but we did not believe it. We thought that something would happen, but people only speculated. Some said it would be like this, some said it would be like that. You see, you could feel it as early as 1988. (Interview 2004) The process of alienation has been described in sociological terms (Carmichael 2006), but it is also a collective experience.

Selma Leydesdorff

135

Conclusion Few think about the genocide of Srebrenica in terms of the memories that I encountered in my research over the years. Since the accusation stresses again and again the atrocities of war, the memories of friendship and living together have become more and more problematic. The image of what happened there has become the image that the responsible parties create; but it is not realistic since it does not show the failure of the international community to prevent the atrocities. This failure is not dealt with by the court. Slowly everything people experienced and wanted is juridified. When the women survivors went to court, their cases were treated as a plea for compensation, which was not their primary purpose. They wanted answers and they wanted to be recognized. They wanted those who were responsible to acknowledge their moral responsibility. Sadly, the ICTY cannot deal with that kind of moral responsibility; no court has been able to do that thus far (Bloxham 2001). Neither can any other institution in former Yugoslavia, where reconciliation is – for the moment – not an option. The survivors’ memories consist of so much more than just material for criminal court proceedings. As traumatized victims, it is extremely difficult for them to make their voices heard. Without a transformation, as is today happening at the Demjanjuk trial in Munich, where survivors get a chance to speak up and where a new way of dealing with suffering is integrated as part of trial, this may never change. One can argue that it took the Holocaust survivors years to be heard. Primo Levi did not find an audience when he first published his book (1996 [1958]) (why that later changed is outside the scope of this chapter). In a sense, the case of Srebrenica seems hopeless in this respect, given the ongoing procedures in The Hague where the survivors are asked to testify. It is not about a few high-profile trials of major significance. Rather, it is about endless lawsuits that have become propaganda for the international community, which looked away at the time the atrocities were committed. One gets the impression that the international community has always been involved in what is morally good. We are constantly told that the Tribunal is handling the past very well. Of course, it is a good thing that the Tribunal exists. However, its authority shapes the tone of the survivors’ voices and drowns out other ways of talking about what happened. This, combined with the vast quantity of testimony available online, creates an immense barrier that blocks out other stories.

136 How Shall We Remember Srebrenica?

I often wonder if the survivors will be able to overcome the immense power of historical representation the Tribunal is creating. They have neither the cultural nor the political means that were available to the Holocaust survivors in the decades after World War II. The Bosnian survivors are powerless, and so is their memory. By denying the truth of the victims’ total stories in their layered and unfinished form – by dismissing them as outbursts of emotion – we deny them their immediate authenticity and impede how they might reconfigure or even remake the world for those who have lost their place in it. In turn, we dislocate the meaning assigned to events and their places in history; we don’t understand the place of events in particular lives and memories. When we subordinate them to the newly manufactured legal accounts, and thereby phase out everything else, we shall finally put at risk our ability to understand history.

Notes 1. The material in this chapter is based on oral history interviews, conducted over six and a half years with women from Srebrenica in Eastern Bosnia and the Netherlands (primarily in The Hague). The oral history interviews were audio-recorded and the material was subsequently analyzed using textual analysis. To supplement and contrast the methods and research of my oral history approach, additional archival research, using the transcripts of the ICTY’s court proceeding, was also utilized; this material was also analyzed using textual and discourse analysis. 2. The film was shown as part of the cross-examination of defense witness Obrad Stevanovic, who was a top Interior Ministry official under Milosevic at the ICTY in 2005.

References Attila Hoare, Marko. 2008. ‘From Nuremberg to the International Crime Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.’ Globus, 12 December. Bloxham, Donald. 2001. Genocide on Trial, War Crimes, Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bringa, Tone. 1995. Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Carmichael, Carrie. 2006. ‘Violence and ethnic boundary maintenance in Bosnia in the 1990s.’ Journal of Genocide Research 8(3), pp. 283–93. Douglas, Lawrence. 2006. ‘The didactic trial: filtering history and memory into the courtroom.’ European Review 14(4), pp. 513–22. Felman, Shoshana. 2002. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Halbwachs, Maurice.1992 [1925]. On Collective Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Selma Leydesdorff

137

Hirsch, Marianne and Leo Spitzer. 2009. ‘The witness in the archive: Holocaust studies/memory studies.’ Memory Studies 2(2), pp. 151–70. Honig, Jan Willem and Norbert Both. 1997. Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime. New York: Penguin. Krsti´c. 2000. Prosecutor vs. General Radislav Krsti´c. Trial IT-98-33. Public Transcript of Hearing, 23 March, available at http://icr.icty.org/default.aspx, accessed 30 January 2010. Laub, Dori. 2009. ‘On holocaust testimony and its “reception” within its own frame, as a process in its own right: a response to “Between History and Psychoanalysis” by Thomas Trezise.’ History and Memory 21(1), pp. 127–50. Levi, Primo. 1996 [1958]. Survival In Auschwitz. New York: Touchstone. Naimark, Norman. 2009. ‘Srebrenica and the history of genocide: a prologue,’ in N. Adler and S. Leydesdorff (eds), Memories of Mass Repression: Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, pp. 3–20. Ori´c. 2006. Prosecutor vs. Naser Ori´c. Trial IT-03-68. Public Transcript of Hearing, 5 April; 14 September, available at http://icr.icty.org/default.aspx, accessed 30 January 2010. Pendas, Devin O. 2006. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History and the Limits of the Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rhode, Peter. 1997. Endgame Srebrenica, the Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica: Europe’s Worst Massacre Since World War II. Boulder, CO: Westview. Stojanovic, Lazar. 2007. The Scorpions – A Home Movie. Humanitarian Law Center: Kosovo. Tonkin, Elisabeth. 2002. Narrating Our Past: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van der Hart, Onno, Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis and Kathy Steelel. 2006. The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization. New York: W.W. Norton. Wilson, Richard A. 2005. ‘Judging history: the historical record of the International Crime Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.’ Human Rights Quarterly 27(3), pp. 908–42.

This page intentionally left blank

Part III Temporality and the Political I: Utopia

This page intentionally left blank

8 Refugees from Utopia: Remembering, Forgetting and the Making of The Feminist Memoir Project Ann Snitow

Rachel Blau DuPlessis and I, old friends from the Women’s Liberation Movement, discovered in the late eighties a shared indignation – and grief. The books about the sixties were beginning to come out. Histories mostly written by men who had been there, these books skirted the Women’s Liberation Movement with a finesse it was hard to quarrel with. One would stop the story before the movement came on the scene. Another would deal with it as an impressive side show – noises off. At around the same time in histories and general discussions, women’s movements, along with a range of Black radical movements, were being corralled into a closed pen to keep in dangerously limited examples of ‘identity politics.’ The charge was that our movements had been chauvinistic in ways that the original democratic and civil rights movements of the earlier sixties were not. Rachel and I recognized some truth in this critical analysis of some movement developments, but a kind of general constriction of meaning and empathy seemed to be at the heart of this critical writing. Had feminists and anti-racists really claimed to be unified tribes, chanting about the wonderful true woman and the special beauty of Black? As we remembered the complex cultures of women’s mobilization in the late sixties and seventies, ours had been a mass movement and had included multitudes. Our problem had not been nationalist claims and narrow interests. Rather, the movement initiated a wild proliferation of opinion and (often utopian) desire. We compared memories, and our sense was that what had lain just one step beyond the initial excitement of shared 141

142

The Feminist Memoir Project

discovery was chaos. Chaos and skepticism about all fixed ideas of identity. Sometimes tribal, sometimes cosmopolitan, second wave feminism had never been theoretically unified, and it always contained within it rival claims about feminism’s subject and ground for analysis. Feminists differ fundamentally in their understanding of women’s near universal subordination and most contemporary feminist thought has developed under the sign of difference. Sometimes an activist’s nightmare, this very instability has also been a source of movement strength. As Rachel and I were to write: ‘feminism [has] constantly broadened its concept of liberation and deepened its recognition of the difficulty of achieving that liberation, the limitations of its own founding ideas’ (DuPlessis and Ann Snitow 1998, p. 18). The narrow accounts we were reading seemed to us a subtle form of dismissal. We felt both too soon forgotten and actively misremembered. This paradoxical mixture of accelerated forgetting and distorted remembering raised questions for us about our own movement story that we couldn’t answer. What had we actually done, and, even more elusive, who had we been? What trace of those actions and selves did we hope to leave behind? Would any of the sweep of our intentions survive us? Could the women’s movement leave historical markers of itself that we ourselves could continue to identify with and approve? Or had our past been a brief utopian moment, separate from other experience, exciting, but destined to be essentially irretrievable – not only for others who were not there, but even for ourselves? Around 1992, thinking of all this – the variety of the movement, its boldness, its erosion, the limited accounts of the sixties – with a primitive urge to record and save, Rachel and I put out a far-reaching call for memoirs of early second wave women’s movement activism. We asked people to describe what brought them into the movement and to reflect on what they thought they were doing. We wanted them to add depth to memory and to explore the rich variety of interests that we remembered but couldn’t find in the record so far. We also started to seek explanations for what we began to recognize as an older habit of forgetting past women’s mobilizations. What were the motors for forgetting what women do? Feminists seem to start from scratch every other generation, a pattern we could trace in Western history since the story of feminism began in the Enlightenment. We wrote that The Feminist Memoir Project was meant to stand ‘against historical forgetting.’ This bit of brave rhetoric still rings for us, though it became obvious from the first that difficulties would abound. Remembering was going to be much harder than we had thought. Could memoir make

Ann Snitow

143

the journey into history? Memory and history were in some unstable relationship, and we were trying to intervene in a process we had only dimly grasped. We began to conceive of The Feminist Memoir Project as both more and less than an accurate account of the movement that had so transformed our lives. Beyond any questions of faithfulness or fact, there was a tussle here, an agon of memory. Who would interpret the movement? Whom would memory serve? What atmosphere would envelop the movement in public retrospect? As the memoirs came in and were subject to an arduous editing process, we came to think that the stories were best understood as a complex mixture of primary and secondary sources. Here were the actual activists, offering their fingerprints, tracings of who they were that hadn’t changed and were still entirely recognizable after 20 years. Here were the voices of the kinds of people who made this particular, passionate attempt at changing history. That earlier time seemed present again in their words, like a scent suddenly released from a sealed bottle. At the same time, these stories they told about themselves had already taken various hortatory shapes. Twenty years after the initial burst of intense experience, a number of narrative conventions had taken a firm hold. Here were tales of conversion or disillusionment, attempts at selfjustification, confessions, rousing calls to act, to hope, to inspire and so on. It was obvious that in the medium of this kind of direct memory, facts were shape changers. After much discussion, we decided that any charges that these stories were interested narratives or that they were sometimes factually inaccurate were beside the point. Memory had inevitably done its selective, simplifying, distorting work. These pieces were both histories and polemics, both raw material and highly compressed narratives, fused together by political desire. Our writers wanted something from these histories and, we freely admitted, so did we. We shared a wish that memory might serve as a fountain of sustained future action. We had a political motive for building up a collective story that would prove enduring – and productive. Our first title for the book was Live, From Feminism. The movement was not to be the past: ‘[w]e intend no elegy,’ we proclaimed in our introduction. Though this comment was, unerringly, a symptom that elegy was indeed one operable genre in this work, we wanted much more. And, therefore, we feared: the 37 pieces we had collected could easily blow away. We ended by calling the book The Feminist Memoir Project because we saw remembering as a group undertaking that would require

144

The Feminist Memoir Project

more and more volumes. Ours would be just one of the first and would foster an ongoing project of remembering. In one of the response pieces that we invited people to contribute at the back of the book, Ellen Willis expressed skepticism about this hope. She wondered what the next and future generations would make of these passionate effusions; the state of (revolutionary) mind they reproduced was rescued from a world of thought, feeling and meaning that was, in 1998, as foreign as the mating practices of Hittites. Feminist theorist Jane Flax had a similar response. She felt that the pieces, feisty and fighting as they were, nevertheless exuded a subtle atmosphere of trauma and loss. Like Ellen Willis, she saw the pieces as sealed off; the writers seemed to know their world was gone and only they had escaped to tell us. No matter how many firsthand accounts we collected, a meta question kept arising: who would listen? Of course, almost everything and everyone gets forgotten. We know hardly anything about the belief systems or – still more elusive – about the texture of how belief was lived in even the immediate past, for example, in the lives of our grandparents. Hence, to remember is to swim against a great human tide. Cognitive psychologist and theorist of memory, William Hirst, poses this as a problem of what he calls ‘stickiness.’ Many elements contribute to which memories are ‘sticky’: which get remembered both by participants and across generations. Some of these mechanisms can be seen as relatively neutral, like a tendency to remember red. Others can be classed as political: to remember is to craft a version of one’s own story; to forget, too, can be an active, politically charged choice. We began our work because it seemed to us that women in the public sphere, particularly active, feminist women, move on a fast track toward oblivion. I began to keep a list of the ways in which women’s public acts disappear from the sustained public record. Beyond the universal obscurity shared by all, some of these barriers to memory arise from traits in women’s cultural practices and movements themselves, while others arise in a tussle between active political women and their detractors.

History and memory Like many others, Hirst makes the common, useful, if hard to sustain distinction between ‘history’ and ‘collective memory.’ History may tell us that women have been present as key players in any number of movements. Documents exist; first-hand accounts list their names.

Ann Snitow

145

But collective memory of these movements is quite a different matter. People retell the past, knocking off edges that don’t fit how the group desires to name and know itself. One might expect that remembering movements specifically for and about women would provide an exception – surely in political spaces where men are almost entirely absent, women must be memorable faute de mieux? But on the contrary, I have only to consult my high school textbook: the mighty US women’s suffrage movements of the nineteenth century were contracted to one paragraph, two names, one issue. The first time Hirst and I discussed the problem of forgotten women’s movements I asked him, ‘so, why is women’s past activism so much more invisible than men’s?’ He laughed: ‘Because we live in a patriarchy of course!’ This flat-footed statement helps; it offers a starting point, an image of women speaking, speaking, speaking while listeners drift away. Women are rarely in charge of the story or in a position to insist on their centrality to the remembered significance of events. They have stories of course, but these are not often enough rehearsed, not inscribed on stones. An example: Hirst and I are colleagues at The New School, a university with a distinctively radical history. Over the years, I’ve heard this history recited dozens of times at convocations, graduations, formal dinners and awards ceremonies. This telling and retelling is a perfect example of the ‘collective memory’ process. The New School identifies its founding moments as inspiring, heroic, and still resonant and moving in the present. The story produces a continuing pride and creates and recreates a treasured identity. The founding moment was a rebellion against politically conservative, repressive, entrenched academics. Columbia University had fired some of its professors who had spoken up against the US entry into World War I. Out of this bold nucleus of heroic refusniks (of course all male – Columbia had no women professors) came The New School’s first generation, dedicated to the proposition that first-rate social science should be a force in the world, that there was no contradiction between serious academic research and engagement in social action. During my 23 years at the university I have always loved this story. But there were always bumps, rough places, glitches I was too busy to attend to. In their history of The New School, Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott write the following sentence about Clara Mayer, student organizer and key supporter in the foundation of The New School: ‘[For] fifty years only Alvin Johnson played a more important part in the life of the New School’ (1986, p. 34). What? But maybe she was merely a handmaiden,

146

The Feminist Memoir Project

a typical role for women then and since? But no. Clara Mayer emerges in this account as a key shaper of The New School project. And there were many others. One finds their names on The New School’s founding document: Mrs George Haven Putnam, Mrs Willard Straight, Mrs Charles L. Tiffany, Mrs Learned Hand, Mrs Henry Bruer, Mrs Ruth Standish Baldwin, Mrs George W. Bacon, with secretary Mrs Victor Sorchan. One cannot easily discover their full names since until the sixties women continued to be cloaked in the names of their husbands. The fact remains: women were central. The school was founded in 1919, a culminating moment in feminist activism, the year before women voted in their first national election. And there it is, at the end of a list of subjects The New School intends to study: ‘Women in the modern social order.’ Sixty-five per cent of the students were women in the beginning. Seventy per cent of the students at the relatively new undergraduate division, Eugene Lang College, are women now. Far from thinking that these facts require marking, many of my colleagues think that it is liberation enough that gender is not named, not marked. Women often keep their own names now. Gender should not matter, therefore it does not matter. Point final. The problem for feminists is obvious enough and often repeated: to be in a marked category is a subordinate position, but pretending not to be subordinate doesn’t actually erase the array of problems that form around gender difference. Hirst’s research, in this and other publications, shows that the most effective way to make part of a story disappear is not, as one might suppose, to drop the story altogether, but rather to tell it again and again leaving out the part one thinks distracting, uninteresting, contrary to the central image or idea one treasures. It is another of his observations that groups seek a shared narrative; whatever doesn’t fit fades from the account. And so it is with the story of The New School. Women’s central position in the founding and development of the school has simply been dropped. There’s an unsettling oxymoron in the concept of women-founders, something, perhaps, diminishing to our proud institution’s glory. The Black Civil Rights Movement provides another example of displacement. No doubt The New School women had habits of selfabnegation and deference to male leaders. Women’s self-effacement, fears and the social price they pay for prominence are also elements in this story of forgetting. But African-American women activists had even more reasons to be ambivalent about promoting themselves: they feared damaging the fragile, new-minted stature of movement men.

Ann Snitow

147

Women were unquestionably central to the Civil Rights struggle, but when Rosa Parks wanted to speak at the first mass rally after the bus boycott she initiated, she was told she had done enough. Instead, Martin Luther King, Jr presided. Many of these effective, relentless, hardworking movement women live in memoirs but the readily available facts about them haven’t been translated into national histories or collective public images. Here are some of the important people from the Civil Rights mobilizations of the fifties and sixties: Daisy Bates, Mary Fair Burks, Johnnie Carr, Septima Poinsette Clark, Dorothy Cotton, Georgia Gilmore, Thelma Glass, McCree Harris, Vivian Malone Jones, Diane Nash, JoAnn Gibson Robinson, Shirley Sherrod and Modjeska Monteith Simkins. A different kind of example: feminist theorist and psychologist Nancy Chodorow (1989) did a study of the generation of female psychoanalysts before her own, women trained in the thirties and forties in the wake of Freud, students of Karen Horney and Melanie Klein. She asked these analysts questions born out of the feminist thinking of the seventies. To her dismay, her interlocutors completely rejected the terms and categories implied by her questions. They didn’t think their gender had mattered at all. They didn’t think the importance of the figure of the mother in psychoanalytic thought had any direct application to them beyond individual and technical questions of transference with particular patients. They didn’t feel any special sisterhood or recognize a disadvantage shared with other women in the field. And on and on. Initially, this was a story Nancy Chodorow (1989) didn’t like. She was particularly worried that her interviews kept pushing her toward the conclusion that these mother figures suffered from false consciousness, an old and comfortable explanation feminists avoid for good reason: once again, stupid women don’t understand their own situation; once again, they are the objects not the subjects of knowledge about themselves. But without using the explanation of false consciousness, where could Chodorow (1989) go while, in disbelief, she listened to her elders reject gender as an important category in their life histories? She came up with an elegant solution to her problem: I came to conclude that my interviewees, rather than being genderblind, had different forms of gender-consciousness than I and experienced a different salience of gender as a social category and as part of professional identity. Gender salience became a central concept in my research. (Chodorow 1989, p. 201)

148

The Feminist Memoir Project

‘Gender salience’ is a useful concept for taking apart any illusion that ‘gender’ itself is a stable, transhistorical category. Chodorow (1989) was looking for her own world of feminist thought in the self-understanding of these older analysts she valued, but her terms turned out to be much more historically specific than she had initially understood. ‘Gender’ is not a free-standing identity, and for her interlocutors it was a variable far less salient than ‘Jewish’ or ‘professional-woman-who-is-also-a-mother.’ If feminists are right to see gendered identity as a changeable and contingent category, they must necessarily recognize variations in gender salience. Why would we expect an unchanging through-line in something so liable to manipulation, interpretation and absorption into any number of systems of meaning? Well and good: but what if one were to add another variable to Chodorow’s (1989) account, the surprising force in these women’s lives of forgetting? Their mothers’ generation was responsible for one of the largest drives for universal citizenship since the eighteenth century. Women’s suffrage is one reductive way to name it, but the women activists who pushed for the vote wanted so much more. Some of them saw women as special, different from men, while others were skeptical on that point. But a collective sense of outrage at exclusion and restriction unified this struggle, keeping it alive for over 70 years. These militant women activists didn’t call themselves feminists, but they shared a sensibility with Chodorow (1989) that the women of the thirties and forties she studied lacked. What had happened? Not a single one of the interviews Chodorow (1989) quotes mentions or even faintly resonates with this dramatic, heroic immediate past. Many of these women were born in Europe or the US before women could vote. Their mothers, active or not, had fought in one way or another for the space this first generation of professional women were to so confidently inherit. Yet not a scintilla of memory, of acknowledgment that the generation of women before them couldn’t go to school as they went to school, couldn’t choose whether or not to be mothers as some of them had chosen, couldn’t imagine a work world shared by both men and women. No echo, no gratitude, no continuity, no awe. Nothing. As Shulamith Firestone (1970) and others have argued, psychoanalysis closed down a broader discussion of politics, history and women’s place in both. Psychoanalysis has had its own role in the history of forgetting. It pathologized the relationship between generations, locating distortions and forgetting firmly in the realm of the private.

Ann Snitow

149

Who wants to forget feminism? These are examples of active, distorting forgetting taken at random. The New School and Civil Rights sagas emphasize the wish of the fathers to be the true and only begetters of public institutions and historical events. The saga of the psychoanalysts, who had no consciousness of the feminist struggle that created the professional space they inhabited, reveals the younger professionals’ ambivalence about just how salient they wished their elders’ struggles to be. Ironically, psychoanalysis provides a possible reading of this kind of forgetting between mothers and daughters. How else to emerge as a whole self, free of what Chodorow’s fellow explorer of this territory, feminist psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein (1999 [1976]) saw as the abjection of childhood, ‘the chagrins of the nursery’? These analysts preferred a timeless sense of their position. Theirs was a genderless triumph. In these stories, it would seem that both men and women can collude in pushing women into the background in collective accounts of public events. It is past disappearances like these that mark The Feminist Memoir Project with anxiety, with the anticipation that all these amazing works and days of the sixties and seventies will not be recalled a mere moment later, even as soon as in the lives of the sons and daughters. Indeed current forgetting is already far advanced. Mary Hawkesworth (2004) made a study of the current, commonly repeated announcement of ‘the death of feminism’ and came up with this stunning conclusion: there is no death of feminism. In fact, feminism is growing worldwide. What we are seeing, she argued in 2004, is not death, but the wish that feminism be dead, that it disappear. Susan Faludi (1991) had made a similar analysis in Backlash as early as 1991. The free women of the Women’s Liberation Movement had made everyone nervous. Faludi studied a wide range of popular and pseudo-scientific literature in the USA which warned women that if they proceeded along this path of rebellion, no one would love them, they would fail to have babies, they would die sad and alone. These admonitory texts were an invitation to forgetting: women, forget this folly; put the rage of feminism behind you; forget, and we will love you again, take you back into the fold. The reasons for forgetting were overdetermined and this backlash message offered a number of narratives from which the variously disaffected could choose. Sylvia Walby (1970) has catalogued some of these common scenarios of death and disappearance. Some say feminism is

150

The Feminist Memoir Project

over because it has succeeded. (Feminists have gotten all they wanted and now can go home; younger women don’t feel the need to complain like their unlovely elders.) Others say feminism has died because it was narrow and self-absorbed, or internally incoherent, or in error about what women really want, or overwhelmed by cat fights. (In other words, feminists killed the movement themselves because of limitations or mistakes; feminism died by its own hand.) The idea that backlash itself has lowered feminist vitality rarely figures in these popular death announcements, but a number of feminist theorists have tried to measure the effect of such hostile or dismissive narratives on how feminism looks to a next generation. How much harm does a dismissive story – stripped of glamour and romance – do to the future? Feminist psychoanalyst and Lacanian theorist Miglena Nikolchina (2004) offers a particularly devastating assessment of the situation: thedeath-of-feminism party do not merely wish women to forget; they want women, the mother in women, to entirely disappear, to die so that we all may live – separate, whole and beholden to no one. Nikolchina argues that each generation of feminists thinks that this time women have made it out into the world only to have their public presence buried once again; the collective desire to bury the memory of women’s power, presence and influence trumps the facts of the record every time. Each time, women expect to be remembered at last, and each time, to their surprise, they are slated once again – by both men and women – for oblivion. Scenarios like Hawkesworth’s (2004) and Nikolchina’s (2004) are not subject to proof. They are polemical accounts of a recurring injustice. What they introduce is a sense of urgency, an angry demand for active explanation. They recognize that forgetting women’s social and political presence is normal, but they see this ‘normal’ as a psychopathology of everyday life, a serious flaw in the collective project of culture. They hypothesize that, while forgetting is eternal, women’s acts are more aggressively forgotten than men’s. Women disappear with a difference. Thin as the record may sometimes be, the stories, symbols and rituals in which the patriarch is the central character remain. He has left his trace and, willy-nilly – and with varying faithfulness – we contrive to weave him back into the stories we tell about ourselves.

How forgetting works Minute by minute, memory by memory, how does it work? Only that which is most ‘sticky,’ to use Hirst’s wonderful word, that which is most

Ann Snitow

151

repeated, most narrated, most encoded in ritual, most elevated to the mythic, or most shockingly, publically traumatic survives as the story of who ‘they’ were in the past and what ‘they’ did. It helps if there are pictures. It helps if there are martyrs. It helps if there are charismatic and photogenic leaders. It helps if the story is clear and conforms in some way to already existing narratives people are prepared to hear. The particular problems the Women’s Liberation Movement might have in relation to these rules-of-the-memorable are immediately selfevident. I remember our saying angrily to the press at those early rallies, ‘Don’t take my picture!’ We meant: we’ve been objectified enough. We hated the early images of feminist events showing cool chicks with short skirts who were so beautiful when they were angry. We carried this image phobia quite far, not taking many pictures of each other either. (The search for photographs to accompany The Feminist Memoir Project revealed a surprising lack. The contrast with the visual record of the Civil Rights Movement – with its brilliant representations of heroes, martyrs and key historical moments – was dramatic.) To escape the usual disparagement, we also resisted being written about, refusing to be interviewed unless they sent female reporters. Sometimes the press raided the ‘research’ pool, sending women out to cover us who had never had the chance to be reporters before. At other times men with microphones and cameras simply stormed away, leaving our events uncovered. We had no notion then of what, a mere moment later, everyone knew, that all ink is good ink, and that ink there will be – or else silence and invisibility. Though our dream that the revolution would not be televised is still worth consideration, for the most part our refusals of representation were a losing game, expressing a utopian wish instantly defeated in a fast-expanding media universe. We felt our movement was earthshaking, but we had an underdeveloped sense of ourselves as historical actors. Grandiose as we no doubt sometimes were (and at moments the memoirs show this trait grandly), we were amateurs at self-promotion, neophytes as myth-makers, suspicious of what we saw as male styles of heroics. Because revolutionary moments seem to suspend time and are lived vividly, in a glistening present, memory seemed beside the point. We simply didn’t register how much representation would come to matter. Nor did we see any value in having charismatic spokespersons, like Martin Luther King, Jr. The Women’s Liberation Movement eschewed leaders. Of course, like all movements, it had them, but they were endlessly savaged by activists who were fighting against the whole

152

The Feminist Memoir Project

world of leaders, hierarchies and elites (The Feminist Memoir Project is full of stories of leaders attacked and chastened). The egalitarian ethos of that time encouraged anonymity, teamwork, anti-hierarchical social structures. One might well think that at least the Women’s Liberation Movement had the intensity of trauma on its side. After all, it had many martyrs too. The victims of domestic violence, rape and illegal abortions were rescued from the private dark where shame and the walls of home had long hidden them. But shame is glamour’s antithesis; shame dies hard and forgetting is one of its prime expressions. When feminists brought these stories into the light, the fact remained that those who suffered or died were victims, not heroes. And they were so many! Too obscure to name – no list of names here – their situation was as common as dirt. With rare exceptions, suffering women remained relative creatures without individual, tragic fates. These stories were not sticky while the backlash narrative had the clarity, simplicity and power to alarm through a brilliant clustering of hostile ideas of what feminism is all about: ugly, bra-burning, manhating, child-murdering, hairy lesbians. This linked chain of words began as a relatively simple case of backlash. But such defamation has turned out to have a longevity that the complex and diffuse movement itself lacks. By now, the ugly, man-hating feminist is a well-established figure of myth – one my students faithfully reproduce each semester as we begin our work of discussing feminism. Hirst suggested to me that the disparity between the memory of the extraordinary social transformations arising from and parallel to the movement and the negative image of the horrible, miserable feminist arises from the movement’s failure to promise happiness, a story with a readable ending. Feminist narratives are internally contradictory, diverse, reactive, unsettling, unclear. Feminists want a different world but have usually distrusted the closure of unity or happy endings. Though vital struggles continue, there is no beloved community once one has left the original commune of the seventies sisterhood. These observations are not meant to name the faults in feminism. On the contrary, feminist values, and some of feminism’s best thinking, underpin the traits that also encourage forgetting. What, after all, is the feminist story? Women are all so different; we want freedom to do a wide variety of things. We have no sustainable identity as a group, nor do we want one. What’s more, feminism makes no promises. Feminism may be about freedom but freedom is an empty set. Can feminism get one love, or

Ann Snitow

153

security, or happiness? In contrast to traditionalist movements, which promise so much depth of feeling, does feminism keep you warm at night, provide you company in old age, offer a sustaining sense of meaning and purpose? Not only does feminism fail on all these counts, but it fails by design. Only in brief periods among a few groups was feminism meant to be an all-encompassing ideology, a full description of the world, a panacea for all ills or a comfortable, permanent home. Usually, feminism has been a disturber of the peace, a critique of our comfy resting places, a skeptic about what is usually on offer as happiness. Feminism is a complaint about oppression. Often accused of whining, feminists are constantly expressing a broad and persistent dissatisfaction with how things are generally organized. Feminist theorists often yearn for the unstable, indeterminate and ironic. They are skeptical about mythical, enduring identities, heroes and magical coherence of any kind. Feminism has few rituals to share with a next generation. It is nervous about any assertion of eternal verities about man, woman, god, truth. Though feminists often describe glorious utopian imaginaries – from men doing housework to an end of the house as we know it – it’s hard to make those wishes stick as solid or real. Instead, what is apparent is that these women are unsatisfied. What, dear god, do they want? The sticky, soothing story is the backlash story: the terrifying ugliness of female autonomy. Feminism is threatening. Though most feminists defend women’s right to pleasure, they can’t guarantee that pleasure will come with the collapse of known, deeply elaborated, mythically sanctioned identities. Women are more forgotten than men, but feminists are suspicious of the ways in which men have achieved stickiness. The male narrative of creation and centrality and glory and autonomy is a story which feminism challenges at its root. Is there another form for remembering? Hirst tells me he thinks not, and I see no reason to dispute his conclusions. His research demonstrates that human beings remember badly: they need the help of simplification, the motive of self-serving teleologies, the false unity of sharing a story with the tribe. Revision is continuous and earlier structures of feeling are abandoned without leaving much trace. What remains in popular memory once the erasing tide recedes is, first of all, very little, and second, very unreliable and approximate. Stickiness depends on the distortions that are myth and ritual and is often sealed further by fear and trauma, death and martyrdom. Memory is a terror-monger; memory is faithless.

154

The Feminist Memoir Project

In The New Yorker as I write this, Ariel Levy (2009) is complaining that women are both the perpetrators and the victims of ‘cultural memory disorder.’ Sometimes they themselves distort the record of what women have done. At the same moment, Gail Collins (2009) is being interviewed about her new book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present; she is arguing that the colossal achievements of women and women’s movements are not becoming part of what we call US history. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (2009) are on the stump recounting the argument of their best seller, Half the Sky: female babies are being aborted and women are being starved and terrorized and enslaved and murdered all over the world but this goes unremarked because it happens every day. How can something that happens every day be a crisis? Kristof and WuDunn try to sensitize their readers, to get them to register shock at what is ubiquitous, normal, generally accepted. Each of these writers sounds the call: women are constantly forgotten. But there is small reason to think this outcry will alter the general process of forgetting. An undertaking like The Feminist Memoir Project can’t build a bridge to historical remembering on its own. Though we hope we have created moments of ‘stickiness,’ we can’t know how much we have succeeded. But in this act of collecting we have expressed a faith in a long-term project of change. Inequality lies deep, but most feminists share a belief that even such ingrained stories can shift. We gathered memoirs describing a fleeting moment in a long and slow process. Women are dissatisfied; they continue to express discontent. They are the ones most likely to herald that there is a relationship between what Dorothy Dinnerstein (1999/1976) called ‘sexual arrangements’ and ‘human malaise.’

Our utopia and the future Perhaps, finally, my outcry here about the forgetting of women is beside the point. Such a complaint can easily descend into a politics of ressentiment. After all the years I’ve spent in political movements, I’ve come to think that ‘I’ve-been-left-out’ is one of our deepest-lying human emotions – right up there with rage, hate and desire. Memory cannot repair loss and is only one aspect of continuity. Unlike religion, feminism does not demand eternal loyalty to unchanging beliefs – nor should it. The continuing density of sexism can be trusted to form its own reaction, and those who need some aspect of what has been the feminist project over the last several 100 years will keep reinventing it. This has already happened repeatedly and is happening all over the world as I write this.

Ann Snitow

155

Feminists now living have an understandable attachment to the bodily, animated particulars of their movement experiences. It is bound to be galling to discover that, in the usual course of things, these treasured, specific memories are not only as evanescent as foam but also, on their way out, subject to a sort of patronizing diminishment reserved for women’s efforts to enter history. There is always the personal question of how to survive being forgotten or aggressively misunderstood. Inevitably, with longevity or luck, one outlives one’s formative moment. In the case of those who were a part of ecstatic, hopeful, utopian movements, this common tragedy of the mismatch between an individual’s life and the arc of history is likely to be particularly acute. For them, forgetting goes beyond personal loss to the loss of a whole world. But one step beyond these feelings, that one’s acts and words of protest have been specially chosen for neglect and insult, lies another, more reliable experience feminists share: in modernity, feminism keeps returning. Though obscurity and abuse dog feminism, self-conscious feminist struggles are constantly finding new forms. Even if each return is greeted as if it were for the first time – the New Woman again and again – still, she keeps coming. And she keeps bringing back some version of feminist resistance. Her central questions recur: what is it to be designated ‘woman’? Why does patriarchy keep insisting on this relatively fixed identity? How stable or unstable are gender categories and what have we to lose or gain in changing gender meanings? Future feminists may develop a critique of the instability of gender that we cannot now imagine. They may say that continuity or discontinuity with the past are dangers to them not for our reasons but for their own. They may choose to define and ramify an activist feminist tradition because all historical through-lines have been destroyed. Our ambivalence about leaving a bloodline – records of leaders, martyrs, heroic triumphs – may develop new political meanings. How much harm does it do when a particular manifestation of feminism fades from collective memory? In responding to my general consternation, Hirst explained that recalling earlier states of mind is one of the weakest links in human remembering. So let that old set of feelings go? Trust in whatever continuity feminism is likely to have over time? Be content to leave personal traces and records like The Feminist Memoir Project? Accept forgetting and at the same time try to create ‘stickiness’ on one’s own terms? After all, the power of patriarchy to sustain its myths, rituals and emotions will continue to arouse women’s long-term resistance to those selective stories.

156

The Feminist Memoir Project

The Feminist Memoir Project was intended to be a place where that tightly woven story of male domination and achievement could be shifted from central position and placed alongside other accounts of what the reality of then felt like. Though to talk back to forgetting is both difficult and, in some respects, doomed to failure, this unequal dialogue, this flash of presence of the other, just might subtly change the story. Later tellers will determine what effect this try at telling had. Unless one believes in the eternal powerlessness of the other, telling may be some small part of change, a part of a slow shift in the gender story in the longue durée. Near the end of our time working on The Feminist Memoir Project I had this dream: I was in the stacks of a library climbing an unnaturally tall ladder past dark volumes upon volumes to an empty top shelf, on which I levered an unwieldy, bound copy of our book. I seemed to be saying to the book something like, ‘stay there and wait for your readers to find you.’ The feeling was: this was the future. The future might find us obnoxious, unintelligible, grotesque. Or, perhaps instead, our exoticism would be exciting to them. They would read, misread, project upon us with their own purposes in whatever languages they would talk – and we would seem to listen.

Acknowledgments I thank Rachel Blau DuPlessis for the thorough editing she gave this piece and for the fine additions she made to it, though her account of what we were doing in The Feminist Memoir Project would be quite different from the story told here.

References Chodorow, Nancy J. 1989. ‘Seventies questions for thirties women: gender and generation in a study of early women in psychoanalysis.’ In Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, pp. 199–218. Collins, Gail. 2009. When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Dinnerstein, Dorothy. 1999 [1976]. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. New York: Other Press. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau and Ann Snitow (eds). 1998. The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices From Women’s Liberation. New York: Three Rivers Press, reprinted by Rutgers University Press, 2007. Faludi, Susan. 1991. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Anchor Books.

Ann Snitow

157

Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow. Hawkesworth, Mary. 2004. ‘The semiotics of premature burial: feminism in a postfeminist age.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29(4), pp. 961–84. Hirst, William. 2009. ‘Presentation to the Lang Freshman class of 2013,’ unpublished talk given at Eugene Lang College, The New School, New York, 6 September. Kristof, Nicholas D. and Sheryl WuDunn. 2009. Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Levy, Ariel. 2009. ‘Lift and separate.’ The New Yorker, 16 November. Nikolchina, Miglena. 2004. Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf. New York: Other Press. Rutkoff, Peter M. and William B. Scott. 1986. New School: A History of the New School for Social Research. New York: The Free Press. Walby, Sylvia. 1997. ‘Backlash to feminism.’ In Gender Transformations. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 156–65.

9 Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud: Utopia and Memory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee Lindsey A. Freeman

On 19 March 1949, the ‘atomic city’ of Oak Ridge, Tennessee was opened with a tiny mushroom cloud. A standard ribbon cutting ceremony executed with a snip of scissor blades would have been far too gauche for this science city of the future. In its place, a mini-simulacrum of an atomic bomb blast was ignited, setting ablaze the scarlet ribbon that stretched across the city’s main gate.1 As part of the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) ‘Operation Open Sesame’ the ribbon burning helped to usher in a new phase of visibility for the former secret city of the Manhattan Project. This spirit of openness marked a drastic change for Oak Ridge, the city responsible for producing all of the uranium-235 that went into the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. From 1943–49, Oak Ridge operated as a completely closed federal military reservation, unmapped and invisible to the Rand-McNally universe.2 Although the AEC referred to Oak Ridge’s transition as part of a process of normalization, ‘Operation Open Sesame’ was a spectacular event with 10,000 people in attendance, including numerous celebrities and politicians, such as the movie stars Marie MacDonald and Rod Cameron, as well as Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut and Vice President Alben Barkley (Figure 9.1). For those who were able to travel to Oak Ridge for the celebration, it must have been quite a red-letter day. In addition to the gate-opening ceremony, another premier event was held; the first museum of atomic energy opened its doors. The inauguration of the American Museum of Atomic Energy3 was carefully planned to coincide directly with the opening of the town; in fact only two hours separated their respective public introductions. The timing was intended to solidify a particular version of the events leading up to and following the end of 158

Lindsey A. Freeman

159

Figure 9.1 The opening ceremony of the ‘atomic city’ of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 19 March 1949. Ed Westcott, Courtesy of the Department of Energy Photo Archives

World War II. The museum’s first displays were devoted to ‘The Atom and Man,’ and the goal was to ‘operate the museum as part of a public education program on atomic energy’ (ORAU, 2010). The museum’s message was future oriented, utopian. Atomic energy was going to revolutionize our everyday lives. Fissionable materials would not only be used for bombs, they would also heat our homes, fuel our cars and provide limitless clean energy forever. Sometimes, though, forever has a brief shelf life. Aided by events such as the Chernobyl disaster, and the Three Mile Island incident, as well as the recognition of the many health problems that plague downwinders in the American West, the idea of nuclear energy as an unproblematic energy source has receded into memory. In many ways the future of atomic energy is a thing of the past. This sentiment is clear from the American Museum of Science and Energy’s (AMSE) current slogan, ‘Where Science and History Meet.’ The same could be said of the town itself. Oak Ridge was once a city of the future, a prototype for an ideal American town designed by the firm of

160 Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud

Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, as well as a new type of scientific community dedicated to producing the fissionable materials of tomorrow. While Oak Ridge is still a destination for world-class physicists and a site of federal nuclear storage and research, the town has taken on a much more historic gloss. This chapter will argue that Oak Ridge, a former utopia, is now experiencing its half-life, the slow erosion of its cultural significance. Meanwhile, local groups along with the Department of Energy are working to delay this process through rituals of remembrance, such as festivals and memorials, as well as through institutions like the AMSE. I will argue that these attempts to remind the world about Oak Ridge have an unmistakably nostalgic character and rely mostly on conjuring memories of ‘The Greatest Generation,’4 those who lived through the Great Depression and then went on to fight in World War II or to support the war on the home front. This nostalgia is dangerous because it suppresses opportunities to revisit many important issues facing the USA and beyond, including the storage, use and proliferation of nuclear weapons. Yet is it actually possible in the early twenty-first century to be nostalgic for the atomic bomb? Are good memories of the mushroom cloud still possible, amidst all the terrible nightmares and the mounting evidence of destruction? If Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the key production sites for the Manhattan Project, is any indication, then, yes it is possible. But does Oak Ridge’s trajectory from atomic utopianism to atomic nostalgia point to something larger than the question of atomic bombs or atomic energy? More generally, are the atomic spaces of the last century becoming nostalgic spaces, staring backwards instead of looking toward the future? Is this kind of scientific utopian thinking, of which Oak Ridge is clearly an example, a thing of the past, accessible only through old movies or museum displays? If so, what might these displays of atomic nostalgia look like in the future? In order to address these questions I will focus on the AMSE as a window to the changing attitudes toward atomic energy and atomic utopianism. While Oak Ridge’s nostalgic shift can be seen through many lenses and social institutions, such as histories, documentaries and newspapers, as well as the annual Secret City Festival, I argue that the museum provides the best vantage point with which to view the phenomenon, as it marks one of the first self-conscious attempts to both narrate the city’s past and to articulate the possibilities of atomic energy in the future. In order to describe the utopianism that was attached to the everyday lives of Oak Ridgers, as well as the work that was done in the secret uranium factories, it will be necessary to make an argument for Oak Ridge as a utopian landscape. Then, using a combination

Lindsey A. Freeman

161

of archival and ethnographic research, I will show how the AMSE has changed over the years from a forward-thinking utopian space to a display of atomic nostalgia, mirroring the arc of the town itself, as well as the national narrative.5 Lastly, I will argue that the changing outlook of Oak Ridge can tell us something about the future of nostalgia for the Bomb in the USA.

Oak Ridge as utopia The anthropologist, Margaret Mead, writing in 1968, recognized that what she found in the small city of Tennessee was a new type of living arrangement not yet seen in the USA, a new variety of utopia, the first scientific community: The segregation of those with special interests is an old tradition in the United States in the form of communities of the religiously dedicated, communities of artists, communities in which the political Utopians have experimented. But the community of scientists and technicians specifically, concerned with such problems as the development of atomic energy, the instrumental bases of automation, the space sciences, is new – only as old as Oak Ridge, Tennessee. (Mead 2005, p. 188) When we think of the utopian history of the USA we tend to think in terms of religious enclaves, transcendental communities and the counter-cultural communes of the sixties and seventies, places such as the Oneida Community,6 Brook Farm7 and Drop City.8 These utopias existed outside of the dominant American culture, either by actively resisting the state or by choosing to live independent lives alongside the prevailing socio-political apparatuses of federal, state and local governments. Oak Ridge marks a distinct break with this tradition in American utopianism in that it was actually established by the federal government. Residents of Oak Ridge were not seeking an alternative from the mainstream American culture; in fact Oak Ridge was a community of heightened patriotism dedicated to the Allied cause of World War II. It sought not to smash the dominant American value system or to skirt the cultural norms, but to celebrate and defend them. Yet Oak Ridge was no less utopian in its aims. First, as an isolated community of united workers dedicated to a single industry, Oak Ridgers were living in a planned environment designed as a precursor to the suburbs that would radically reshape the American landscape in the decades to come. Then,

162 Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud

after the war, Oak Ridgers displayed utopianism in their belief that our lives could be completely remade and reorganized through the development of atomic energy, and that they would have some responsibility for this transformation. Absent from cartographic representation or newspaper columns, hidden to protect it from possible enemy attack, Oak Ridge, Tennessee was the first ideal scientific community in the USA; Francis Bacon’s (1919) New Atlantis brought to life. The industries of Oak Ridge were devoted to nuclear physics and to solving the problem of how to create an atomic bomb before the Axis powers. Meanwhile, the planners of Oak Ridge sought to produce an ideal American town, nearly overnight. Their goal was to provide as much comfort and stimulation as they could to the residents in order to ensure productivity in the atomic factories, while at the same time maintaining a high security military reservation. Despite the restrictions placed on residents, including the inability to talk about their jobs, security checks at city gates and the possibility that whomever you socialized with could be a government informer, many people describe this period of life in Oak Ridge as idyllic. As long as Oak Ridge remained ‘the city behind the fence,’ many of its residents saw it as utopian, an island of culture, prestige and intelligence tucked away from the surrounding communities and the outside world. Oak Ridge was an ideal city where unemployment was non-existent, where the school system was far above the national average and where universal healthcare provided the most advanced medical services available. Meanwhile a free bus system criss-crossed the city, taking residents not only to work, but also to the plethora of cultural opportunities available at nearly all hours from symphonies to dances to organized sports leagues. Perhaps these advantages, especially during the scarcity of wartime, explain why many were in opposition to the opening of the gates and why they were hostile to the process of normalization that the AEC initiated in 1949. Once the city was normalized, the problem of Oak Ridge became a question of identity; its challenge was to sell its uniqueness, both as a crown jewel in national security and as a global player in scientific brainpower. Initially, Oak Ridge sought to present itself as playing a key role in the future of atomic energy. Then, as the Cold War slowly thawed, attention was directed toward the preservation of the town’s utopian moment, its role in the historic Manhattan Project, as one of the three top-secret cities devoted to building the first atomic bomb. From the first opening swing of the gates, Oak Ridge has sought to celebrate and legitimize its role in winning World War II and in the development of

Lindsey A. Freeman

163

atomic energy, and since the very beginning the town has attempted to tell this story through the AMSE. In the following, I will trace the museum’s initial atomic optimism to its current state of atomic nostalgia. I will argue that both dispositions are mystifying positions that thwart critical analysis of the use of the atomic bomb against Japan, as well as the problematics of nuclear energy in general.

Atomic utopianism on display The American Museum of Atomic Energy offered a spectacular and sexy introduction to the possibilities of atomic energy and scientific advancement. The message of the museum was clear: our lives are getting better all the time thanks to science and technology. Left out of this celebration was any discussion of the destructive elements of scientific progress or the gruesome after-effects of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan. The true horrors of war and the potential dangers of fissionable materials both at home and abroad were hidden behind the overt utopianism of the displays. While the museum’s focus was ‘The Atom and Man,’ the virtues of scientific and technological knowledge in general were celebrated. For example, there was a robotics exhibit featuring a set of mechanical hands that could take care of light tasks. In the (near) future there would be no need for such exertions. The first person to demonstrate the dexterity of the robotic digits was the actress and chanteuse Marie ‘The Body’ MacDonald; she volunteered her cigarette. As the Hollywood vixen gracefully leaned forward, her cigarette protruding from its elegant holder, the paper was ignited and successfully lit, as elegantly perhaps as Clark Gable could have done (McCarthy 1987, p. 379). Long after opening day the museum continued to be a curiosity for visitors, both local and from very far away, attracting those who were interested in science and energy, as well as those who wanted to get closer to the power of the atom. One way that visitors were able to increase their proximity to atomic energy was through some rather odd souvenirs. For example, between 1949 and 1967 visitors could walk away with an irradiated dime – the charge would be neutralized by the time they reached the parking lot – but for a few seconds they could possess a bit of radiation, hold it in their hands and put it in their pockets. Even Miss Universe of 1966, Aspasra Hongsakula of Thailand, got in on the action as you can see in Figure 9.2. However, the irradiated dimes were not the only souvenir that promised owning a bit of atomic energy (even if untapped); during the fifties and sixties visitors could

164 Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud

Figure 9.2 Miss Universe of 1966 receives irradiated dimes at the American Museum of Atomic Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Courtesy of Oak Ridge Associated Universities

also purchase uranium ore from the gift shop. Encased in plastic and embossed with the museum’s logo, tourists were able to take away the raw material for producing an atomic bomb (ORAU, 2010). As the spectacle of celebrities on opening day obscured some of the ugly truths regarding the atomic bombing of Japan, later the souvenirs worked to domesticate the dangers of radiation in general, after all how bad could it really be if you could carry it around in your pocket? Originally located in a former wartime cafeteria, the American Museum of Atomic Energy was the first atomic museum in the USA; now there are many, including the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, New Mexico,9 the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the B-Reactor Museum in Richland, Washington. These museums are important in that they are among the only cultural institutions still discussing nuclear weapons. They influence the American public’s ideas about the history of the bomb, while at the same time they seek to legitimize this history for an international audience. The fact that these museums remain largely uncritical and nationalistic damages the possibility for debate regarding the US nuclear past, present and future.

Lindsey A. Freeman

165

With the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War the AEC felt a need to control the message surrounding the atomic bomb and atomic energy in general. Along with the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies, the AEC created the first atomic museum with the initial stated goal of educating the public by providing information in non-scientific terms. For the first two months of the museum’s existence there was a lot of ‘educating’; more than 15,000 visitors from across the USA and from 25 foreign countries visited and absorbed the nationalistic and pro-nuclear message on display (ORAU, 2010). From the beginning the AMSE sought to put into context the intricacies of the Manhattan Project and the work that occurred in Oak Ridge at the uranium production plants.10 It aided in the crystallization of a very recent memory for the residents, and created a story for outsiders to absorb. The exhibits put a positive spin on the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan, as well as the production of uranium for peacetime purposes and security, thus legitimizing Oak Ridge’s role during World War II, the Cold War and beyond. The museum was utopian in its vision that atomic energy could provide a safer and better future for all. This sentiment is echoed in the slogan ‘Atoms for Peace!’ that was used by the museum in the fifties and sixties.11

The American Museum of Science and Energy By the seventies nuclear sloganeering had lost much of its original purchase in the USA. Nationally, the emotions of bewilderment, fear, dread and ambivalence replaced the hopefulness once attached to atomic energy. The cries of ‘Not in my backyard!’ drowned out those who still whispered ‘Atoms for Peace!’ Yet, many Oak Ridgers past and present remained convinced that their unique history as a secret city of the Manhattan Project is akin to a technological Shangri-La.12 This image of an idyllic existence is perhaps no more apparent than in the series of rooms at the AMSE that detail Oak Ridge’s role in the Manhattan Project. This portion of the museum came to fruition in 1975, when the museum moved from its first location in the ramshackle wartime cafeteria to a new modern two-storey building. Replete with black and white photographs, objects and products from the forties, this wing celebrates American victory culture, consumerism and citizenship (Jackson and Johnson 1981, p. 31).13 It is a space where nostalgia reigns. Yet, it should be noted that the ‘Secret City’ room is not completely a provincial affair; from 1975 to the present, in addition to images of local life there are also displays of national newspaper headings and various

166 Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud

documents and images from World War II. Since 2008, to enter the ‘Secret City’ room the visitor must first snake through a curvilinear structure that begins with a mounted television screen flashing black and white images of the Third Reich. Once inside the visitor is confronted with a plexiglass display, where Nazis goosestep across the visual plane, the mini-mustachioed Hitler performs his famous salute, the itinerary of the Enola Gay is mapped and a brief description of the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima is offered. To counter the villains, who are easily recognized, the museum casts the heroes of World War II: the US military ‘our boys overseas,’ Oak Ridgers, along with other Americans who are ‘doing their part for the war effort’ and the international cohort of scientists – ‘the greatest minds in the world’ – who worked on the side of the Allies. The most famous of these minds resides in the skull of Albert Einstein, who appears more times in the museum than any other historical actor. Through the figure of Einstein, the AMSE’s outlook toward the atomic bomb and the scientific uses of nuclear energy can be easily ascertained. Einstein’s presence is reassuring; of all the nuclear physicists, he is the most recognizable, his genius the most trusted and his corporality the most comforting. Typically pictured as wild haired and sweater clad, he plays the comforting grandfather to Oppenheimer’s rakish and slightly unsettling charms. From the opening scene of the museum Einstein plays a starring role, a painting of the scientist hangs in the mezzanine directly above the information desk. The scientist pops up again in the portion of the museum dedicated to the Y-12 National Security Complex;14 here Einstein is a ghostly image visible in the background of a poster that shouts ‘Defending The Free World,’ where he looks over some papers with fellow scientist, Leo Szilard.15 The third most obvious placement of Einstein exists on the lower level of the AMSE where the scientist is rendered in the Madame Tussaud style, next to him a card states: ‘He laid the groundwork for splitting atoms.’ There is also a copy of a letter that he wrote from Long Island to President Roosevelt in 1939, urging development of an atomic fission program. Left out, however, is Einstein’s correspondence to Roosevelt in 1945 requesting that the program be stopped. The complexity of his feelings toward the bomb are missing, making it appear as though Einstein had given a rousing endorsement. This absence countered by his omniscient presence throughout the museum makes it appear as though not only does Einstein wholeheartedly support the Manhattan Project, but also all the US Homeland Security measures that have been taken at the Y-12 plant in response to the ‘global threat of terrorism,’ as proclaimed by the museum’s displays. As with Marie ‘The Body’ MacDonald, the

Lindsey A. Freeman

167

celebrity spectacle of Einstein helps to distract the visitor, to distance and obscure the dangers of nuclear materials, and to mask the realities of the destructive pasts and potentials of nuclear weapons.

Atomic nostalgia in black and white In 2009, Oak Ridge’s nostalgic sheen was polished until it glowed. Sixty years had passed since the gates to the town were opened ceremoniously by ribbon burning. In order to mark the occasion on 21 March, a historical re-enactment of the event was held, complete with the original speeches and even girl scouts dressed in the uniforms of the forties. Although the turnout was quite low in comparison to the gate opening of 1949, a ritual of remembrance was undoubtedly performed. In keeping with the original day, the celebration of the town’s openness was followed by a special event at the museum. The AMSE hosted a showing of the new documentary by Keith McDaniel, Operation Open Sesame: Opening the Gates of the Secret City, and a retro admission price of a quarter was charged. In the summer of 2009, to celebrate the dual anniversary of the gate and museum openings, the AMSE held a retrospective exhibit of the photographs of Ed Westcott, the official Army photographer for the Manhattan Project. Westcott was the only person allowed to take pictures of the creation of the town, as well as the only photographer given access to the top-secret factories and their workers. Westcott’s highly staged photographs depict patriotic sentiments, a protestant work ethic and wholesome family values. Positioned in the first room of the museum, they set the tone for the visitor. Perhaps more than any other object or museum display, these photographs evoke nostalgic emotions, the longing for the golden age of American culture.16 The exhibit features two-dimensional Kodak teenagers in letter sweaters and knee-length skirts doing ‘the twist,’ women tending Victory gardens and swarms of smiling workers filing out of the K-25 plant during a shift change, among other evocative photographs of mass sacrifice for the war effort.17 One of the most recognizable images is that of the ‘Calutron Girls,’ snapped by Westcott in 1945.18 The ‘Calutron Girls’ photograph shows two rows of young white women working in the Y-12 plant, monitoring multiple dials embedded in tall, gray metal columns. In addition to illuminating the role of the generic (white) worker, the photographs provide evidence that women played a part in the war effort; Rosie the Riveter lays down her rivet gun to observe an

168 Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud

Figure 9.3 The ‘Calutron Girls’. Ed Westcott, Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration

electromagnetic separation dial.19 Row upon row of these women can be imagined in multiple rooms stretching out like so many Tiller girls across the stage.20 The description that the German sociologist Siegfried Kracauer gives to the Tiller dancers could easily be applied to the workers in Oak Ridge: ‘These products of American distraction factories are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics’ (1995, pp. 75–6). The image conveys the enormous scope of the Manhattan Project and its labor intensity, where everyone is doing her part to achieve a collective goal (Figure 9.3). The image of the Calutron Girls and the rest of the collected photographs offer a very idealized version of the work that was done at the atomic factories, even the African-American workers, who were given the least desirable jobs on the reservation, including carrying coal or collecting the garbage, smile at the camera. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is no counter-balancing exhibit of the destruction of the cities of Japan. Alone in another room is one figurative photograph of a Japanese sufferer. The entire business of the Manhattan Project from start to

Lindsey A. Freeman

169

finish is simplified: it is depicted in black and white. While an in-depth analysis of Westcott’s catalog is not within the scope of this chapter, these examples should illuminate the overall tone of the retrospective exhibit. Instead of providing a space for an open discussion of nuclear weapons or even a glimpse of the catastrophic loss of civilian lives in Japan, the overly nationalistic space of the museum focuses on two seemingly contradictory elements to justify the US nuclear past: American victory culture and American innocence. Sociologist Steven Dubin paraphrases the idea of American victory culture in his work on controversial museum exhibits, from Displays of Power: [Victory culture] is a set of beliefs that dominated American thinking since colonial times. A central precept was that savages – be they Indians or the Japanese in their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor – continuously provoked conflicts that Americans felt compelled to respond to, typically with vanquishing force. (Dubin 1999, p. 188) Victory culture goes hand in hand with the American culture of innocence, the myth of a benevolent nation stripped of any lust for power. It is a position of denial that ignores the role the USA has played in global politics, and instead presents the nation as a non-aggressive entity, only attacking when attacked (Sturken 2007, p. 7).

The future of atomic nostalgia Despite the fact that the adjective ‘atomic’ was excised from its official name, exhibits devoted to the Manhattan Project still dominate the space of the museum. However, from the fifties onward there have been many attempts to diversify the space, albeit within the constraints of certain historical perspectives. The AMSE is a national museum, a Smithsonian affiliate that is operated by the Oak Ridge Labs and the Department of Energy contractors, University of Tennessee-Battelle. From the Manhattan Project to Cold War politics to Homeland Security new exhibits have been steadily added that reflect the political moods of the federal government and the corporate entities that remain closely attached. Yet the overly positive attitude toward science and technology in the AMSE, while expected considering its backers, is questionable in a museum that owes its life and content to a town that was created for

170 Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud

the sole purpose of the development of the atomic bomb. However, on this point the message of the museum is clear: (1) The use of atomic weapons was absolutely necessary. (2) The use of the atomic bomb accelerated the end of the war, saving thousands of lives, both American and Japanese. (3) The end of World War II subsequently led to an age of nuclear deterrence and to a world safer for democracy. This stance is not unique in American museums. As the sociologist Matt Wray points out in his recent article on the Atomic Test Site Museum: ‘Few museums of technology ever stray from the ideological path that equates technological advances with human progress and cultural and moral superiority’ (Wray 2006, p. 483). From the first American Museum of Atomic Energy in Oak Ridge to the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay controversy to the Atomic Test Site Museum, America’s relationship with the atomic bomb, as displayed in the museal context, has historically been celebratory rather than critical. How, then, can the history of the Manhattan Project and of nuclear weapons in general be told in a museum setting in a more complex way? Several curators who have attempted to tell various sides of the story in the USA have come up against incredible opposition. Implicit in the debate over displays of the atomic bombing of Japan is the tension between historical representation and commemoration. The most public of these mnemonic battles was the Smithsonian Enola Gay controversy. The exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum, which eventually became ‘The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II,’ was originally conceived in 1987 as ‘From Guernica to Hiroshima – Bombing in World War II.’ This title drew vitriol from many veterans’ groups who strongly opposed any display that would call into question the absolute necessity and sound judgment involved in the atomic bombings. Steven Dubin, who studied the event, has suggested that the original provocative display could be construed as ‘paralleling fascist atrocities with American actions’ (Dubin 1999, p. 188). World War II was an extremely popular war for Americans; it has been called the ‘Great War,’ the ‘Just War’ and the war fought by the ‘Greatest Generation.’ Challenging a heroic version of a national past through museum spaces has proven to be extremely difficult. As the sociologist Vera Zolberg explains: [M]useums have become arenas in which the reconstruction of the past is frequently at issue. They are, arguably, institutions in which a nation’s qualities are ‘written’ or ‘displayed.’ Open to the public and explicitly intended to draw attention to their exhibits, they serve as

Lindsey A. Freeman

171

sites of celebration of events in which patriotism or, at the least, a sentiment of national cohesiveness is evoked. (Zolberg 1998, p. 583) The Smithsonian is certainly not the only museum that has faced this challenge. Another museum that has battled the problem of commemoration is the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. The new director, William Johnson, has expressed his desire for the museum to ‘become a kind of open public space, where visitors will learn about the history of the science and technology at the site and where experts and laypeople can find common languages to discuss highly charged controversies and debates,’ to create a ‘venue for all things nuclear’ (Johnson quoted in Wray 2006, p. 406). Despite Johnson’s best intentions for a nuclear public sphere, the museum has become, like the AMSE, a puppet for the Department of Energy. What, then, lies ahead for the atomic spaces, like Oak Ridge? It remains to be seen how museums will deal with the nuclear past in the future. If they will continue to pile more and more distracting themes into their exhibits, trying to encompass history, science and national agendas or if they will be able to develop more effective ways of telling a complicated past that the public will accept. At this point it is unclear whether new sites of nuclear memory will fall victim to the same tropes of scientism and nationalism that have plagued the AMSE, the Smithsonian and the Atomic Testing Museum, to name a few. As the original creators of Oak Ridge coast into middle age, Oak Ridgers have begun to ask themselves how they want to remember their past. At present, plans are in the works to create a new museum in Oak Ridge. Former employees of the Manhattan Project as well as local preservation groups were hoping to save a portion of the massive K-25 building. While contamination issues prevented this from happening, another site has been proposed, the K-25 History Center. The proposed site, although not on the original grounds, would contain a ‘withdrawal alley fitted with authentic World War II process equipment’ and an ‘interpretive center focused on the methods pursued at Oak Ridge to produce enriched uranium’ (Smith 2009). In addition to its didactic features, the K-25 site would also include examples of what historian and memory scholar Alison Landsberg calls ‘experiential’ space, where the visitor experiences elements of the past physically (Landsberg 1997, p. 74). Or, as D. Ray Smith suggests in a recent article in The Oak Ridger (2009), the museum will ‘allow visitors to delve deeply into the richness of the culture and exhibits of seeing the real thing, the real equipment,

172 Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud

smelling the place, and knowing one is where it actually happened.’ If this museum space is realized it will introduce additional layers of physicality – olfactory, optical and tactile, with the intention of creating the aura of being in the actual atomic laboratory c. 1945, even though it will be a newly created site. However, if brought to fruition, we can expect that the new site will be doubly stripped of danger, where the narratives as well as the equipment will be sanitized for consumption, yet again missing a chance to re-evaluate the nation’s atomic history and nuclear future. Other proposals for the new space describe a schizophrenic distraction factory. Murals illustrating the history of Oak Ridge have been proposed, as well as an expansion of the current AMSE, and many commercial activities, including a brew pub, roller skating rink, squash courts, bicycle rental store and a performing arts center. As the marketability of historical spaces continues to grow, it could be possible for the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the original Oak Ridgers to receive an entirely new type of mnemonic socialization; they could roller skate through the K-25, while their parents enjoy a micro-brew at the local uranium-themed pub. While all of this activity promises pleasure and fun, what about the nasty history of the bomb itself? Is it possible that we will see a new narrative regarding Oak Ridge’s past and the trajectory of nuclear weapons in general? The fact that many former Manhattan Project workers are leading the charge for the new atomic museums is potentially problematic, as they tend to be among the least critical or questioning of the atomic past. Also, if the new museum gains funding from the Department of Energy and the Smithsonian Institute, like the current AMSE, then undoubtedly the museum will adhere to a positive interpretation of the US nuclear record. Atomic nostalgia, like the scientific utopianism that came before, masks real-life realities of destruction and atrocity. The fog under the happy mushroom cloud creates an environment where critical thought is choked. The result is a loss in the potential to engage in debates regarding many important issues facing the USA and the world at large, such as the use of nuclear weapons, the clean-up of ‘hot’ spaces and the power of the federal government to reshape and reorganize the landscape. With new opportunities for sites of memory it is possible that this trend toward scientific and atomic nostalgia could be reversed. But can a pause be created in the steady stream of celebration to ponder the destruction and atrocity that has resulted not only from the atomic bomb, but other large-scale scientific and technological projects as well?

Lindsey A. Freeman

173

Unfortunately, the current trajectory in museum planning seems to be moving toward more of the same, new spectacular displays to celebrate old spectacular displays, more happy memories under the mushroom cloud: ‘The first time as tragedy, the second as farce’ (Marx 1998, p. 15).

Notes 1. The tiny mushroom of smoke was the result of an electrical impulse generated from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s uranium chain-reactor that ignited the ribbon, which had been treated with potassium chlorate and magnesium in order to make a loud pop. 2. Of course this was decades before Google Earth and the nearly successful project of mapping the entire globe. 3. The American Museum of Atomic Energy was the original name of the museum. It was changed in 1978 to the American Museum of Science and Energy. According to a current staff member at the AMSE, the change ‘reflected the expanded programs in all energy alternatives and energy research.’ Email interview with Jim Comish, 20 November 2006. 4. ‘The Greatest Generation’ is a term coined by the journalist Tom Brokaw in his 1998 book of the same name. 5. The data presented in this chapter were gathered through a combination of ethnography, participant observation, archival research and critical tourism. Fieldwork for this project was conducted independently in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in December and March 2007, December 2008 and August 2009. Additional archival research was conducted on-site at the AMSE. The ethnographic and archival material collected was analyzed using qualitative sociology, interpretive methods, and discourse and historical analysis. 6. The Oneida Community was founded in 1848 in Oneida, New York, by John Humphrey Noyes. The community believed that Jesus had already returned to earth in the year 70, and therefore it was possible to be free of sin and to create a perfect kingdom in this world. 7. Brook Farm was a transcendental utopian community founded by the former Unitarian minister George Ripley and his wife Sophia Ripley. Inspired at least in part by Charles Fourier, the community was dedicated to communal living and the balance of passions through work and leisure. 8. Drop City was an artists’ community located in Colorado from 1965–70. Community members were inspired by the designs and ideas of Buckminster Fuller, who argued that because of our advanced stage of industrialization our options for the future were now limited to only two: utopia or oblivion. 9. The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History was originally known as the National Atomic Museum, yet another example of the historicizing of the once imagined atomic future. 10. There was also a pilot plutonium production plant located in Oak Ridge, the X-10 plant. However, the plutonium enrichment process was mainly carried out at the Hanford, Washington site.

174 Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud 11. This slogan was taken from a speech that President Eisenhower gave of the same name to the United Nations General Assembly on 8 December 1953. 12. In fact, at one point the suggested name for Oak Ridge was Shangri-La, a utopian paradise first described in the novel, Lost Horizon by James Hilton (1947). Shangri-La is located in a mystical valley that is isolated and protected from mankind, and ironically it is also a haven from war. 13. There is more to be said about the role that these photographs play in the overall environment of nostalgia that permeates the museum space today; I will return to this topic later in the chapter when I explore the special photography exhibit held in the summer of 2009. 14. The Y-12 plant was initially created to produce enriched uranium for the Manhattan Project by means of electromagnetic separation. Y-12 is now a US Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration facility. 15. Here images of Einstein and Szilard are used as props to bolster the US Homeland Security agenda. Both Szilard and Einstein later felt ambivalent about the use of the bomb, even though they initially encouraged research in that direction. Szilard, especially became an avid critic of the US Cold War policies. 16. It should be noted that Ed Westcott’s photographs are a mainstay of the museum. This exhibit marks an expansion of the Westcott photographs that are permanently on display at the AMSE. 17. The K-25 plant used the process of gaseous diffusion in order to transform uranium-238 to the fissionable uranium-235. 18. A Calutron was a mass spectrometer used for separating uranium isotopes. It was created by Ernest O. Lawrence at the Berkeley labs of the University of California for which it takes part of its name. 19. There are no African-American Calutron girls in the picture because like the rest of the South at that time, Oak Ridge was still practicing segregation. 20. The Tiller Girls were a dance troupe created by John Tiller in Manchester, England in the early 1900s. They were characterized by their uniformity and uncanny ability to dance as a unit.

References Bacon, Francis. 1919. ‘New Atlantis,’ in Ideal Commonwealths. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co, pp. 170–213. Brokaw, Tom. 1988. The Greatest Generation. New York: Random House. Dubin, Steven C. 1999. Displays of Power:Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum. New York: New York University Press, pp. 186–226. Hilton, James. 1947. Lost Horizon. New York: The World Publishing Company. Jackson, Charles O. and Charles W. Johnson. 1981. City Behind a Fence: Oak Ridge, Tennessee 1942–1946. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. Krackauer, Siegfried and Thomas Y Levin. 1995. ‘The mass ornament,’ in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 75–89. Landsberg, Alison. 1997. ‘America, the Holocaust, and the mass culture of memory: toward a radical politics of empathy.’ New German Critique 71, pp. 63–86. Marx, Karl. 1998. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers.

Lindsey A. Freeman

175

McCarthy, Thomas F.X. 1987. ‘My! How ORAU has grown,’ in James Overholt (ed.), These Are Our Voices: The Story of Oak Ridge 1942–1970. Oak Ridge, TN: Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge, pp. 374–84. McDaniel, Keith. 2009. (DVD) Operation Open Sesame: Opening the Gates of the Secret City. Prod. Oak Ridge Heritage and Preservation Association. Mead, Margaret. 2005. ‘The crucial role of the small city in meeting the urban crisis,’ in Margaret Mead and Robert B. Textor (eds), The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 185–202. Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU). 2010. http://www.orau.org (accessed 9 October 2009). Smith, D. Ray. 2009. ‘K-25: authenticity key element of heritage tourism.’ The Oak Ridger, 3 March, http://www.oakridger.com/columnists/x844651591/K-25Authenticity-key-element-of-heritage-tourism. Sturken, Marita. 2007. Tourists of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wray, Matt. 2006. ‘A blast from the past: preserving and interpreting the atomic age.’ American Quarterly 58, pp. 467–83. Zolberg, Vera L. 1998. ‘Contested remembrance: the Hiroshima exhibit controversy.’ Theory and Society 27, pp. 565–90.

This page intentionally left blank

Temporality and the Political II: Revenge

This page intentionally left blank

10 Authorizing Death: Memory Politics and States of Exception in Contemporary El Salvador Gema Santamaria-Balmaceda

What is the relationship between politics and death in those systems that can function only in a state of emergency? Achille Mbembe (2003, p. 16)

The aim of this chapter is to elucidate the workings of what I consider to be one of the main social frames through which the violent past – particularly that of the eighties civil war – is being retrieved in contemporary El Salvador. Up until now, the notion of social frames, first explored by Maurice Halbwachs (1992 [1925]) and salient in the work of Irwin-Zarecka (1994), has been used mainly to refer to the set of social meanings, narratives or discourses that make collective memory possible as a socially transmittable experience. In the case of El Salvador, however, it is the sheer physicality of violence and tangible suffering that enacts the transmission of the experience of a shared past at the social level. Indeed, the formation of a discursively articulated collective memory of the civil war is first made possible as a result of interpretations elicited by contemporary concrete suffering and acts of violence, such as street crime, thievery, delinquency and, most importantly, criminal acts associated with a type of juvenile gangs called maras.1 When Salvadorans attempt to grasp, measure and comprehend their suffering and vulnerability to violent acts in the present, they revisit their direct or indirect encounters with violence during the war years (Hume 2004; Moodie 2006; Silber 2004a). In this revisiting process, an embodied social frame is in the making – a frame that, grounded in concrete violence and suffering, points to a reciprocal relation between past and present forms of violence and simultaneously contains and reshapes the memory of the 179

180 Authorizing Death: Memory and Exception in El Salvador

violence experienced during the eighties civil war. While present violence and suffering are not perceived as a mere repetition of the same experiences of the past, they appear as strangely familiar. In this respect, the present acts of violence and suffering contain a trace of the collective experience of the war years, despite their temporal distance. Thus, confronted by the need to grasp and comprehend contemporary violence and suffering, people also ascribe meanings and values to past death and suffering (Moodie 2006, p. 67). As a result, every interpretation of the present predicament, which necessarily entails a recollection and reinterpretation of the past, is also a reshaping of collective memory. In the first section, I introduce the relationship between past and present forms of violence, as well as the production of a certain memory of the war years that then serves to frame contemporary forms of violence. In a context in which violence can no longer be neatly ascribed to either the state and its paramilitary forces or the revolutionary groups, I show how Salvadorans tend to make use of old and familiar categories in order to interpret ‘post-political’2 forms of violence (Hume 2004, p. 64). The predictability of the violence of the war years, based on the friend/enemy binary of the Cold War (capitalist/communist or ARENA/FMLN in the Salvadoran case), is remembered with a ‘strange nostalgia’ (Zilberg 2007a, p. 39). Its logic is invoked either to grasp the reality of the present or to ‘measure’ the degree of arbitrariness that characterizes contemporary forms of violence. In the second section I establish that this type of nostalgic collective memory of the war years has a direct effect on the kinds of political solutions and futures that are perceived as possible in El Salvador’s present context of violence. This effect can be traced concretely in the authorization of exceptional measures to counteract gang-related forms of violence and criminality, measures that tend to be associated with warfare scenarios and moments of extreme political crisis. I will specifically identify this authorizing effect in a series of emergency policies that have been implemented since 2003 by the Salvadoran state to counteract the proliferation of maras, as well as in the re-emergence of death squads or paramilitary groups3 that specifically target members of maras. Although the acts of social cleansing performed by the latter actors cannot be attributed directly to the state, I will show that their actions derive certain legitimacy from the state of emergency and from the war that the state has declared on young gang members. These mechanisms of power are inscribed in what Agamben (2005) has called the ‘state of exception,’ a technique of government and a paradigm of security that enables the state, under ‘extraordinary’ circumstances, to control

Gema Santamaria-Balmaceda

181

and govern through the violent exclusion of whole categories of citizens whose lives have been deemed unworthy.

An embodied social frame in the making In 1932, between 15,000 and 30,000 people were killed at the hands of the Salvadoran army and the local paramilitary organizations sponsored by the state (Alvarenga 1996, p. 9; Lindo-Fuentes et al. 2007, p. 2). These killings, which are known in Salvadoran history as La Matanza (‘The Massacre’), were promoted by the oligarchic agrarian elite that had seized power in El Salvador at the beginning of the twentieth century (Arnson 2000, p. 86). Its stated purpose was to annihilate the peasants and indigenous population that had previously participated in a rebellion to claim access to land and economic justice. However, the indiscriminate nature of the massacre, as well as the brutality of the killings (Lyon-Johnson 2005, p. 211), indicate that the purpose of La Matanza was not only to control this uprising. The objective was to instill terror among the population and repress any attempt to defy the state’s authority (Alvarenga 1996, p. 6; Gould and Lauria-Santiago 2008). La Matanza represents the inauguration of a regime of domination based on terrorizing practices and the indiscriminate use of violence to assure the hegemony of the elites in power in El Salvador. This regime installed a ‘culture of terror’ or a ‘culture of violence’ that continues to pervade Salvadoran political and social life (Cruz 1997; Hume 2007b, p. 740). One of the most salient expressions of this mode of power can be found in the violence that the Salvadoran state inflicted upon civilians during the war of the eighties. The Salvadoran civil war was characterized by the savage confrontation between the right-wing military government led by the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and the leftist guerrilla group Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) (Bourgois 2001, p. 9). The FMLN was the leading force among a set of clandestine and semi-clandestine organizations whose aim was to overthrow the military regime. ARENA held an openly anti-communist discourse and, in the name of the interests of the nation and the state, justified the use of repressive measures against the ‘communist insurgents’ of the FMLN, including the use of death squad operations (Lindo-Fuentes et al. 2007, p. 8). The confrontation between the FMLN and ARENA in the eighties represented the continuation of the agonistic relation between the oligarchy in power and the peasants and workers that rebelled against it in the thirties. The different interpretations of the 1932 massacre in

182 Authorizing Death: Memory and Exception in El Salvador

the eighties express this continuing relation between the past and the present as well as the grounded politics of memory that characterized Salvadoran twentieth-century history. ARENA, for instance, reinterpreted the 1932 massacre as a necessary ‘measure’ that the Salvadoran state had to carry out in response to the communist threat that the rebellious indigenous peasants presented for a nation envisioned as catholic and ‘respectful of private property’ (Lindo-Fuentes et al. 2007). The FMLN, on the other hand, made the victims of the 1932 massacre the martyrs and heroes that would inspire the subversive acts of the revolutionary movement. In this sense, the memory of La Matanza became a powerful narrative both to mobilize people against the regime (in the case of the FMLN guerrilla) and to justify the use of repression against the revolutionaries (in the case of ARENA). With the decisive support of the US government, which saw in the Salvadoran civil war a vital battleground to stop the advancement of communism in the Central American region, the government led by ARENA installed a regime characterized by fear and terrorizing tactics. The military and security forces, as well as the death squads and other paramilitary groups that had the explicit or implicit support of the Salvadoran state, were the main actors responsible for the torture, disappearances and extrajudicial executions that occurred during the civil war (Arnson 2000, p. 8; Lean 2003, p. 175). From the 22,000 denunciations of human rights violations received by the United Nations Truth Commission in El Salvador, only 5 per cent were attributed to the FMLN (Bourgois 2001, p. 21). As a consequence of the widespread level of brutality and repression implemented or enabled by the state authorities, the lives of more than 80,000 men, women and children were lost (Hume 2004, p. 63). Nearly two decades have passed since the 1992 peace agreements signaled the formal end of the pervasive civil war that affected El Salvador for more than ten years. The agreements have been considered a success in terms of the effective demobilization of the guerrilla, the reduction and reformation of the armed forces, the formation of a new civil national police force and the formal transition toward an electoral democratic system (Silber 2004a, p. 213). However, processes of reparation, reconciliation and restorative justice in post-war El Salvador in relation to the crimes and human rights abuses that occurred during the eighties tell a very different story. The report published by the Truth Commission in March 1993 was followed by a general amnesty law that granted ‘absolute and unconditional amnesty to all those involved in human rights abuses before 1992’ (Silber 2004b, p. 563). Although

Gema Santamaria-Balmaceda

183

amnesty may be considered a necessary measure to rebuild a country in a post-war scenario, it also raises important questions for the victims in terms of the exemption from any penalty granted to their former victimizers. Moreover, El Salvador continues to be in the category of those countries that ‘have considered’ reparations, but that have not undertaken any (Lean 2003, p. 173). In a country like El Salvador, where perpetrators and victims interact in their everyday lives (Silber 2004a, pp. 217–8) and where the political elites from the war years continued to hold control of the political and juridical institutions during the postwar era, the failure of the state to acknowledge legally, symbolically or materially the abuses and atrocities of the past constitutes an open wound in the social and political body. Moreover, the post-war years have been characterized as a period of ‘violent peace’ (Zilberg 2007a, p. 39) based on the high levels of criminality, economic deprivation and insecurity experienced by Salvadorans in the present. Today, 40 per cent of the population lives under the poverty line, inequality and socio-economic divides continue to be highly pervasive (Hume 2004, p. 63), and the level of homicides is as high as in the war years, if not higher.4 Most of these deaths have been attributed to the steady increase in street crime, thievery, delinquency and gang-related violence during the transitional years. The violence associated with maras, in particular, has captured both the public imaginary of fear, as well as been prioritized by the state’s security policies. The ongoing violence in a context of ‘peace’ accounts for the general sense of disenchantment and discomfort that prevails among Salvadoran people. Expressions like ‘estamos peor que antes’ (‘we are worse off than before’) (Silber 2004a, p. 217) or reference to the eighties as a time when everything was ‘tranquilo’ (‘peaceful’) (Hume 2004, p. 64) not only express this pervasive social mood, but also foreground the important role that the past and the memory of the war years play in Salvadoran’s self-understanding of the anguish and suffering they experience in the present moment. Moodie (2006) points out that feelings or emotions need to be coded according to certain shared values or perceptions in order to become socially translatable. The proximity of the violence and suffering experienced during the civil war and the dramatic impact it had on the Salvadoran people have established this experience as the indisputable referent to grasp at the individual level and to transmit, within a given social milieu, the anguish and suffering that Salvadorans experience today. When Salvadorans refer to their present situation as ‘peor que la guerra,’ a memory of the suffering and violence of the past is in the making.

184 Authorizing Death: Memory and Exception in El Salvador

This memory tends to recreate the violence of the civil war as more predictable and coherent, the effects of which were for the most part felt by and circumscribed to the armed actors of ARENA and the guerrilla fighters of the FMLN (Santacruz Girald and Concha-Eastman 2001, p. 17). At the same time, this memory serves to produce an image of the present that depicts contemporary forms of violence as particularly random and arbitrary. Acts of robbery or extortion attributed to maras, for instance, appear as acts that are not based on any political or social criteria and that do not discriminate between their potential victims based on class, gender or political affiliation; as a result, these acts are perceived as being potentially harmful and threatening to all Salvadorans. In this sense, the enemy/friend distinction of the civil war years is remembered with certain nostalgia and as the source of the relative ‘predictability’ of the violence of the war years. This memory differs radically, however, from historical accounts provided by the Truth Commission, declassified CIA documents (Arnson 2000) and ethnographic works carried out during the war years (Bourgois 2001), which demonstrate that the violence of those years, particularly that perpetrated by the military or the death squads, was not only directed at those associated directly with the FMLN, but jeopardized the lives of innocent civilians as part of the purposeful terrorizing practices of the state. In spite of this evidence, it is the selective nostalgic memory and not the ‘actual’ events of the war years that shapes Salvadorans’ perceptions of their experience of contemporary forms of violence. In other words, the coherence attributed to the violence of the war years does not necessarily arise out of an analysis of historical facts or events, but instead crystallizes as such when juxtaposed with the events in the present. One of the consequences of the nostalgic character of this memory is that Salvadorans try to identify a ‘neatly defined source of danger’ in the present (Hume 2007a, p. 484) that may allow them to recuperate the predictability thought to be associated with the violence of the war years. Gang members have been singled out as that source of danger, not only by the governmental discourse, but also by prevalent perceptions of violence and fear among Salvadorans (Aguilar and Miranda 2006, p. 57). In this post-war scenario, members of maras have been deemed not only potential or actual enemies of the state, but also of the society in general. Given that the enmity that these gang members embody does not follow from their association with a given political faction, the nostalgic dichotomous framework recollected from the past interpolates the maras as a depoliticized them versus us.

Gema Santamaria-Balmaceda

185

Thus, the gang member has been established as the common enemy, the ‘scapegoat,’ of the post-war scenario (Zilberg 2007a, p. 39). This explains why some Salvadorans consider the only solution to the ‘gang problem’ is to ‘kill them, attack them at the roots and kill them all’ (quoted in Hume 2004, p. 65). It also explains why, according to figures of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 55 per cent of Salvadorans ‘would approve of the killing of a criminal who terrorises the community [and] 40.5 per cent would approve of lynching the criminal’ (Hume 2007b, p. 745). By deeming maras the main enemy, Salvadoran citizens have been able to make sense of a tumultuous context of thievery, violence and crime that otherwise appears to have no criteria of discrimination. If maras have been declared ‘the’ source responsible for the danger within the current scenario of insecurity and fear – that is to say, if the state and the people, the sovereign and the citizens have declared who is to be punished – then it is not unreasonable to expect a collective authorization of exceptional measures on behalf of the state in order to eradicate these actors from the political and social body.

Memory and exception The consequences of a collective memory that, on the one hand, depicts the violence of the war years as more predictable and, on the other, incites the production of a type of enmity that seeks to attain a greater sense of predictability or security, have materialized in the contemporary appearance of two phenomena in El Salvador. First, they have materialized in the re-emergence of certain acts of social cleansing that resemble those perpetrated by the death squads in the eighties. And, second, the effects take on the form of a series of exceptional policies that have been implemented by the state in order to counteract the criminal actions attributed to gang members. In the early nineties, a group called Sombra Negra (‘Black Shadow’) started to carry out social cleansing operations against alleged gang members in the Department of San Miguel in El Salvador (Cruz 1997, p. 980). Conceived of as a vigilante group, its aim was to eliminate the presence of juvenile gangs through the use of violent and extralegal actions. Thirteen youngsters identified as mareros were killed as a result of its actions (Cruz 1997, p. 984). Despite the illicit character of this group, the then governor of that region considered the killings a ‘necessary evil’ to address the insecurity and crime associated with gangs (Zilberg 2007a, p. 53). At the end of 2002 and through 2003, body parts

186 Authorizing Death: Memory and Exception in El Salvador

from mutilated young women who were associated with gangs appeared dumped in different points of San Salvador (Hume 2007b, p. 745). The case that inaugurated these series of macabre killings was that of Rosa N., a young woman whose head, trunk and thigh were found scattered. She was identified as a gang member because her ‘forehead was tattooed with the number 18’ (Zilberg 2007a, p. 40), the main symbol of one of the most powerful maras, the Pandilla del Barrio 18 (‘18th Street Gang’). Although the government pointed to gang members as the executors of these crimes, arresting many of them during the process of investigation, the accusations were never verified. Rather, the tactics used to kill and hide the bodies resembled those used by clandestine groups during the civil war. In 2006, a group called Mano Blanca (‘White Hand’) announced its formation on a local radio station and claimed openly that its objective was to kill ‘todo aquel tatuado’ (‘all those tattooed’) (Hume 2007b, p. 746). This threat was clearly directed to those youngsters that belong to maras, who tend to use tattoos all over their bodies, including the face. At least 96 extrajudicial killings of alleged gang members have been attributed to this insidious group (Hume 2007b). The official number provided by Dirección de Centros Penales (‘Office of Criminal Justice’) is that 16 per cent of the gang member deaths can be attributed to ‘civilians’ (Cruz and Carranza 2006, p. 168). The appearance of mutilated bodies in remote places simulates some of the violent acts perpetrated by the death squads in the eighties (Moodie 2009, p. 77). These groups operated usually in civilian clothing and their objective was ‘not only the elimination of opponents . . . but also, through torture and the gruesome disfiguration of bodies, the terrorization of the population’ (Arnson 2000, p. 86). Despite operating formally outside the state structure, death squads enjoyed the ‘financial, ideological and logistical backing’ of members of the government as well as the wealthy economic elites (Arnson 2000, p. 110). The impunity and negligence that characterizes the state’s response toward contemporary acts of social cleansing, in this case against gang members, strangely resembles the complicity of the state with the extralegal actions of the death squads during the war years. This has raised serious questions about the democratic and non-repressive nature of the state (Cruz and Carranza 2006, p. 168) and has contributed to the perpetuation of a mode of power that Salvadorans are familiar with from the past, which has extended from the 1932 massacre to the civil war (Zilberg 2007a, p. 42). Although it is not possible to establish the state’s direct involvement in such acts, the fact that since 2003 the government, led by ARENA,

Gema Santamaria-Balmaceda

187

adopted a series of repressive and so-called exceptional measures in order to counteract gang members has infused these vigilante acts with certain legitimacy. Agamben (1998, p. 18) has described the state of exception as a set of policies that suspend the juridical order’s validity as a response to a situation of extraordinary chaos or crisis that threatens the juridico-political structure. As explained by Agamben, the use of the exception in the political realm was originally related to situations of warfare but has become, in contemporary contexts of security threats identified by the state, a ‘paradigm of security’ and a ‘normal technique of government’ (Agamben 2005, p. 14). The use of emergency measures by the Salvadoran state during times of peace demonstrates that the exception does not need to be circumscribed by a situation of warfare and that it can be used as a normal technique to rule and govern those categories of citizens identified as dangerous. In July 2003, the Salvadoran government declared a ‘state of emergency’ and announced the implementation of the Plan Mano Dura (‘the Firm Hand Plan’) and the introduction of a legislative proposal, La Ley Anti-Maras (‘the Anti-Gang Law’) (Cruz and Carranza 2006, p. 133). The emergency was justified by the increase in criminal activities attributed to these juvenile gangs and was characterized by the use of repressive measures, massive incarcerations and the indiscriminate criminalization of youngsters associated with maras (Aguilar and Miranda 2006, pp. 58–64; Cruz and Carranza 2006, p. 148). The Anti-Maras Law had as its stated aim to ‘establish a special and temporal regime, for a period of 180 days, to counteract the associations known as maras’ (Cruz and Carranza 2006, p. 149, emphasis added). After being in place for a 180 day period, and following an intensive debate among the executive, legislative and judicial powers, the law was declared unconstitutional (Aguilar and Miranda 2006, p. 60). This law, however, was immediately replaced by a new one approved by the national assembly that was also deemed ‘temporal’ and ‘exceptional.’ This new law, which lasted 90 days, contained the same unconstitutional elements of the first one, including the violation of Article 13 of the Salvadoran Constitution, which establishes that ‘every person that has been associated with a crime will be presumed innocent until her culpability is demonstrated’ (Cruz and Carranza 2006, p. 149). These two legal measures instantiate what Agamben has described as the self-constitution of a rule that, in its capacity to suspend itself, embodies and legitimizes its own nature as a rule; he writes, ‘the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule’ (Agamben 1998, p. 18). Despite their clear

188 Authorizing Death: Memory and Exception in El Salvador

unconstitutionality, these laws were used in their capacity of ‘law’ to justify the now exceptional legitimacy of the detention and arrest of thousands of youngsters (Hume 2007b 747, endnote 3). In August 2004, after the expiration of these two laws and President Antonio Saca’s assumption to power, a new plan was launched. Under the name of Plan ‘Super’ Mano Dura (‘Super Firm Hand Plan’), this policy reproduced the repressive dimension of the former laws, but incorporated a (poorly funded and low profile) rehabilitation program in an attempt to lower recidivism rates (Aguilar and Miranda 2006, pp. 65–70; Cruz and Carranza 2006, p. 154). More relevant, however, is the fact that this policy was no longer inscribed in the political realm under the form of a legislative measure. Rather, its foundations rested only on an executive order. This political shift is congruent with Agamben’s explanation that the state of exception moves away from the legal and, instead of being inscribed in the political realm through a law, is based solely on an enactment of the executive power (Agamben 2005, p. 17). In the case of El Salvador, this concentration of executive power is understood as necessary in light of the perception of a continuous and imminent danger posed by the maras as enemies of the state and the wellbeing of Salvadoran society. This is the case despite the fact that in 2005 the national victimization survey reported that only 4.6 per cent of Salvadorans had been victims of a violent act perpetrated by gang members (Aguilar and Miranda 2006, p. 57). That is, the reiteration of the ‘necessity’ (Agamben 2005, p. 25) that leads to the exceptionality of these policies is no longer based on a ‘factual situation,’ but ‘produces the situation as a consequence of [the] decision on the exception’ (Agamben 1998, p. 170). In other words, the decision of the state’s authority is what ultimately grounds the factual existence of an emergency and, as a result, law and fact become indistinguishable. However, this relation between law and fact is also permeated by the reciprocal relation between past and present that exists in El Salvador. That is, the authorization of these emergency measures is grounded also on a melancholic perspective about the war years in which states of emergency are thought to be effective measures that affected only armed actors. The government’s usage of a rhetoric of warfare (Hume 2007b) serves to project the past into the present and in this way authorizes a type of state violence that, originally aimed at neutralizing and eliminating the enemy during war scenarios, is now directed against criminalized actors in a context of peace. As an effect of this warfare imaginary, the use of exceptional measures against gang members is not only deemed necessary but appropriate. Through these policies, ‘gang

Gema Santamaria-Balmaceda

189

membership’ has been criminalized on the basis of the potential threat that maras represent for the security and wellbeing of the Salvadorans. That is, the marero has been produced as a criminal figure and has been ‘deemed dangerous’ by the state even before any criminal act occurs (Butler 2004, p. 76). Given that the policies work actively ‘to get the young person into the [criminal justice] system by giving law enforcement probable cause to arrest [him]’ (Zilberg 2007b, p. 79), the marero is not treated as a subject that needs to be punished and corrected in order to return to the social body. Instead, he or she is always already a criminal. For instance, one of the criteria to identify gang membership is tattoos that designate gang affiliation (Zilberg 2007a, p. 45). The fact that most of the mareros mark their bodies with tattoos in order to signal their entry to the gang (Santacruz Giralt and Concha-Eastman 2001, p. 38) makes the process of their criminalization ‘more tactile, more anatomical and sensorial’ (Mbembe 2003, p. 34). In this sense, the poorly funded rehabilitation programs mentioned before are always set back by these pervasive forms of criminalization as expressed in the ever marked bodies of the mareros. These exceptional measures have increased the vulnerability of gang and alleged gang members to experiencing a violent death or confronting lethal forms of violence at the hands of state and non-state actors. Since the mid-nineties, official registers showed that males between 15 and 30 years old were the most likely to die a violent death in El Salvador (Cruz 1997, p. 987) and in 2004, official data indicated that 65 per cent of the homicides registered during that year corresponded to victims less than 30 years old (Aguilar and Miranda 2006, p. 78). Despite this, the type of enmity and criminalization embodied by these actors has prevented the emergence of a discourse that acknowledges the suffering or that mourns the death of the thousands of young males that belong or that have been associated with maras; a discourse capable of recognizing the social, economic and structural disparities characteristic of this period of ‘violent peace’ as a potential cause of these youngsters’ current condition as victims and perpetrators of violence (Aguilar and Miranda 2006, p. 128; Moodie 2006, p. 76). With Butler (2004) we can ask: ‘At what price, and at whose expense does [a collective] gain a purchase on “security” . . . ?’ How is the Salvadoran collective dealing with ‘its vulnerability to violence’ (p. 42)? The criminalization and exclusion of the marero’s body has sought to repair the vulnerability to violence that Salvadorans experience today by establishing a figure of enmity that helps them to recuperate the predictability associated with the memory of the war years. In this

190 Authorizing Death: Memory and Exception in El Salvador

sense, the state’s exceptional measures have been authorized by a society that experiences contemporary forms of violence as more random and arbitrary than those of the past. In other words, the concrete effects of memory can be read in the political solutions and futures that are envisioned by Salvadorans today. As a result of this encounter between memory, politics and states of exception, the body of the marero has been wounded.

Post-scriptum: on prospective politics The relation between memory, war and politics in the context of a relatively recent transition toward democracy is not exclusive to the Salvadoran case. El Salvador shares with many Latin American countries the difficult task of instituting a democratic system against the grain of political divisions, social injuries and a vivid memory of violence perpetrated by state and non-state actors in the context of civil wars, dictatorships or authoritarian rule. The recent character of these transitions as well as the everyday interaction between former victims and perpetrators (Lean 2003, p. 170) constitutes a constant challenge to envisioning peace, reconciliation and community building in these countries. Moreover, the Salvadoran case illustrates the kind of politics of memory that has affected many Latin American countries and that is extensive to other post-war scenarios around the world – a politics marked by the partial reconstruction of the truth, by impunity or the denial of past crimes and by an unsatisfactory process of reparation or reconciliation (Lean 2003, p. 185). Finally, El Salvador shares with neighboring countries, such as Guatemala, a past of totalizing civil war that involved the vast majority of the civilian population and a present social reality characterized by high levels of poverty, increasing rates of street and gang-related crimes, and high levels of institutionalized violence in the military and the police aimed at preventing and punishing these crimes (Aguilar and Miranda 2006). The repressive measures that have characterized the Salvadoran state’s response to crime, and specifically to juvenile gangs, cannot be understood without looking at the historical trajectory of a state that has justified the use of terrorizing practices in moments of emergency (Hume 2007b, p. 740). If during the thirties and eighties the body of the communist or of the guerrillero served to justify the indiscriminate killing of thousands of civilians under the discourse of the ‘communist threat,’ in contemporary El Salvador the marero embodies the enmity that has served to justify the exceptional measures implemented by the

Gema Santamaria-Balmaceda

191

state in these post-war years. The reciprocal and constant interpretative dynamics between war imagery and post-war reality is intimately related to a collective memory of the war years that serves to project a different and yet familiar past onto contemporary acts of violence and suffering. It is the result of an embodied form of social frame that serves as a unifying interpretative thread that not only gives content to Salvadorans understanding of their shared past, present and future, but also, in so doing, has the power to effect a social and political environment that perpetuates violence and suffering in the lived experience of Salvadorans. The criminalization and tacitly authorized death of the maras, the weakening of the democratic state in the name of a necessity for exception and the depoliticization of other pervasive forms of violence in times of ‘peace’ (poverty, inequality, forms of institutionalized violence) are contemporary, concrete and material consequences enabled or even promoted by this framing. This frame constitutes not only present realities but also expectations, visions and actions that shape the future of this society toward continuation of the decrease in democratic policy and increase in state violence. The state policies and the resurgence of paramilitary groups reflect an amount of temporal continuity between memory and politics, between war imagery and post-war reality that has served to authorize, once again, the exclusion and potential death of a whole part of the population. As if the past cannot remain in the past, but repeats in the present and shapes the future. Illuminating these workings of memory in the making of present and future forms of social and political violence constitutes an urgent call for El Salvador as well as to the field of memory studies.

Acknowledgments My research for this chapter was part of a larger collaborative project on gangs and other forms of violence in Central America and Mexico that involved the participation of researchers from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mexico, Colombia and the USA. It was led by the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México in close collaboration with the Washington Office for Latin America (WOLA) and the Institute for Public Opinion of the Central America University (IUDOP-UCA). It was co-funded by Kellogg Foundation and Ford Foundation and took place from 2005 to 2007. I participated in the project from its inception.

192 Authorizing Death: Memory and Exception in El Salvador

This chapter is based on interviews and ethnographic work developed during my three years of participation in the research project, during which I interviewed ex-members of the juvenile gangs known as maras as well as NGO representatives and Salvadoran academics working in the field of violence and Salvador’s post-war reconstruction. My reflections on the violence of the eighties civil war are based primarily on secondary literature on the topic, and the question of memory emerged after my participation in the project ended, as a result of the analysis of my notes and data, and further exploration on the relation between past and present forms of violence. I am especially grateful to Rafael Fernandez de Castro, Carlos Mario Perea and José Miguel Cruz for having encouraged me to work on the challenging field of violence. I am also thankful to Cynthia Paccacerqua for her insightful observations and comments on the chapter and for challenging my theoretical understanding of the relation between violence and memory politics.

Notes 1. The term maras refers to juvenile gangs that originated in Los Angeles and whose presence became salient in El Salvador after the massive deportation of many of their members in the nineties by the US government. 2. In general terms, the label post-political violence serves to differentiate those types of violent acts attributed to the state or to other political actors from current forms of violence associated with economic, social or structural factors such as poverty, criminality and domestic violence, among others (Bourgois 2001, p. 8). 3. Death squads or paramilitary groups can be described as privately founded, armed and extra-state organizations that act generally with the assistance or compliance of the state’s authority and that target either political enemies or alleged criminals, both of which are perceived as potential threats for the system (Huggins 1991, p. 3; Mazzei 2009, pp. 4–5). 4. For instance, during the nineties, 8700 to 11,000 people were assassinated per year, compared to an average of 6250 people per year during the eighties (Bourgois 2001, pp. 15–16).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereignty and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Aguilar, Jeannette and Lissette Miranda. 2006. ‘Entre la Articulación y la Competencia: Las Respuestas de la Sociedad Civil Organizada a las Pandillas en

Gema Santamaria-Balmaceda

193

El Salvador,’ in José Miguel Cruz (ed.), Maras y Pandillas en Centroamérica: Las Respuestas de la Sociedad Civil Organizada. El Salvador: UCA Editores, pp. 37–139. Alvarenga, Patricia. 1996. Cultura y Ética de la Violencia: El Salvador 1880–1932. San José, Costa Rica: EDUCA. Arnson, Cynthia J. 2000. ‘Window in the past: a declassified history of death squads in El Salvador,’ in Bruce B. Campbell and Arthur D. Brenner (eds), Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability. New York: St Martin’s Press, pp. 85–124. Bourgois, Phillipe. 2001. ‘The power of violence in war and peace. Post-cold war lessons from El Salvador.’ Ethnography 2(1), pp. 5–34. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, pp. 19–49, 50–100. Cruz, José Miguel. 1997. ‘Los Factores Posibilitadores y las Expresiones de la Violencia en los Noventa.’ ECA-Estudios Centroamericanos 52, pp. 978–92. Cruz, José Miguel and Marlon Carranza. 2006. ‘Pandillas y Políticas Públicas: El Caso de El Salvador,’ in Javier Moro (ed.), Juventudes, Violencia y Exclusión: Desafíos para las Políticas Públicas. Guatemala: Magna Terra Editores, pp. 133–72. Foucault, Michel. 1997. ‘Society must be defended.’ Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. New York: Picador, pp. 239–64. Gould, Jeffrey L. and Aldo Lauria-Santiago. 2008. ‘Memories of La Matanza: the political and cultural consequences of 1932,’ in To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador 1920–1932. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 240–73. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992 [1925]. On Collective Memory. Translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Huggins, Martha K. 1991. ‘Introduction: vigilantism and the state – a look south and north,’ in Martha Huggins (ed.), Vigilantism and the State in Modern Latin America: Essays on Extralegal Violence. New York: Praeger Publishers, pp. 1–18. Hume, Mo. 2004. ‘ “It’s as if you don’t know, because you don’t do anything about it”: gender and violence in El Salvador.’ Environment and Urbanization 16, pp. 63–72. Hume, Mo. 2007a. ‘(Young) men with big guns: reflexive encounters with violence and youth in El Salvador.’ Bulletin of Latin American Research 26(4), pp. 480–96. Hume, Mo. 2007b. ‘Mano Dura: El Salvador responds to gangs.’ Development in Practice 17(6), pp. 739–51. Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. 1994. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, pp. 3–22, 47–66. Lean, Sharon F. 2003. ‘Is truth enough? Reparations and reconciliation in Latin America,’ in John Torpey (ed.), Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices. New York: Rowman and Littlefied Publisher, pp. 169–92. Lindo-Fuentes, Héctor, Erik Ching and Rafael Lara-Martinez. 2007. Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Lyon-Johnson, Kelli. 2005. ‘Acts of war, acts of memory: dead-body politics in US Latina novels of the Salvadoran civil war.’ Latino Studies 2, pp. 205–25.

194 Authorizing Death: Memory and Exception in El Salvador Mazzei, Julie. 2009. Death Squads or Self-defense Forces: How Paramilitary Groups Emerge and Challenge Democracy in Latin America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. ‘Necropolitics.’ Public Culture 15(1), pp. 11–40. Moodie, Ellen. 2006. ‘Microbus crashes and Coca-Cola cash: the value of death in “free market” El Salvador.’ American Ethnologist 32(1), pp. 63–80. Moodie, Ellen. 2009. ‘Seventeen years, seventeen murders: biospecularity and the production of post-cold war knowledge in El Salvador.’ Social Text 27(2), pp. 77–103. Santacruz Giralt, Maria and Alberto Concha-Eastman. 2001. Barrio Adentro: La Solidaridad Violenta de las Pandillas. El Salvador: IUDOP. Silber, Irina Carlota. 2004a. ‘Commemorating the past in postwar El Salvador,’ in Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer (eds), Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 211–31. Silber, Irina Carlota. 2004b. ‘Mothers/fighters/citizens: violence and disillusionment in post-war El Salvador.’ Gender and History 16(3), pp. 561–87. Zilberg, Elana. 2007a. ‘Gangster in guerrilla face: a transnational mirror of production between the USA and El Salvador.’ Anthropological Theory 7(1), pp. 37–57. Zilberg, Elana. 2007b. ‘Refugee gang youth: zero tolerance and the security state in contemporary US-Salvadoran relations,’ in Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh and Ronald Kassimir (eds), Youth, Globalization and the Law. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 61–89.

11 Memories of War and Enacting the Future at Yasukuni Shrine, Japan David P. Janes

Following World War II Germany and Japan, more than any other countries, were forced to reckon with atrocities they had committed. How both countries continue to address the past under international constraints endures as a critical area of scholarship. The issue remains salient both domestically and internationally as nationalism re-emerges and confronts internal, regional and international fears that the military aggression of the past could be repeated in the future. This chapter examines the public debate on this issue in Japan through the country’s most controversial memorial museum dealing with World War II, the Yasukuni Shrine.1 The Shrine has come to represent the military aggression of Japan during World War II and in it, through commemoration of war criminals and by visits of prominent political figures, nationalism is re-enacted (and in reaction also contested), guided by present political concerns, as well as by future visions for the country and region. Founded in 1869, Yasukuni Shrine was designed as a sacred space to honor fallen soldiers who ushered in Japan’s Meiji period by defeating the Tokugawa Shogunate (‘Yasukuni Shrine’ 2008). Today the Shrine is Japan’s de facto national monument to all who died fighting for the Japanese state, and it is arguably the most divisive and controversial monument to war in Northeast Asia. Yasukuni Shrine is contentious due to the collision of conflicting collective memories of World War II, which are deeply influenced, as sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1980, 1992) argues, by the present. Furthermore, as Dubin (1999) suggests, cultural struggles that take place at museums and memorials can ‘alert us to where fault lines lie in our society’ (p. 2). Much scholarship has focused on the Shrine’s depiction of past conflicts, especially World War II, but the Shrine is also an interesting case study for examining how present 195

196 Memories of War and the Future at Yasukuni Shrine, Japan

context influences these depictions. Furthermore, the future also shapes how war memory is enacted at the Shrine. The future is a site of contestation when different groups or communities have imagined futures that are at odds (Anderson 1991). This contestation likely increases if the path in which a country or culture is headed appears to differ from a certain group’s vision of how it should proceed. In addition to the way in which the future may impact narratives about the past at Yasukuni Shrine, the Shrine’s narrations of the past may conversely impact the future. Yasukuni is therefore not only a place to see an interpretation of Japan’s past but also a place to discern contemporary concerns as well as future visions that are important to individuals and groups in Japan. Part of this future vision appears to be motivated by revenge, in the sense that numerous presentations at the Shrine directly challenge the way Japan’s past has been previously characterized by historians, especially in China, Korea and the USA, as well as in Japan. Utilizing discourse and historical analysis, combined with ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter aims to discern how both the present and future impact the commemoration of the past at the Shrine, as well as how the site is a stage for the enactment of the public debate on the return of Japanese nationalism, which makes the Shrine so controversial.

Historical and conceptual background of the Shrine Yasukuni Shrine is located in central Tokyo, adjacent to the Imperial Palace, and consists of three main spaces: the main Shrine complex, the Yushukan Museum and the Shrine grounds. All three contain important objects and displays that evoke memories of Japan’s past wars. In addition, all three are contested spaces where battles over not only the past but also the present and the future are fought. Main Shrine complex The main Shrine complex houses the enshrined war dead including, since 1978, 14 Class A war criminals, which are Yasukuni Shrine’s most controversial aspect (Rose 2008, p. 25; Tanaka 2008, p. 123). Class A war criminals were those judged by the US-dominated International Military Tribunal for the Far East as having committed the most severe war crimes during World War II. Fourteen of those classified as Class A war criminals died during the American occupation (seven were hung and seven died in prison), and among them is the wartime Prime Minister Tojo Hideki (McGreevy 2005) as well as General Matsui Iwane, who was

David P. Janes

197

in charge of the Japanese troops in Nanjing, where a significant number of Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese troops (Breen 2008a). There are no bones or body parts at the Shrine; the war dead are symbolically enshrined, and through enshrinement, they are claimed to be transformed into deities. The contention over the enshrinement of Class A war criminals stems from two primary factors. First, as the war becomes temporally distant, certain Japanese groups have questioned the guilt of these individuals (Yasukuni Shrine 2009, p. 84). Second, from the perspective of many Chinese and Koreans, the presence of these Class A war criminals at Yasukuni is interpreted as signaling that Japanese people who visit the Shrine are paying homage to leaders of massacres and massive suffering. It is important to point out that many Japanese people have expressed discontent at the enshrinement of the Class A war criminals. For those who do support the enshrinement of these soldiers, there is apparently a strong desire to reduce the burden of the past and present it in a more positive light. Furthermore many items at the Shrine appear to signal a desire for a future Japan with a more aggressive foreign policy that is less dependent on the USA and free to utilize its military in potential conflicts. The Class A war criminals are not the only enshrined deities in the main complex. The Shrine also honors soldiers who died fighting wars from the end of the Tokugawa regime up to and including World War II (‘About Yasukuni Shrine’ 2008). The main building purports to contain 2,466,000 deities of the war dead from a range of conflicts (‘Yasukuni Shrine’ 2008). Of these, 2,133,915 are from World War II2 (Tanaka 2008, p. 121), illustrating how central this war is to the Shrine. According to the Shrine, the war dead honored there died in the line of duty fighting for Japan. This includes non-Japanese who fought in the Japanese military, as well as some civilians. In addition to the Class A war criminals, Class B and C war criminals are also enshrined at Yasukuni, making the total number of war criminals enshrined at Yasukuni 1068 (Williams 2007, p. 122). A complicating factor that influences the interpretation of the enshrinement of war criminals, especially those with Class A status, has to do with the extent to which the Shrine is viewed as an institution of the state. While originally established by the state, the Shrine is now a private Shinto religious institution over which the state has no direct control. Its independence is protected by Article 20 of the Japanese Constitution that separates religion and the state. However, visits to the Shrine by prime ministers and other government officials create a tacit

198 Memories of War and the Future at Yasukuni Shrine, Japan

connection with the state, which sparks controversy and has led to calls for the removal of the Class A war criminals. Yushukan Museum A second critical space at Yasukuni is the Yushukan, which is essentially a war museum that now contains items primarily from World War II. The Yushukan describes itself as ‘a museum to inherit sincerity and records of enshrined divinities of Yasukuni Shrine by displaying their historically important wills and relics’ (‘Yasukuni Jinja’ n.d.). The Yushukan was originally built in 1882 and refurbished in 2003 (‘Yushukan’ n.d.). Contents inside the Yushukan include war relics, kamikaze planes, submarines, plaques, paintings and descriptions that highlight Japan’s activities in World War II. The museum presents the ‘Greater East Asian War’ as a war of either self-defense or liberation (Zhixin 2008, p. 77). One of the first exhibitions in the museum is titled ‘Western Powers Encroach upon Asia,’ and a later exhibition about World War II features a description of Roosevelt’s plan to use oil embargoes to force Japan into war. These exhibitions frame the Pacific War as a necessary response to the West’s imperial expansion and ambitions in Asia. Further along in the museum is a large sign titled ‘Postwar Independence Movements,’ which states that ‘[n]ot until Japan won stunning victories in the early stages of the Greater East Asian War, did the idea of independence enter the realm of reality. Once the desire for independence had been kindled under Japanese occupation, it did not fade away, even though Japan was ultimately defeated. Asian nations fought for their independence, and achieved triumph’ (Yasukuni Shrine 2009, p. 78). Here the arguments presented in the museum are that Japan’s occupation of many parts of East Asia during World War II had a beneficial outcome, not the negative one so often portrayed. Building on this notion, Shrine publications discuss how the sacrifices made by Japanese soldiers were all for the cause of creating peace (Yasukuni Shrine 2009, p. 3). While the narratives in the museum display outline a specific, albeit one-sided, context for Japan’s engagement in the ‘Greater East Asian War,’ the museum presents war relics, or what the museum refers to as ‘Mementos of War heroes enshrined at Yasukyni [sic] Jinja’ (‘Yasukuni Jinja’ n.d.) in a de-contextualized manner. A Type 0 Carrier-based Fighter used by the Japanese Navy is a primary object seen upon entering the museum. In the Great Exhibition Hall, one is able to observe human torpedoes, models of planes used in suicide missions, as well as Navy ships, cannons and other war instruments. But the hall is sterile; it shows

David P. Janes

199

nothing of the suffering these instruments caused. Kamikaze pilots are also celebrated in the museum with displays highlighting their bravery, loyalty and sacrifice without mentioning any negative consequences of their actions to them or to others (Buruma 1994, p. 223). The narrative presented is not one of loss or moral challenge; instead, it glorifies war. The Shrine, however, rejects the position that the narrative it offers is unbalanced or de-contextualized; Shrine officials view the Yushukan not as a museum but as a repository for relics of the war dead that are preserved to honor them (Breen 2008b, p. 152). The Shrine’s website indicates that these relics are ‘filled with . . . [the] sincerity of enshrined divinities who devoted themselves to build a peaceful nation’ (‘Yasukuni Shrine’ n.d.). East Asia scholar Ian Buruma’s (1994) experience at the Shrine concurs with this view. During a visit to Yasukuni, a priest informed him that one day the Yushukan would become a proper museum, however at this time the relics were there to honor the dead. Buruma responded to this by enquiring if historians would be brought in for consultation purposes when the time was right to turn it into a museum. In response, a priest informed him, ‘[as] a shrine, we must think of the feelings of the spirits and their families. We must keep them happy. That is why historians would cause problems. Take the so-called war of invasion, which was actually a war of survival. We wouldn’t want the families to feel that we are worshipping the spirits of men who fought a war of invasion’ (Buruma 1994, p. 224). The present and future feelings of the families trump history, leaving a memory that the war was positive in nature. The Yushukan also has a store which sells model planes that were utilized during the war, videos and calendars highlighting the strength of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and even pre-packaged military meals. The store allows people to take away not only memories from Yasukuni, but also physical reminders of a glorious side of war. Visitors to the Shrine experience no presentation of the fear and pain inflicted by war, which may influence their level of support for future military operations conducted by Japan. Interpretations presented at the Yushukan Museum evoke a specific collective memory of World War II. These memories are not the collective memories shared by all Japanese, and certainly not the memory shared by most Chinese, Koreans and others in Asia; nor is it shared by most Americans. Therefore, instead of creating unification or promoting solidarity as some memorials do, Yasukuni deepens cleavages among groups possessing different collective memories (Zolberg 1998).

200 Memories of War and the Future at Yasukuni Shrine, Japan

Shrine grounds The Shrine grounds present a third critical location at Yasukuni where a specific version of the past is remembered and contested; a monument honoring Justice Radhabinod Pal is one of its most controversial features. The monument to Justice Pal provides an illustration of how the past is contested as well as the role of both the present and future in the presentation of Japan’s actions in World War II at Yasukuni. Justice Pal was a judge in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East who claimed that the Japanese were innocent of war crimes; he argued that the British and Americans were the ones who should be blamed for the war (‘Yasukuni Shrine’ n.d.). An English inscription attributed to Pal on the monument reads: ‘[w]hen time shall have softened passion and prejudice, when reason shall have stripped the mast from misrepresentation, then justice, holding evenly her scales, will require much of past censure and praise to change places.’ Directly in front of the monument one can find a box in which papers written in both English and Japanese are available for visitors to freely take; a homage by the Chief Priest of Yasukuni Shrine in praise of Justice Pal is written on these papers. This homage states in part that ‘Dr. Pal detected that the tribunal, commonly known as the Tokyo Trial, was none other than formalized vengeance sought with arrogance by the victorious Allied Powers upon a defeated Japan’ (Nambu 2005, p. 1). The monument to Dr Pal was erected in 2005, and the homage was written on 25 June 2005. Why, almost 60 years after the war’s end, has this monument been built on the Shrine grounds? Theoretical insights may come from Halbwachs’s (1980, 1992) notion that memorials and monuments speak more about the present (and, as argued here, the future) than the past. Taking this point into consideration, Japan’s significant military engagement in Iraq around this time, combined with anti-Japan protests in China, are important factors to consider. While additional research would be necessary to discern the exact motivation behind those who erected the statue, contemporary concerns are influencing how this monument is interpreted. The Koizumi administration’s decision to join the US war in Iraq led to Japan’s largest troop deployment since World War II. This expanded use of Japan’s military power may have ignited the passions of those who desire a strong Japanese military. Paradoxically, this deployment may also have fostered anger over the fact that Japan’s military was participating in Iraq at the request of the USA. Japan’s decision to participate in the Iraq war was disliked by the Japanese public; by 2005 a significant number of Japanese were in favor of pulling troops out by early 2006.3

David P. Janes

201

For those who reject Radhabinod Pal’s claim and believe that Japan is guilty of war crimes, arguing for a more militarized Japan with global reach raises questions domestically and internationally about the level of social trust that can be invested in the Japanese military due to its past actions. However, for the groups that support Justice Pal’s claim, they believe that Japan did nothing wrong in the past and should be allowed to pursue independent foreign policy and security goals. Japan’s relationship with China also influences how this monument is interpreted and likely served as another motivating factor for its creation. China’s increasing economic and military might, combined with rising domestic nationalism, are attributes fostering some Chinese groups to challenge Japan to face its past atrocities. In direct opposition to these calls for reflection and apology, the monument to Justice Pal makes the statement that Japan has little, or perhaps nothing, for which to apologize. John Breen, an expert on Yasukuni Shrine and author of numerous books on the Shrine, states that the Shrine has three main mnemonic strategies: textual, display and ritual (Breen 2008b, p. 144). The illustrations of monuments on the Shrine grounds and descriptions of the interior of both the Yushukan and main Shrine building combine both the textual and display strategies. Ritual brings together the content described above with specific groups, explored in the section below. This intersection of high profile groups with the Shrine causes controversy domestically and internationally.

Public voices and actions Rituals are ubiquitous at Shinto shrines, and rituals involve both individuals and groups. They range from daily prayers conducted by priests and visitors to more abstract ceremonies that take place annually. Important from the perspective of memory studies is that rituals provide a specific time and place to remember the past (Irwin-Zarecka 2007, p. 57) and bring particular people and groups to Yasukuni Shrine. Groups are key to understanding the construction of collective memory since the past is usually remembered through the stories and memories of groups (Boyarin 1994; Halbwachs 1992). As time passes and group make-up changes, memories are often reconstructed leading to transformed stories. The annual Great Fall and Spring Festivals, rituals revolving around 15 August (the date of Japan’s surrender), and Shogatsu (New Year’s Day) draw the largest numbers of visitors to the Shrine grounds.4 Including

202 Memories of War and the Future at Yasukuni Shrine, Japan

the above festivals and daily visits, from five to eight million people visit the Shrine annually (McGreevy 2005). The Great Spring Festival is attended by members of the Imperial Family, but not by the Emperor (Breen 2008b, p. 148). Hirohito was the last Emperor to visit the Shrine in 1975; his apparent frustration with the enshrinement of the Class A war criminals led him to cease participation in Shrine activities (Takahashi 2008, p. 108). While the Shrine is no longer a state institution, government officials from the Diet, the Japanese Defense Ministry, leaders of various other government offices and prime ministers visit the Shrine, most typically on 15 August (McGreevy 2005). The first post-war prime minister to visit the Shrine was Prime Minister Yoshida in 1951 (Tanaka 2008, p. 125) and the first to visit on 15 August was Prime Minister Miki in 1975 (Rose 2008, p. 27). The last to visit was Prime Minister Koizumi on 15 August 2006 (Tanaka 2008, p. 125). To avoid controversy, prime ministers often state that their visits to the Shrine are in an unofficial capacity. This theoretically should lead to less controversy since in these cases private individuals are visiting a private religious organization. Yet it is difficult for high ranking government officials to decouple from their official identities on this matter, especially in the eyes of others. Prime Minister Nakasone did not attempt to shed his official identity when he visited the Shrine on 15 August 1985; he publicly stated that he was visiting in his official capacity (Tanaka 2008, p. 125). Nakasone’s visit was one of the most controversial due to his formal link to the state and, from the Chinese perspective, due to the fact that 1985 was the 40th anniversary of China’s victory over Japan (Eykholt 2000, p. 33). The visit resulted in a strong anti-Japanese response in China. Protest posters were displayed; one stated ‘[t]he new devils are enshrining the tombs of the old ogres. Yasuhiro pays tributes to the spirit of Hideki Tojo’ (Tanaka 2008, p. 125). This poster gets to the heart of the criticism of official visits to the Shrine by prime ministers: the visits appear to be paying respects, in part, to the Class A war criminals and somehow justifying their actions. For many Chinese and Koreans (and Japanese), the soldier and the cause cannot be disconnected, which is similar to the issue President Ronald Reagan faced in Bitburg, Germany (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991). During his visit to Kolmeshöhe Cemetary in Bitburg, Reagan was accused of honoring SS soldiers buried there; for some, the soldier and the cause were forever linked (WagnerPacifici and Schwartz 1991). Furthermore, there is a concern that visits to the Shrine by the prime minister signal a national intention that Japan could possibly repeat its past actions.

David P. Janes

203

Koizumi’s visits during his five years as prime minister (2001–06) played a role in enabling China-Japan relations to spiral out of control (Tanaka 2008). High level economic and political meetings were cancelled, student riots erupted and formal protests from the Chinese government were made. Just after the largest anti-Japan protests in April 2005, I was in Beijing where I met with middle and high school students who told me how viscerally they hated Japan. Based on their statements, it appears that part of this hatred came from a sense that Japan has not apologized for past atrocities, and now attempts to deny them and honors those responsible (personal interviews 2005). Some of the Chinese memories are kept alive due to political motives, which engage China’s own concerns over its future. The Chinese Communist Party’s narrative is that it succeeded in driving Japan out of China. This anti-Japan sentiment can be helpful in shoring up the government’s legitimacy, which is essential for future domestic stability in China. The Communist Party often uses anti-Japanese feelings to ‘promote an agenda of unity and development’ (Eykholt 2000, p. 39). In addition to the controversy stirred by visits of Japanese prime ministers and government officials, specific groups play important roles at the Shrine. The Japan War Bereaved Families Association (Nippon Izokukai)5 is one of the most important. With over 80,000 members and a variety of political links, including past leaders who had significant positions of responsibility with the then ruling Liberal Democratic Party (Breen 2008a, p. 5), the Association’s voice is powerful. In 1963 the Association led the effort to encourage the Japanese Diet to pass the Yasukuni Bill, which aimed to renationalize the Shrine (Seraphim 2007, p. 20). Although the bill failed, they continue to actively promote visits by members of the Diet to the Shrine. Their website contains a list of all prime ministers who have visited and describes various political groups that attended the last Great Spring Ritual, including the Association of Diet Members who Visit Yasukuni Shrine. It is noteworthy that Nippon Izokukai, in an effort to encourage Emperor Akihito to visit the Shrine, formed a study group to explore the possibility of removing Class A war criminals from the Shrine (Breen 2008a, p. 5). Other groups who visit and whose views resonate with those espoused by the Shrine include the Tokubetsu Kogekitai Irei Kensho Kai (Association to Honor Kamikaze Pilots), whose members pay tribute to the kamikaze pilots who fought during the ‘Greater East Asian War.’ Another group, the Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho o Tsukuru Kai (Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform), creates school textbooks with narratives similar to those found at the Yushukan (Janes 2005; Nathan 2004).

204 Memories of War and the Future at Yasukuni Shrine, Japan

Just as there are groups that support Yasukuni’s view of the past, Japan possesses its fair share of critics of this view, and it is important to point out that much controversy over the Shrine comes from domestic voices. Among the post-World War II critics of the Shrine’s presentation of the past are the Japan Teachers Union, the Japan-China Friendship Association and various pacifist student organizations (Seraphim 2007, p. 19). Their memory of the war is that it was tragic and wasteful and necessitated a decisive break with the past. The Japanese Teachers Union, which views World War II with derision, fights against the Shrine’s view of the past. Many teachers do include in their teaching plans lessons about the atrocities Japan committed and, in an act of protest against the war, some members refuse to stand for the national anthem or allow the national flag to fly in their classrooms (Seraphim 2007, p. 21). Business leaders such as Fuji-Xerox’s Kobayashi Yotaro and Diet members such as Kato Koichi have voiced criticism of Yasukuni and of visits made by prime ministers to the Shrine (Wakamiya 2006). Yet the struggle is not solely about the past; it is also about the future. Business leaders like Kobayashi appear to be concerned about Japan’s future relations with China. Many teachers I have interviewed want their students to develop friendships with their peers in China and Korea in the hope for a brighter, more peaceful, future for the region.

Contemporary context Yasukuni Shrine does not exist in a vacuum. External contexts play a role in determining the Shrine’s content and rituals, and by analyzing it over time, as Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz (1991) did with the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, it is possible to fully realize how Yasukuni ‘emerges from the society’s values’ (p. 383) as well as from regional and transnational values. Contemporary controversies over the Shrine were significantly affected by post-Cold War regional and global transformations. Regionally, economies were beginning to integrate and bring countries closer together as the Cold War ended. Additionally, the post-Cold War period saw an increase in the revelation of evidence of atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers during the Pacific War (Seraphim 2007, p. 35). Globally, comparisons between Germany and Japan were also being made during this period, and such comparisons continue today (Seraphim 2007, p. 35). The death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989 also led to deep reflection in Japan and abroad about the war years and about the level of Hirohito’s

David P. Janes

205

involvement in the Pacific War. Those who viewed Hirohito as complicit in the atrocity of the war perceived the fact that he was never tried as the cause of many current social issues (Seraphim 2007, p. 24). Fissures between those who want to apologize and those whose memory of the war is more glorious remain alive in Japan today and intersect with the way in which the Shrine is viewed and used. Key to understanding contemporary contentions over the present and future that occur at the Shrine is to observe that fundamentally Asia is undergoing a period of dynamic integration that brings individuals, corporations and states in frequent contact. For instance, China is now Japan’s top trading partner, illustrating the extent to which both countries interact. Nevertheless, positive economic relations do not guarantee improved political or social relations; paradoxically they may give rise to increased tensions. This regional situation forces Japan to confront significant questions regarding its future both in the region and the world that intersect with the Shrine and the collective memory of World War II presented there. These questions range from the global role of Japan’s military to the role of the US-Japan alliance, as well as questions about Japan’s integration into the Northeast Asian region. Currently there are many attempts to develop stronger East Asian networks ranging from trade agreements to new types of security architecture and organizations. As countries in the region debate and discuss more complex and close relationships with Japan, memories of the past are brought to light, making Yasukuni a continued challenge for a peaceful regional future. These memories impact the extent to which regional integration is successful, as battles over the future course of Japan take place in the context of struggles over memories from the past. One of the greatest concerns about the future is a remilitarization of Japan. This concern, carried by China and other states in the region, is dually fostered by occurrences at Yasukuni as well as by changes in Japan’s military bureaucracy, which was upgraded to a full Defense Ministry on 9 January 2007.6 This, along with Japan’s troops in Iraq, are in tension with Article 9 of Japan’s post-war constitution, which denounces war as a way to solve international problems and states that Japan will not harbor a military. Debates about the interpretation and potential revision of this Article are frequent in Japan and impact how politicians, nationalistic groups and people abroad interpret and interact with Yasukuni. Utilizing the past as leverage to prevent Japanese remilitarization gives China a chance to engage in its own efforts to project regional and global military power. Regardless of what official policy may be or what actual political limitations to Japanese remilitarization exist, these

206 Memories of War and the Future at Yasukuni Shrine, Japan

perceptions have a serious impact on various levels of domestic and international relations for Japan. As integration continues to deepen, domestic groups and individuals in China and Korea (and other countries in the region) will remain closely observant of how leaders in Japan address the past, particularly with regard to their actions at Yasukuni Shrine. In this chapter I have shown how both the present, as sociologist Halbwachs theorized, and the future, as I have argued, influence how the past is presented and interpreted at Yasukuni Shrine. As Shriver might state, the past evils that Japan and the USA face today vis-à-vis their relations with the rest of Asia casts a shadow on their future in the region (Shriver 1995, p. 119). Additionally, tensions over imagined futures which take place through debates on remembering the past also threaten the present. Yasukuni remains a central site for the enactment of these debates and is poised to continue to be a significant site of controversy in Northeast Asia.

Notes 1. To understand memories of the past presented at Yasukuni Shrine, Japan, I utilized a combination of ethnography (site visits), discourse analysis of the Shrine’s museum and documents available at the museum, and traditional historical research using the sources cited in my chapter. Most of the ethnographic data for this project were collected in November 2009 during a visit to Yasukuni Shrine, the Shrine grounds and the Yushukan Museum. This was my third visit to the Shrine over the course of the past seven years, though I have studied various aspects of Japanese war memory over the past 15 years as a student in Japan, in graduate work in the USA and as a professional at the United States-Japan Foundation. The data were analyzed using discourse analysis of the Shrine’s museum and objects and texts presented on the Shrine’s grounds, combined with background information obtained through the secondary sources cited. 2. Some of these deities are from the Pacific War, which includes fighting in Asia/the Pacific region that occurred before and during World War II. 3. A December 2005 poll conducted by Nikkei Shimbun found that 28 per cent felt that the Japanese Self-Defense Forces should withdraw immediately and 46 per cent felt they should withdraw during the first half of 2006 along with British troops; only 11 per cent wanted activities to continue until the USA pulled out its troops (Asian Opinion Poll Database/Mansfield Foundation 2005). 4. The Annual Great Spring Festival is called Shunki Reitaisai and is held in late April; the Annual Great Fall Festival is called Shuki Reitaisai and is held in late October. See http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/english/festivals/index.html (accessed 13 December 2008). 5. See http://www.nippon-izokukai.jp/index2.html (accessed 13 December 2008).

David P. Janes

207

6. A PBS Wide Angle film titled Japan’s About Face captures many contemporary tensions over changes in Japan’s military. Also see http://www.mod.go.jp/e/ about/history.html (accessed 13 December 2008).

References Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso. Asian Opinion Poll Database. 2005. ‘Nikkei regular telephone opinion poll.’ The Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation, 22–25 December 2005. http://www.mansfieldfdn.org/polls/2005/poll-05-13.htm (accessed 24 November 2008). Boyarin, Jonathan (ed.). 1994. Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Breen, John. 2008a. ‘Introduction: a Yasukuni geneology,’ in John Breen (ed.), Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1–22. Breen, John. 2008b. ‘Yasukuni and the loss of historical memory,’ in John Breen (ed.), Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 143–62. Buruma, Ian. 1994. The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dubin, Steven C. 1999. Displays of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum. New York: New York University Press. Eykholt, Mark. 2000. ‘Aggression, victimization, and Chinese historiography of the Nanjing Massacre,’ in Joshua A. Fogel (ed.), The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 11–69. ‘Foundation/About Yasukuni Shrine/Yasukuni Shrine.’ 2008. http://www. yasukuni.or.jp/english/about/foundation.html (accessed 22 November 2008). Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper and Row Colophon Books. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. 2007. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Janes, David. 2005. ‘Memory war: Japan and China’s “educational nationalism” and its impact on China-Japan relations.’ MA Thesis, Medford. McGreevy, Andrew M. 2005. ‘Arlington national cemetery and Yasukuni Jinja: history, memory, and the sacred,’ in Mark Selden (ed.), The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 10 August 2005. http://www.japanfocus.org/-Andrew%20M.McGreevy/1786 (accessed 11 November 2009). Nambu, Toshiaki. 2005. Homage. Tokyo: Yasukuni Shrine. Nathan, John. 2004. Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation’s Quest for Pride and Purpose. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company. Rose, Caroline. 2008. ‘Stalemate: the Yasukuni Shrine problem in Sino-Japanese relations,’ in John Breen (ed.), Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 23–46.

208 Memories of War and the Future at Yasukuni Shrine, Japan Seraphim, Franziska. 2007. ‘Relocating war memory at century’s end: Japan’s postwar responsibility and global public culture,’ in Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter (eds), Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 15–46. Shriver, Donald W. 1995. An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Takahashi, Tetsuya. 2008. ‘Legacies of empire: the Yasukuni Shrine controversy,’ in John Breen (ed.), Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 104–24. Tanaka, Akihiko. 2008. ‘The Yasukuni issue and Japan’s international relations,’ in Hasegawa Tsuyoshi and Kazuhiko Togo (eds), East Asia’s Haunted Present: Historical Memories and the Resurgence of Nationalism. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, pp. 119–41. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin and Barry Schwartz. 1991. ‘The Vietnam veterans memorial: commemorating a difficult past.’ American Journal of Sociology 97(2), pp. 376–420. Wakamiya, Yoshibumi. 2006. ‘Japan’s “war on terror” should start at home.’ Japan Focus. 9 September 2006. http://www.japanfocus.org/-WakamiyaYoshibumi/2218 (accessed 24 November 2008). Williams, Paul. 2007. Memorial Musuems: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities. New York: Berg. Yasukuni Jinja. n.d. Guide of Yasukuni Jinja Yushukan. Tokyo: Yasukuni Jinja. ‘Yasukuni Shrine.’ http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/english/(accessed 28 October 2008). ‘Yasukuni Shrine. About Yasukuni Shrine: History.’ 2008. http://www. yasukuni.or.jp/english/about/foundation.html (accessed 26 November 2008). ‘Yasukuni Shrine. Monument of Dr. Pal.’ http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/english/ precinct/monument.html (accessed 15 November 2008). Yasukuni Shrine. Record in Pictures of Yasukuni Jinja Yushukan. 2009. Tokyo: Yasukuni Shrine. ‘Yasukuni Shrine. Statue of Omura Masujiro.’ http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/english/ precinct/statue3.html (accessed 28 October 2008). ‘Yushukan.’n.d. http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/english/yushukan/index.html (accessed 16 May 2010). Zhixin, Wang. 2008. ‘China, Japan and the spell of Yasukuni,’ in John Breen (ed.), Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 71–90. Zolberg, Vera L. 1998. ‘Contested remembrance: the Hiroshima exhibit controversy.’ Theory and Society, Special Issue on Interpreting Historical Change 27(4), pp. 565–90.

Afterword Jeffrey K. Olick

After a long durée of more than a hundred years (since the work of Wilhelm Wundt, Henri Bergson and others in the late nineteenth century) and a conjuncture of some three decades (since Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire and the ‘rediscovery’ of Halbwachsian theory), memory studies has come into its own, both intellectually and institutionally. The chapters in this volume are more than sufficient testament to, and result of, this maturity. In them and elsewhere, we are finally beginning to see the contours of the newly mature field: common sources, shared terminology, established lines of disagreement, and resultant empirical and theoretical cumulation. Even more important in this volume, however, is the editors’ call to re-examine the commonly held idea that because it is nominally concerned with ‘the past,’ memory studies is inherently backward looking. As they and the authors in this volume demonstrate, this is far from the case, both conceptually and historically. Indeed, while one main sign of – and prerequisite for – a mature field of study is some kind of myth about its origins, one could argue that contemporary memory studies, for all its promise, has been captive to a particularly misleading narrative. The misleading story of the contemporary interest in memory goes something like this: following the decline of post-war modernist narratives of progressive improvement through an ever-expanding welfare state, nation states turned to the past as a basis for shoring up their legitimacy. The decline of utopian visions redirected our gaze to collective pasts, which served as a repository of inspiration for repressed identities and unfulfilled claims. Without unifying collective aspirations, identity politics proliferated. And most often these identities nursed a wound and harbored a grudge. A ‘memory boom,’ beginning toward the end 209

210 Afterword

of progressivist power in Western Europe and the USA in the seventies, thus unleashed a discreditable culture of trauma and regret, and states are now judged on how well they atone for their past misdeeds in rituals of repentance rather than on how well they meet their fiscal obligations and inspire future projects. Within this narrative, memory studies is often characterized as part of, and a response to, the memory boom and the sort of ‘memory industry’ to which it supposedly gave rise. In this light, for instance, many critics have characterized Pierre Nora’s seven-volume encyclopedia of French Lieux de mémoire (places of memory) – a landmark of both memory studies and the memory boom – as a sort of neo-nationalist fantasy, an effort to recuperate what had been lost in the fissiparous history of contemporary French identity, rather than as implying a theory of memory. Nora’s was supposedly just one among many efforts at cultural recuperation, one more lament for what has been lost. For all its flaws, however, Lieux de mémoire was an effort to limn and fill out a theory of memory, an effort clearly tied to the earlier work of Maurice Halbwachs and to a long historiographical tradition in France: the so-called Annales tradition, influenced in part by Halbwachs’s theories of memory, had long highlighted the history of ‘mentalities,’ of which collective memory is clearly a part. The dominant narrative thus underplays the scientific history of Nora’s effort. To be sure, for many, contemporary culture seems to have devolved into an endless ‘competition among the victims.’ Coupled with a pervasive nostalgia, this new politics, and social theory as part of it, does seem to signal the future’s loss of salience, and makes, according to progressive critics, a rather poor substitute for it. Instead of underwriting collective projects, critics thus charge, it seems that all we can now do is legislate history’s remains. In this light, Nietzsche’s prediction from more than a century ago that too much history would be the gravedigger of the present could not seem to be more true, with memory digging the grave of the future alongside of history’s work in the present; never have we been more paralyzed, as Nietzsche predicted, by the tyranny of ‘It was.’ One such critic, the historian Charles Maier, famously referred to our contemporary ‘surfeit of memory,’ by which he actually implied a lot more than a surfeit: more accurately, a mountain of detritus. Such an account of the epoch is accurate insofar as it grasps both the profound civilizational transformations brought about in a century of industrialized horror and the peculiarly conservative turn in the politics of the late seventies and eighties. It is true as well that these developments have had a profound effect on memory studies, both in

Jeffrey K. Olick

211

generating its place at the top of scholarly and public agendas and in calling attention to its longstanding subject matter. It is also true that a sort of intellectual horror tourism has been as important for many ‘memory’ scholars as real horror tourism – both literal and literary – has been in Western culture more generally. As either an intellectual history or conceptual delimitation of memory studies, however, this story is less convincing. As the editors imply, the dominant narrative has given us the false impression that memory studies is allied with regressive forces and neglectful of ‘the future.’ Nora, and memory studies more generally, were held to be guilty by association with their supposedly regressive moment. In the first place, even when the focus of memory studies is on the peculiar political and commercial conjuncture of the end of the twentieth century, the study of memory is not as tied up with any particular kind of politics, as critics charged. Progressives recognize the importance of memory and tradition as much – if not exactly in the same way – as conservatives. Tradition may weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living; but even Marx recognizes that in periods of revolutionary crisis, it is precisely revolutionaries who ‘anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in timehonored disguise and borrowed language.’ It may be that the first time revolutionaries produce a tragedy and the second time a farce, but they do so both times in reference to the past just as much as conservatives, and whatever past we are talking about is of neither’s own making; by the same token, neither conservatives nor progressives have a monopoly on distorting the past for their present purposes. Nor is it clear that a rise in demands for redress – however selfinterested – and the profligacy of ‘never again’ – no matter how disappointing its actual effect in contemporary politics – are such bad, backward things. After all, no greater avatar of increasing human freedom than Hegel can be found, whether one interprets him from left or from right. While there are good reasons to be concerned with the competition of victims and the nursing of old wounds, it is thus far from clear that either conservatives or progressives have a monopoly on the ‘lessons of history.’ The point is that memory studies appears particularly well situated for understanding these complexities, rather than being a symptom of them. It is indeed true that in the early days of memory studies – let’s say the eighteen eighties through the nineteen fifties – many theorists were interested in highlighting the ways in which positive images of common

212 Afterword

pasts underwrite identities and mobilize agendas, and that contemporary memory scholars focus more on traumas and disruptions than on victories. This matches changes in culture: after World War II we switched from a culture of monuments to one of memorials; in place of the celebration of heroes, we now seem obsessed with the mourning of victims, and with making claims on their behalf; instead of imagining ambitious programs to reform society, we seek to repair the damages such programs have already done. But is memory studies merely an academic legitimation of these moments, assuming different forms within them, or does it have the contours of something more durable? The answer, according to the chapters in this volume, is clearly the latter. Memory studies, as the editors and contributors make clear, is a diverse and multiplex enterprise, drawing on disciplines and insights ranging from neuropsychology all the way to cultural studies and everything in between. The temporalities and conceptual concerns of these many sources contributing to memory studies are not all centered around the neo-conservative moment of the early eighties or the contemporary culture of mourning and regret. Indeed, contemporary memory scholars – perhaps even more than others – have noted the importance of the ‘non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous,’ the coexistence of materials and ideas from different epochs, and the editors highlight the unique perspective memory studies offers on the complex intermixing of temporalities in social life. For many progressives, images of both past and future (as well as past images of the future and anticipated visions of the past) serve as a foundation on which they can articulate critiques: just as utopian visions can provide an alternative future that discredits the present and a remembered past can provide an image of what has been lost, the sense of distance from the past can provide a more measured view of our present moment. There have been countless Hegelians left and right, but for all, being is becoming, and the meaning of the absolute is only visible in its historicity. So, again, concern with history and historicity is not limited to the peculiarities of the Noraian conjuncture, and the complexities involved clearly require a sober analysis. Moreover, even if, as critics charge, the contemporary preoccupation with the past of which memory studies is said to be merely a manifestation is indeed temporary – that is, if the memory boom came about in a whirlwind of despair about the past and will inevitably go back where it came from when we feel more celebratory – that too requires a theory: just as in economics, for social and cultural theories a memory bust is as much a matter for study as a memory boom. Critics are thus often

Jeffrey K. Olick

213

conflating memory studies with the boom it analyzes when they seek to dismiss it along with the politics it seemed to them to represent. But we now have the perspective, through a growing intellectual history, to see that memory studies is not reducible to the boom of the last 30 years. Its history is much longer, and not all of its recent contributions concern the proliferation of nostalgia in politics. The editors thus highlight memory studies’ multidisciplinarity not simply as a side benefit, but as a constitutive feature of it. Finally, as the editors also point out in the Introduction, the new memory studies is not merely a part of the reconfiguration of temporalities in the development first of modernity and second of postmodernity. It is also a key way to understand those reconfigurations. The history of memory is part and parcel of the history of the epoch, and vice versa. The framework of memory, they argue, may indeed be particularly well suited to the complexities of temporal reconfiguration because it highlights the intermixing of past, present and future at its very core, not as some late, derivative implication of its framework. Memory studies recognizes the way in which we are continually engaged in situating ourselves in and through time, and that this is an inherently dynamic process. Memory, new theories of it have shown, is a sort of gyroscope that mediates trajectories from past to future through gravitational points in the present. As such, none of its reference points are fixed. We are engaged, as the sociologist Harold Garfinkel put it in a very different context, in a perpetual process of ‘retrospective-prospective temporal reckoning.’ Taken as a whole, the present volume thus makes clear why memory studies is so important to contemporary scholarship: it provides uniquely powerful ways of grasping our complex mix of temporalities, and how this mix differs from others from other times and places. The importance of such perspectives is, again, not reducible to a temporary moment in which ‘memory’ seems to be a political and cultural slogan.

Index

Note: Page numbers in bold denotes figures. Agamben, Giorgio, 180, 187–8, 192 American Museum of Science and Energy, 6, 159–61, 163, 165–7, 169, 171–2 analogon, 111 Arendt, Hannah, 44–9 Argentina, 69–70, 73 Assmann, Jan, 21–2, 29, 34, 49 atomic bomb, 158, 160, 162–6, 170, 172 atrocity witnessing, 106–7, 109, 111, 124, 129. 134, 136 audience tuning 91–2 Auschwitz, 53–4, 57–8, 123 Auschwitz revolt, 52, 58–9, 64 Auschwitz trial, 123 autobiographical memory, see memory, autobiographical Barthes, Roland, 107–9, 111–12 ‘Bearer of the secret,’ 61, 65 Beck, Ulrich, 17, 20–1, 30 Black Civil Rights Movement, 141, 146 Blau DuPlessis, Rachel, 141, 156 Bosnia, 36, 121–4,136 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 37, 46, 75, 79, 83 Cambodia, 46, 68, 77, 79, 80, 81–3 Chile, 68, 71–3, 79, 84 Chodorow, Nancy, 147–9 collective memory, see memory, collective cosmopolitanism, 7–8, 20–1 crime, 121–3, 129 179, 182–7, 190 crimes against humanity, 18, 35, 43, 45–7, 106

death of feminism, 149–50 death squads, 180–6, 191–4 Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 154 dominant narrator, 94–5 East Asia, 198–9, 205 education, 78–82, 159 El Salvador, 7–8, 179–83, 185, 188–94 empathy, 81–2, 115 ethnic cleansing, 18, 123 exceptional measures, 180, 185, 187–90 Faludi, Susan, 149 feminism, 8, 149–50, 152–3 The Feminist Memoir Project, 7, 141–3, 151, 154–5 Foster, Hal, 112 future, 1–9, 15–17, 22–4, 27–9, 50, 57, 59–60, 67–9, 77–8, 82–3, 122, 150, 154, 156, 158–65, 169, 171–2, 180, 190–1, 195–7, 199–206, 210–13 see also temporality gangs, 131, 179–80, 183–94 gender, 146–9, 155, 184, 193–4 gender salience, 147–8 genocide, 6, 18, 35, 44–5, 66, 73, 76, 78–9, 81–2, 121, 128, 133–5 Halbwachs, Maurice, 22, 30, 69, 85, 102, 108, 179, 193, 195, 200–1, 206, 209–10 Hawkesworth, Mary, 149–50 Hirst, William, 93–5, 98–9, 144–6, 150, 152–3 214

Index history, 3, 6, 19, 26–8, 39, 50–1, 54–60, 63, 143–5, 148, 154–5, 159, 161, 164–5, 170–2, 181–2, 193–4, 199, 203, 210–13 history of experience, 55, 57 history writing, 59, 64 mnemo-history, 21–2 Holocaust, 7–8, 18–19, 24, 31–2, 36–48, 50–1, 55–6, 59–61, 66–7, 78, 81, 106, 121, 123, 135–6 Holocaust, memorials, 73, 75, 77–9, 81 Holocaust, memory, 39, 41, 43 Holocaust, trials, 44 human rights, 1, 26, 29, 31–2, 67–8, 70, 81, 106, 108, 123, 182 identification, 20–1, 40, 81 identity, 21, 34, 40, 68, 71–6, 105–6, 108–9, 117, 141, 145, 147–8, 152, 155, 162, 202, 210 identity politics, 209 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 83, 121–4, 135 international law, 3, 35, 44, 47, 121–4, 135 Iraq Veterans Against the War, 107–8 Japan, 7–8, 66, 69, 163–5, 168–70, 195–206 justice, 44, 70, 181–2, 186, 189, 200 justice, transitional, 1, 3, 23, 69, 82–3 kitsch, 31, 38, 48 Kosovo, 75–6 Kurdistan, 74 Lanzmann, Claude, 59, 62, 64 Lebanon, 75 Levy, Daniel, 16–19, 24–5, 29–32, 35–9, 41, 43, 47–9 Liberia, 68, 77, 79 Lieux de Mémoire, 48, 209–10 Manhattan Project, 165–72 maras, 179–89, 191–3

215

Martin Luther King Jr., 147, 151 martyrs, 151–2, 155, 182 memorials, 66–86, 160, 195, 199–200, 212 memory memory, autobiographical, 33, 36, 39, 89 memory, ‘boom’, 209–10, 212–13 memory, collective, 4, 6, 69, 89, 105, 108, 165, 179–80, 185, 191, 193, 196, 199, 201, 204–6, 210 memory, cosmopolitan, 20, 25–6 memory, embodied, 4 see also social frames, embodied memory, enacted, 55, 195, 196 memory, episodic, 32–3, 36–7, 39 memory, individual, 1–2, 4–9, 32–3, 106, 113 memory, and representation, 6, 37, 39, 55–6, 58–9, 105 memory, shared and unshared, 73, 94–5, 199 memory, studies, 1–2, 4–9, 209–13 memory, ‘surfeit of’, 210 memory, versus history, 3, 21, 26–8, 33, 39, 50–64, 143–4 Meyer, Clara, 145–6 Meyer, John, 19, 30 military, 8, 105–18, 128, 130, 158, 162, 166, 195–7, 199–201, 205, 207 Morocco, 7, 68, 72, 79, 84 museums, 5, 66–7, 72–3, 77–83, 164, 170–3, 195–6, 198–9, 206 mythical representation, 55 narrative, 1, 6, 16, 18–19, 26, 79, 107, 111, 115, 118, 143, 146, 149, 152–3, 161, 172, 179, 182, 196, 198–9, 203, 209–11 Holocaust narratives, 41–2, 60 nation state, 6–7, 16–18, 25–6, 28–9, 35–6, 70–2, 76, 209 nationalism, 7, 21, 25, 28, 70–1, 195–6, 201 nationalism, methodological, 17–18, 26

216 Index The New School for Social Research, 9, 145–6 Nora, Pierre, 27–8, 30, 48–50, 209–12 normativity/normative, qualities of memory, 8–9, 31–2, 34–7, 46 nostalgia, 4, 6–8, 160–1, 163, 165, 167, 169, 172, 180, 184, 210, 213 Nuremberg Trials, 44, 124 Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 6–8, 158–62, 164–72 Olick, Jeffrey, 9, 15, 17, 23, 30, 69, 85 oral history, 6, 136 Orwell, George, 15–16 Pacific War, 198, 204, 206 paramilitary groups, see death squads Parks, Rosa, 147 particularity, of memory, 35, 37, 41 perpetrators, 6, 18, 47, 54, 56, 58–60, 62, 106–8, 110, 112, 118, 183, 189–90 photographs, 6, 78–9, 81, 105, 107–18, 165, 167–8 photographs, trophy, 108–16 Poinsette Clark, Septima, 147 polysemy, 111 prevention, 4, 7, 31, 68–9, 77, 81, 106–7 psychoanalysis, 6, 55–6, 63, 147–50 Putnam, Mrs. George Haven, 146 rape, 129–31, 152 restoration, 56, 60 retrieval retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF), 97–100 retrieval-induced forgetting, socially-shared (SS-RIF), 98–100 retrieval-induced forgetting, within-individual (WI-RIF), 98 revenge, 13, 16, 141, 143, 195, 215 Rwanda, 7, 36, 46, 66–7, 69, 73, 78–80, 83 saying-is-believing effect, 91–2 security, 162, 165–6, 169, 180–5, 187, 189, 194, 201, 205 Seltzer, Mark, 112

shared memories, 73, 94–5, 108 shared reality, 91–3, 199 silence, 60–1, 96–100, 151 social social contagion, 93–5 social frames, 1 social frames, embodied 179, 181, 191 Sontag, Susan, 108–9, 111 South Africa, 5, 67, 69, 71, 77–8 Srebrenica, 6, 75, 79, 121–3, 127–36 Stangl, Franz, 62–3 state of exception, 179, 188, 190, 193 suffering, 106, 112, 118, 179–80, 183, 189, 197, 199 symbolism, 105, 109, 111–12, 118 Sznaider, Natan, 16–20, 24–5, 31–2, 35–9, 41, 43, 47–9 temporality, 1–2, 5, 17, 29, 106, 118, 212–13 terror, 181–4, 186, 190 testimony, 6, 50, 52, 54–7, 59, 61–2, 64, 106–18, 124 third meaning, 111–12 trauma, 5, 8, 10, 50–1, 54, 56, 59–60, 63, 111–13, 117–18, 123–5, 133–5, 144, 151–3, 210, 212 truth, 57–9, 62, 64, 164, 182, 184, 190, 193 universality/universalism, 18–21, 23–4, 28, 31–2, 35, 37, 41–3, 46–7 universality, of memory, 18, 31–2, 35–7, 41, 43, 46–8, 72, 81, 123, 142, 144, 148 Uruguay, 73, 74, 77 Utopia, 1, 4, 6, 8, 139, 141–2, 151, 154–5, 158–63, 165, 209, 210–12 victim, 6, 18, 44–5, 47, 50, 54, 58–62, 66, 69, 72–6, 81, 106–8, 112, 115, 171, 182–4, 188–90 victimization, 16, 69, 75 violence, 3–4, 7–8, 106, 108–9, 111, 117, 179–85, 188–94 visual image, 105, 109, 111–12, 117

Index Walby, Sylvia, 149 war, memory and memorials, 66, 71–3, 76, 180, 183, 189–91, 195–6, 199–200, 206, 212 war, Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan, 107–18 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, 58–9 witness, 18, 33, 56–7, 59–60, 62, 64, 106–7, 109–11, 115, 118, 124, 129, 134, 136

217

Women’s Liberation Movement, 7–8, 151 World War II, 66, 72, 105, 159–62, 164–6, 170–1, 195–200, 204–6, 212 Yasukuni Shrine, 195–201, 203–7 Zelizer, Barbie, 9, 108, 111 Zolberg, Vera, 1, 9, 170–1, 199