The Certainties of Evil and the Politics of Not-Forgetting

“The Holocaust” as a construct of memory stories about the historical events of Nazi rule began its spectacular rise in Western culture with the Eichmann trial that located Jewish identity in the experience of extreme suffering and victimization. Presented on the stage of the world, before hundreds of journalists of the print and electronic media, this trial changed the earlier universalist perspective on Nazi crimes by focusing on individual Holocaust witnesses. The chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner had chosen a large number of witnesses on the basis of their written testimonies and his subsequent interviews with them. His goal was to derive the dramatic structure of Eichmann’s trial exclusively from their stories rather than the extensive collection of Nazi documents gathered by the Israeli police.The extreme experience of “the Holocaust”could only become ‘real’ for the millions of readers, listeners and viewers of the trial, if a large number of carefully coached survivors testified in person and thereby individualized the uniqueness of unimaginably cruel persecution. In the cumulative acts of individual recitation, however, these stories would not draw on collective memories “refreshed,” as Hausner had hoped, by the witnesses’ recorded testimonies. Rather, the emotions released by the recitations overpowered the witnesses to the point where they became their stories of extreme suffering—an identification that exploded the elaborate choreography of the trial. Screaming with the recalled pain, fainting from the remembered fear, the performance of their past persecution collapsed all temporal and spatial distance between the narrator and the narrated and thereby erased the historicity of their experiences of persecution, that is, the complex relational historical reality of Nazi crimes.

Hausner would have been dismayed at first that his elaborate strategy for handling the witnesses' testimonies had not worked as planned. He would not have wanted his audiences to witness this seemingly uncontrollable emotional engulfment in selective individual reenactments of past persecutions that in reality had been shared with many others. But he also had not planned for the representation of Nazi persecution to be negotiated by historical relation and comparison between different witnesses’ past experiences based on a rational interrogation protocol. And it was precisely the spontaneous erasure of such rational contextual historical inquiry that communicated to “the whole world” the supra-historical reality of indescribable, unspeakable, incredible suffering. What the world saw, heard, visualized and visceralized watching this trial had to mean the uniqueness, and then unique significance, of Jewish suffering that called for a supra-historical status of the survivor-as-witness and a near-religious postwar hierarchy of victimization and innocence.

Observing and reporting the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt disliked particularly the witnesses’ self-absorbed performances of their extreme suffering that created the illusion of a powerful immediacy of previous persecution and thus drowned out the ostensibly real issue of the trial, the guilt of Eichmann. She was troubled by the result of the show trial’s sensationalist and emotionalist use of the witnesses, namely the uncommonly low protocol standards regarding their examination and the evaluation of their testimonies. She also criticized the staging of Jewish collective identity in the experience of Nazi persecutions as “uniquely” Jewish victimization, where in historical reality many other groups were also persecuted as the declared enemies of the Nazi regime.

In her correspondence with the philosopher Karl Jaspers about the question of German guilt, Arendt had expressed her fears about the political consequences of the pure victim status of Jews in the postwar era (17 August 1946). More clearly than most of her contemporaries, she foresaw the problems with the American sharply drawn separation between the absolute innocence and goodness of the victors and the absolute guilt and Evil of all the vanquished: none of them politically workable concepts. Her compounded misgivings about the political consequences of the Eichmann trial contributed to her ill-advised choice of the subtitle for the Eichmann book, “The Banality of Evil.” It was meant to focus more attention on the guilt of Eichmann, an extraordinary mass-murderer and ordinary man, and less on his extraordinary victims. But linking “banality” and “Evil” was a profound shock to most of her readers since it appeared to question the mysterious substance and significance of (Nazi) Evil, and by association the a priori existential dignity of the victims of that Evil. Arendt, in turn, was shocked by their powerful desire to believe in the profoundness of Evil: her critical questions and reservations signified an amoral violation of religio-political certainties, heresy.

Over the decades, the desire to join the community of believers would grow and with it the semi-religious status of "the Holocaust" and the politicization of the memory of W.W.II. The perception of German collective guilt as the combined banality of ordinary men and the Evil of extraordinary murderers had been prefigured in the Allies’ Manichean scenario at the end of the war. But Eichmann as he emerged at the trial, a hyper-modern kind of ideological mass murderer, fit neither the religious concept of Evil nor the secular concept of banality. The man’s bad (evil) deeds may indeed have seemed to reflect elements of both in that his ideological (utopianist) motivations could be said to have been semi-religious--hence Arendt's definition of him as a "common man and extraordinary murderer." Yet the extreme situation of a total inversion of morality (killing the perceived enemy as the supreme value) at the end-stage of a hyper-modern technological war of heretofore unheard-of dimensions was a new phenomenon for which this explanation was and is too simple.

Arendt herself had invoked that extreme situation in her attempts at a better understanding of the nature of Eichmann's deeds and thereby undermined her neat combination of common and extraordinary, the banality of evil. This is precisely the point where the still most controversial, indeed "evil," relation between Nazi criminality and the Victors' war crimes could be helpful for a better rational, and that means partial, understanding of the historical events of W.W.II and its heritage. The Allies' new concept of “total air war” differed in kind from Hitler’s and Stalin’s brutal warfare on the eastern front in that its equally absolute disregard for human life did not focus on particular population groups, other than “the enemy” (which included civilians); nor did it depend on outlandishly ruthless, psychopathic leaders.

The denial of the protective civilian status to all civilian populations at all times in all places was built into the new concept of air war, and it was there to stay. In his recent account of the beleaguered President's plan to shift the "war" in Iraq away from the politically sensitive (physically messy) ground troups to more neutral (less visible) airpower, Seymour Hersh sums up the opinion of military experts: "while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troups are withdrawn, the over-all level of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what" ("Up in the Air," The New Yorker, Dec.5, 2005, 43). But who, given the evermore chaotic situation in Iraq, would be in control of such control?

The Eichmann trial had been successful in presenting the supra-historical uniqueness of the Jewish victim status; and though it took them some years to act on it, the political value of the moral capital of this status was not lost on American Jewry—hence also the sharp attacks on Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial in the early sixties. In the late sixties, with mounting international criticism of Israel's occupational strategies, Jewish leaders in America found it increasingly useful to draw on the authority of “the Holocaust” to support belief in the unique claims of a “chosen” people with unique victim status—claims that were echoed in the Germans’ increasing pre-occupation with their unique collective guilt and "inability to mourn” their victims.

Over the next four decades, “the Holocaust” would become a gigantic construct of memory stories of singular Jewish suffering, and May 2005 saw the much lauded inauguration of the hyper-monumental Berlin Mahnmal. Dedicated exclusively to the memory of the murdered Jews of Europe, it promised an enduringly guilty remembrance of Germany's Bad Past that would "forever" control that nation's future. In political reality, the long heated debates over many years about the wisdom of such an exclusive and extravagantly monumental memorial, and the highly politicized process of actually building it, were a microcosm of the notorious German anxiety of memory. German singleminded loyalty over such a long time to a rigid hierarchy of remembrance has produced, to the outsider, often darkly comical malaise, especially where it concerned the by now quite numerous politically and morally charged anniversaries of important events of W.W.II. Maintaining this hierarchy at all cost could not but reflect the vicissitudes of politics and memory, their potentially surprising contingencies and all-too familiar instabilities. Nevertheless, many American Jews and Israelis applauded the Mahnmal as a binding moral-political promise that the Germans “will never forget,” affirming the continuation of the power-politics of remembrance in the future.

Tony Judt's recent article "From the House of the Dead: On Modern European Memory," (NYRB, October 6, 2005) begins with the acknowledgement that "by the end of the twentieth century the centrality of the Holocaust in Western European identity seemed secure." Surprisingly, given his notorious insistence on the central cultural and political power of Holocaust memory, he now sees some "risks" in this position, a potential "backlash" such as a new German interest in their own war experiences, even to the point of alleging "the crimes of the Allies." At the end of the essay, after lengthy complaints about Eastern European failure to own up to their flawed dealings with Jews past and present, presumably in contrast to Germany, the model child, Judt acknowledges the "partisan" nature of memory. Now more civic minded, he suggests a general necessity of "some measure of neglect and even forgetting," even invoking the power of history over "memory itself" in recalling the painful past. But the question left unanswered in his half-hearted concession is "whose history?" Who defines at what time and in what situation the cultural and political role of history? Instructively, where the issue is the need for a more sober, secular historization of the Nazi-period, partisan memory still clearly trumps for Judt an at least intentionally more objective historiography .

Calling for a "professional study of the past," Judt still wants it focused on the "truth" of Nazi "Evil" which, he claims, only the historian can "guard" against forgetting. But what kind of historian would that be? What modern historian would work with religious concepts like immutable "truth," "forever," "Evil," "uniqueness"? The Berlin Mahnmal is for Judt the existential lode of guilt where "Western Europeans--Germans above all--now have ample opportunity to confront the full horror of their recent past." What about all their "confrontations" and demonstrations of remorse over the last 60 years? Not Judt's concern. He praises the German Chancellor's promises at this year's celebration of the liberation of Auschwitz: "the war and the genocide are part of our life. Nothing will change that; these memories are part of our identity." These are oddly provincial assertions for the democratic leader of a technocratic mass demoracy that now includes many different ethnic groups. Among them are many moderate Muslims who might think that unquestioned Nazi Evil has gone a long way to support questionable American and Israeli political and military conduct. But Judt is undeterred, demanding that postwar Europe, arising from the ashes of Auschwitz, will have to "remain forever mortgaged" to its "terrible past." Have there been no important issues besides Auschwitz for Judt? Where have all the years gone? Where are all the problems of the present? Arguably, exclusive not-forgetting of Nazi-Evil has contributed to forgetting them.