Filed under: Educational Politics | Tags: fascism, freie universität, german politics, marxism
Spotted at the FU Berlin: "Fascism is not an opinion, but a petty bourgeois mass movement in the interests of high finance."
Don’t you think your analysis could use some updating already?
Filed under: Macht Spass | Tags: native americans, berlin, winnetou, avatar, libraries
I’ve been a busy little budgie the last few weeks, so sorry about the lack of updates, but before I get back into the blogging world, two short stories about Germany.
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If there is such a thing as a personal hell, mine will consist of the locker room at the university library. You are only allowed to bring the essentials into the library, so your bag and even your laptop sleeve must be left outside, in a locker.
There are never enough lockers around, though, so sometimes you have to wait in line for fifteen minutes, or thirty, holding your books, palming your 1 Euro coin, praying that the next five people who exit the library used the locker room you’re waiting at and that they are about to clear out their locker for you so that you can finally get work started.
This weekend I learned that the books in my apartment are also trying to kill me.
Berlin’s main research library discovered asbestos in one of its storage depots, so lending operations are being suspended. 2 million of the Staatsbibliothek’s 5.5 million books have to be quarantined while they clean up the stacks.
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I saw James Cameron’s Avatar, and this weekend I had the opportunity to discuss it with a roomful of Germans. I started talking about how it was politically dubious:
“I know it looks like it’s a pro-native-people sort of movie, but it’s just that, well, the white man has to become blue to save the blue people, but the blue people can’t save themselves. Only the white guy is brave and smart enough to lead the native tribe! Isn’t that kind of insulting, that even here only the white guy can be the hero?”
“But that’s exactly the same plot as Winnetou.”
“Yeah, I know!”
“Are you saying you have a problem with Winnetou?”
Filed under: Sightseeing | Tags: 95 theses, lutherstadt wittenberg, martin luther, my awesome ideas for souvenirs
Fellow Fulbrighter and Swarthmore alumnus Andrew came to visit me in Berlin this weekend so that we could try some new beers, snark about some Biedermeier paintings, and visit Lutherstadt Wittenberg, which is famous for one thing.
Our journey to the home of Protestantism was rather harrowing, interrupted as it was by a ninety-minute stop at the train station in Jüterbog.
This image doesn't adequately convey the cold.
They informed us that because there had been a train delay, they were just going to truncate the train in Jüterbog, only halfway to our destination. We filed off the train glumly, quickly appraised the situation at the train station (there was no restaurant and may not have been one for several years), walked outside to discover a sign telling us that the city center was a thirty minute walk, stood on the tracks getting our hopes up for twenty minutes because the train schedule was printed incorrectly, and finally, once we realized what was going on, walked across the street to have coffee and soft pretzels in the Edeka.
When we finally arrived in poorly signed Lutherstadt Wittenberg, we visited the Luther House and the Melancthon House in our patented “Let’s read every single text and make a joke about every single display case and occasionally pontificate on something” style.
I learned that Andrew has a ranked list of his favorite early Lutherans.
But this isn’t Andrew’s blog, and sadly all I know about Luther is this: whenever I go to a museum, I get a couple of ideas about things that I would be thrilled about purchasing at the gift shop, and then the gift shop never has any of those things.
In Lutherstadt, I wanted the following:
The 95 theses cast in bronze.
1) A corkboard that was a replica of the church doors to which Luther supposedly nailed his 95 theses, so that I, too, could pin up my own most important theses.
This is the most awesome thing ever.
2) A copy of this mug. Supposedly Luther had a mug with four rings around it, representing the Ten Commandments, Belief, the Vaterunser [the Lord's Prayer], and the Catechism. Luther could drain the entire mug, but was amused that his erstwhile friend Johannes Agricola could never get beyond the second ring.
How awesome would that be? So awesome. I think if the historian thing doesn’t work out I’m going to become a purveyor of historical novelties.
After the Luther and Melancthon houses, we got to the church too late to go inside, but took some pictures of the outside and then settled down for good German cooking.
When we went back to the train station, we discovered that the next train didn’t come for another ninety minutes, which gave us time to trudge to the Hundertwasser school and take pictures in the dark.
I only now realize how completely insane we look in these pictures.
Afterwards, we got some beers and chocolate at Netto and sat on a bench and groused about how much we hated Deutsche Bahn and how much Deutsche Bahn clearly hated Lutheranism.
In February I think we’re going to make the trek to Chemnitz. Let’s hope the Bahn likes petrified forests and large heads of Karl Marx.
Filed under: Holocaust Stuff | Tags: bosnian genocide, daniel levy, holocaust comparisons, holocaust memory, human rights, natan sznaider, peter novick, yugoslavia
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider’s The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age is worth a read if you need a pick-me-up after Novick’s cynicism about Holocaust memory.
Levy and Sznaider, both sociologists, believe that “Holocaust memories have become a measure for humanist and universal identifications… [and] helped shape the articulation of a new rights culture” (5).
They investigate a number of different developments, some which they see as negative, some positive, to give what is ultimately a very nuanced view of the Holocaust’s role in global memory. “The Holocaust sets the parameters for de-territorialized memoryscapes in Second Modernity, provides a model for national self-critique, serves to promote human rights as a legitimating principle in the global community, and plainly offers a negative example of dealing with alterity” (201).
I read this as a statement of potential: the Holocaust can provide a model for national self-critique, or, as Novick argues has happened in the United States, it can eclipse the process of national self-critique.
The Holocaust can serve to promote human rights as a matter of universal values and a general concern for the global community. Activists who have pushed for intervention in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur, to name a few, often point to the Holocaust as a memory which convinces them of the value of universal identifications.
But it can also make us callous to situations that don’t seem as bad as the Holocaust, and it can be a dangerous metaphor to graft onto situations where it doesn’t really belong. For example, Levy and Sznaider criticize comparisons of the Bosnian genocide to the Holocaust, arguing that although it was true in some senses, the power of the Holocaust metaphor overshadowed the cultural and historical specificities of the Balkans and gave policy makers unrealistic expectations about what to look for.
Overall, it was a good read, making a lot of Novick’s points but with a glass-half-full sort of approach (remember Hofstadter’s dictum: every idea worth stating is worth overstating, and your followers will refine it for you), and further drove home the point I was trying to make with the post about Holocaust memory in Austrialia: memories aren’t given, they’re constructed, and the things that we choose to do with them have consequences.
Filed under: Politics of History | Tags: graduate school is fun!, history education, moral education, peter novick, richard hofstadter
Somebody once asked me how I got good grades on history papers, and I made the following flippant comment: “You realize that they’re not grading you on being correct, right? They’re grading you on how convincingly you can sustain an audacious argument. If it’s interesting it doesn’t really matter if it’s wrong.”
It’s always nice to see long-dead, but still respected, public intellectuals backing up your cranky jokes.
Hofstadter’s strategy was consistent with his long-held view that ‘if a new or heterodox idea is worth anything at all it is worth a forceful overstatement,’ a position he contrasted with that of historians who ‘approach their work as though they were engaged in the final death grapple with error.’
–Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, p. 338
I also liked this passage a lot, from Hofstadter’s Progressive Historians but cited on page 407 of the Novick.
The great fear that animates the most feverishly committed historians is that our continual rediscovery of the complexity of social interests… may give us not only a keener sense of the structural complexity of our society in the past, but also a sense of the moral complexity of social action that will lead us toward political immobility… History does seem inconsistent with the coarser rallying cries of politics. Hence I suppose we may expect that the very idea of complexity will itself come under fire once again, and that it will become important for a whole generation to argue that most things… are not complex but really quite simple. This demand I do not think the study of history can gratify.
Filed under: Politics of History | Tags: aborigine genocide, australian history, holocaust comparisons, holocaust historiography, native americans, neil levi, refugees
I found this article, Neil Levi’s ” ‘No Sensible Comparison?’ The Place of the Holocaust in Australia’s History Wars,” really interesting in light of all the doom and gloom about American uses of Holocaust memory.
Levi starts by acknowledging the critique that in many countries the Holocaust is used as a “screen memory… remembered in order to displace, repress or ’screen’ other, perhaps more traumatic, local events and histories” (125).
But in the Australian context, “the traumatic local past is indeed remembered, both in itself, as something that might be regarded as genocide, and in explicit comparison with the Holocaust” (127). He argues that in contrast to America, where attempts to compare slavery or the Native American experience to the Holocaust have been shouted down before they ever received a wider hearing, in Australia, Holocaust memory has served a different purpose.
The Holocaust energized some Australians to confront their own past with regard to Aboriginal Australians, with a number of historians producing impressive comparative studies. In 1997 the Bringing Them Home report about the separation of Aboriginal children from their families presented testimony in a way reminiscent of Nazi war crimes trials. It also named the actions “genocide,” setting off a huge debate within Australia.
In response to the “genocide word,” another group of historians and politicians reacted in anger, using the Holocaust as a sort of defense, saying that because the Holocaust was genocide the Aboriginal situation couldn’t possibly be. For them, writes Levi, “the Holocaust is a memory to be simultaneously invoked and defended against, not to be remembered in place of a more troubling local history. The Holocaust is remembered less to repress the more traumatic memory of the local past than to make the memory of the local history tolerable, by making whatever violence there may be in the Australian past appear relatively benign” (136).
In part because of the Bringing Them Home report’s use of the word “genocide,” the Holocaust has become a much more politicized reference point for Australian history than it has ever been in the United States.
Levi still thinks Australians have more to confront, criticizing the Bringing them Home report for leaving out the voice of the perpetrators, and writing that “it is one thing to identify oneself with the perpetrators and apologize on their behalf, and quite another to identify oneself as a perpetrator and face the consequences of one’s actions. It is the latter that has been an impossibility in Australia” (148).
Levi then goes off on his own political hobby horse, saying that because Australians haven’t yet fully grappled with the consequences of their own actions, because their Holocaust memory is not yet “complete,” they refuse to see that “[it is] this nation’s current treatment of refugees and asylum seekers that raises most distressingly the specter of Holocaust memory” (148).
He continues, “both the actual horrific conditions of the detention centers themselves and their existence outside the law—in the state of exception where, as Hannah Arendt was the first to argue, anything is possible—are enough to warrant in this instance a deliberate, critical invocation of comparative historical memory… when the time comes to tell this particular Australian story, few of us will be able to say that we did not know, many of us, however, that we did nothing” (149).
So now you know how Neil Levi feels about refugee camps in Australia.
I really liked this article not only because I learned about a use of Holocaust memory I didn’t know much about, but also because it demonstrated Novick’s point that Holocaust memory is not “natural,” but rather that it’s determined by our choices.
Levi shows that in Australia, people have made different choices about how to remember the Holocaust, and those different choices have led to different outcomes.
Filed under: Holocaust Stuff | Tags: american history, holocaust education, janet reno, moral education, peter novick, victims and perpetrators
The importance of the second part of Peter Novick’s argument about the place of Holocaust memory in American life first hit me when I was watching the 1978 Holocaust miniseries, which can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube.
The miniseries follows the terrible things that happen to the Weiss family, assimilated German Jews (the series opens with the son marrying a Christian woman), and also features a subplot about a young German lawyer who joins the SS.
There are a range of different nationalities represented in the cast, Germans, Canadians, Americans and even British actors, but I was struck by the fact that as a general rule, the victim characters tend to have more American accents, and the perpetrators tend to have more foreign and German accents. Linguistic cues urge the American viewer to identify with the victims while feeling alienated from the “evil Germans.”
Which seems to me to defeat the entire point.
But it reflects a more general trend in how Americans tend to learn about the Holocaust and how it tends to be depicted in our museums: we identify with the victims and the liberators rather than considering how we could be the perpetrators.
Sometimes we even “use the Holocaust as a negative marker of American identity” (Novick ItHaAM, 9). Novick quotes Janet Reno’s description of murals in the Attorney General’s Conference Room: “One is Justice Granted… on the other end of the room is Justice Denied, and there is a barren slope with people being led off into bondage by brown-shirted troops, violins being taken, papers being torn.”
Novick comments: “Whatever the failings of our criminal justice system, we are being told, we don’t have brown-shirted troops taking violins. As a nomination for a negative marker of American identity this is so pathetically complacent and self-aggrandizing that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry” (9).
The implicit criticism, of course, is that the “Justice Denied” memorial in our nation’s capital shouldn’t be ripped from another nation’s historical context. The use of the Holocaust here is, to borrow another phrase from Novick, “cost free.”
It doesn’t impose any demands on us or even cause us to question any of our previously held assumption. Throwing Nazis on the wall is an easy way to pat ourselves on the back–if we put the Scottsboro Boys up there it might lead to some more sober contemplation.
Detlef Junker, a German historian, suggests in a 2000 essay that more than just being “cost free,” remembering the Holocaust “gives the American nation the everlasting possibility to externalize Evil and renew the necessity of its own mission to broadcast freedom and democracy.” He finishes the essay by asking us to consider the impact of leaving the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to find ourselves on the Mall–”after confronting the overwhelming scenes of inhumanity, they find themselves back in the monumental center of Washington–in the middle of the monuments to freedom and to the American Mission” (translation my own–and imagine how much angrier this essay would have been after Iraq!).
For Junker, and for some of the other Germans who give me a hard time about being here, the way some Americans go on and on about the Holocaust is repellent, constantly gesturing to it as some sort of ultimate evil, patting ourselves on the back for engaging with “profound events,” without any evidence that we’re asking the tough questions about our own subtle societal injustices.
To throw my two cents into the ring, I read a lot of “Holocaust literature” when I was growing up, and I do think that I learned a few things from it.
But if I had to point to a single moment where doing history made me a better person, it would be my seminar paper on the historiography of racism, where I plowed through a lot of arguments about how racism developed.
I finished that paper with a much better understanding of some important things: of the fact that racism isn’t inevitable, of the fact that the choices I make matter in the history of things, of the ways in which I can benefit from a racist system without actually being responsible for it. I might even have caught a glimmer of the things that I could do to help chip away at that system.
I still think it’s incredibly important to study the Holocaust, and I will tell that to any German who asks. I still think Americans should remember the Holocaust, and I think that many of our reactions to Holocaust memory are genuine.
But I think Novick’s right that we should also question the ways we use the Holocaust. We should take the question “Why do you have a Holocaust museum on your Mall and no slavery museum?” seriously. We should question assertions that learning about the Holocaust makes us better people.
(Those assertions generally piss me off, because they let people get away with thinking “Well, I wouldn’t be an SS guard,” when 99% of the moral dilemmas the average person will face in their lives are much more subtle and difficult.)
We should probably be queasy when we produce miniseries where the good guys are Americans and the bad guys are Germans.
And with that, I’m going to get back to reading about racism.
Filed under: Turkish Stuff | Tags: esperanto is the shit, language learning, the european idea, turkish
Remember this crazy long Turkish word favored by Czechoslovakian nationalists ?
Five months later I can tell you exactly how it works!
In German-Turkish class we actually used the following example:
“You are supposedly one of those whom we will not be able to Europeanize.”
[Sie sind angeblich von denjenigen, die wir nicht europäisieren konnten.]
Avrupa-la-lış-tır-ama-yacak-lar-ımız-dan-mış-sınız.
Europe – adjectival “with” suffix – verbal “process” suffix – verbal causative suffix – imposssibility suffix – future participle suffix – plural – first person plural possessive ending – ablative “from” case – inferential “supposedly” suffix – second person plural personal suffix.
If that hurts your head, be comforted: tonight I start Esperanto lessons.
Filed under: Holocaust Stuff, Politics of History | Tags: black history, holocaust historiography, identity politics, oppression olympics, peter novick, victims and perpetrators
One interesting thing about Peter Novick’s 1999 book The Holocaust In American Life is that it may be responsible for the concept of “the oppression Olympics.”
Novick makes the argument that Jewish leaders were largely silent about the Holocaust until the 1970s, when they invoked it for reasons that turn out to be blatantly political: to garner support from Israel and to shore up a disappearing Jewish identity.
This is obviously going to be a controversial argument, but I think we would have a bigger problem on our hands if the book were called The Holocaust in Jewish Life. It’s patently false that all Jews were silent about the Holocaust for two decades, and Novick’s cynicism about the uses of Holocaust memory refuses to acknowledge the ways in which these memories also represent an authentic emotional reaction to the events.
But the book is about the Holocaust in American life. Novick isn’t trying to chart the ways the Holocaust is remembered in individual synagogues, around the dinner table, or in the quiet moments that literature might bring us. He’s trying to chart the ways the Holocaust has been talked about in the larger arena of American politics and culture, and because he’s trying to do that he’s necessarily going to focus on a different set of memories.
A pivotal section of the book describes the rise of “the new ethnicity” and “identity politics” in 1960s and 1970s America. Novick claims that these groups “organized on the basis of shared grievances against the dominant society… their shared identity was thus, above all, a victim identity. The hallmark of the fully participating and fully conscious member of the group was belief–however well one was doing personally–in shared victimhood” (189-190).
He continues: “This ‘culture of victimization’ didn’t cause Jews to embrace a victim identity based on the Holocaust; it allowed this sort of identity to become dominant, because it was, after all, virtually the only one that could encompass those Jews whose faltering Jewish identity produced so much anxiety about Jewish survival” (190).
There were plenty of atrocities being talked about at the time, writes Novick, “but the success of Jews in gaining permanent possession of center stage for their tragedy, and their equal success in making it the benchmark against which other atrocities were judged, produced a fair amount of resentment–’Holocaust envy’” (192).
Novick briefly describes some of the clashes between Jews and other groups. Native Americans who described their own experience as “genocidal” had the claim shoved back down their throats by Holocaust scholars. Jewish lobby groups were part of the coalition that helped defeat the congressional resolution to recognize the Armenian genocide.
Blacks and Jews clashed again, and again, and again, writes Novick, with black writers penning eloquent complaints against the fact that “while Jews had a federally funded museum memorializing their victimhood, proposals for a museum of the black experience never made it through Congress” (194).
The rhetorical crescendo of this section is when Novick blasts Holocaust scholars for insisting on the event’s uniqueness, leading into that argument by writing that “the most common Jewish response to the charge that Jews were intent on permanent possssion of the gold medal in the Victimization Olympics has been to protest that it was others, not they, who were engaged in competition… it was only those who, out of ignorance or malice, denied the uniqueness of the Holocaust who could be so foolish as to engage in competition” (195).
(This was in 1999–does anyone have an earlier citation for “oppression/victimization Olympics” than that? Since present usage is almost always about comparing oppressions of gender, sexuality, and race, I was taken aback when I realized that this might well be the place the term comes from.)
But I agree with Novick–and always have agreed, indeed, this is one of the first memories I have from learning about the Holocaust–that calling something “unique” is an utterly vacuous utterance, because every event is by definition “unique.” So what?
Novick writes, “the talk of uniqueness coexists with, overlaps with, and is inextricably intertwined with repeated insistence that the Holocaust is the archetype and yardstick of evil… does anyone believe that the claim of uniqueness is anything other than a claim for preeminence?” (197).
Tomorrow we’ll turn to Novick’s discussion of some of the effects that making the Holocaust the “archetype and yardstick of evil” has had on American political life.
Filed under: Macht Spass | Tags: gay history, german politics, guido westerwelle, proud to be an american
This political button would be interpreted very differently depending on whether I was wearing it in New Jersey or in Germany.
I bought it at a bar on Kottbusser Tor.
Personally I find it difficult to dislike Guido Westerwelle [catchy German-language youtube comedy song], Germany’s openly gay Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor, because in some ways he’s the most American politician in Germany; confident and charismatic, pro-business, and prefers to speak his own language.
(In other ways, like being “the Facebook friend Israel can’t ignore,” he’s not very American at all. But I’m mostly just talking about personal style here.)
More hard-hitting posts to come soon: I just wanted to share my latest acquisition.
