BesondersWeg

I went to my course about Holocaust memory in international comparison today. It’s one of the courses in the new Public History MA program at the university, so I was the only person in the class who was not also pursuing a Public History MA. That was uncomfortable. Also, two things struck me as odd:

1) We all had to go around and introduce ourselves and say what we liked and didn’t like about the syllabus, which hasn’t really happened in any of my other classes, and which became particularly awkward for me because

2) Everyone felt the need to complain about how America was over-represented on the syllabus, and “Can’t we talk about Poland more?” or “What about the Third World why don’t we ever talk about that,” which was stupid, because the professor is an American Studies scholar, so he’s playing to his strengths, but which was doubly stupid, because Americans basically invented Holocaust memory.

Maybe this is my own biases showing, but as far as I’m concerned there’s a reason that you have to study American contributions to Holocaust memory: it’s because those are by and large the contributions that had ripple effects around the world.

Have you ever watched a Polish miniseries on the Holocaust? No. Was the largest collection of interviews with Holocaust survivors in the world collected by Germans? No. Does the rest of the world put together have as many Holocaust museums as America does? Surprisingly no. Do non-Hollywood films about the Holocaust get made? Of course. But they’re not the ones that reach wider audiences.

We can talk about how it’s weird that the Americans like to talk about the Holocaust so much (and we did; the professor was all “Isn’t it weird that the Americans have more Holocaust museums than slavery museums? Why do they need to focus on the crimes of others so much?” and more on that later, don’t you worry), and we can certainly say that it’s important to think about local Holocaust memory in France and Poland and Japan and what-have-you.

But there’s many good reasons that there’s a lot of America on the syllabus.The word “Holocaust” was popularized by Elie Wiesel, who became a US citizen in 1955 and whose work (ever heard of Night?) was consistently supported by American publishers.

The 1978 American miniseries featuring a young Meryl Streep and filmed on location was a key element in Germany’s own confrontation of the past. 70% of young West Germans claimed that they had learned more from the miniseries than they had from their own history classes. 

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point: don’t go dissing my country’s presence on your history syllabus quite yet.