Multidirectional Memory

Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

Michael Rothberg

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804783330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time. Employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book makes a twofold argument about Holocaust memory in a global age by situating it in the unexpected context of decolonization. On the one hand, it demonstrates how the Holocaust has enabled the articulation of other histories of victimization at the same time that it has been declared "unique" among human-perpetrated horrors. On the other, it uncovers the more surprising and seldom acknowledged fact that public memory of the Holocaust emerged in part thanks to postwar events that seem at first to have little to do with it. In particular, Multidirectional Memory highlights how ongoing processes of decolonization and movements for civil rights in the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere unexpectedly galvanized memory of the Holocaust.

Rothberg engages with both well-known and non-canonical intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers, including Hannah Arendt, Aimé Césaire, Charlotte Delbo, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marguerite Duras, Michael Haneke, Jean Rouch, and William Gardner Smith.

Introduction: Theorizing
Multidirectional Memory
in a Transnational Age

Beyond Competitive Memory

In a characteristically provocative essay on the relationship between racism and anti-Semitism in contemporary America, the literary critic Walter Benn Michaels considers the seemingly incompatible legacies of slavery and the Nazi genocide in the United States:

Why is there a federally funded U.S. Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, DC? … The difficulty of coming up with a satisfactory answer to this question has produced a certain exasperation among African Americans, memorably expressed by the notorious black racist Khalid Muhammad when, in the wake of a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, he told an audience at Howard University on 3 April 1994 that “the black holocaust was 100 times worse than the so-called Jew Holocaust. You say you lost six million. We question that, but … we lost 600 million. Schindler’s List,” as Muhammad put it, “is really a swindler’s list.” The force of these remarks consists not in the absurd Holocaust denial but in the point—made precisely by his visit to the Holocaust Museum—that commemoration of the Nazi murder of the Jews on the Mall was in fact another kind of Holocaust denial. Why should what the Germans did to the Jews be treated as a crucial event in American history, especially when, given the absence of any commemoration of American racism on the Mall, what Americans did to Black people is not?¹

In this passage Michaels takes up one of the most agonizing problems of contemporary multicultural societies: how to think about the relationship between different social groups’ histories of victimization. This problem, as Michaels recognizes, also fundamentally concerns collective memory, the relationship that such groups establish between their past and their present circumstances. A series of questions central to this book emerges at this point: What happens when different histories confront each other in the public sphere? Does the remembrance of one history erase others from view? When memories of slavery and colonialism bump up against memories of the Holocaust in contemporary multicultural societies, must a competition of victims ensue?

Michaels’s stance toward his example in his essay on anti-Semitism and racism is somewhat cagey; he acknowledges Muhammad’s racism and the “absurd” nature of his Holocaust denial, yet he seems simultaneously to embrace a fundamental feature of Muhammad’s argument. Like Muhammad, Michaels implies that collective memory obeys a logic of scarcity: if a Holocaust Museum sits on the Mall in Washington (or just off of it, as is the actual case), then Holocaust memory must literally be crowding the memory of African American history out of the public space of American collective consciousness. There are plenty of legitimate ways to engage critically with the fact and function of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and there is certainly a great need to engage with the ongoing fact of American racism, but Michaels’s argument begs some important questions: Does collective memory really work like real-estate development? Must the claims of memory always be calculated according to their relevance for national history? Is “commemoration of the Nazi murder of the Jews” really a form of “Holocaust denial”?

Although few people would put the matter in such controversial terms, many other commentators, both inside and outside the academy, share the understanding of memory and identity articulated by Michaels. This study is motivated by a sense of the urgency of the vexing issues that Michaels raises, but it challenges the widely held ideas about the nature of collective memory and its links to group identity that undergird Michaels’s provocations. Like Michaels and, indeed, Muhammad, many people assume that the public sphere in which collective memories are articulated is a scarce resource and that the interaction of different collective memories within that sphere takes the form of a zero-sum struggle for preeminence. Because many of these same commentators also believe that a direct line runs between remembrance of the past and the formation of identity in the present, they understand the articulation of the past in collective memory as a struggle for recognition in which there can only be winners and losers, a struggle that is thus closely allied with the potential for deadly violence. While there can be no doubt that many manifestations of contemporary violence, including war and genocide, are in part the product of resentful memories and conflicting views of the past, I argue that the conceptual framework through which commentators and ordinary citizens have addressed the relationship between memory, identity, and violence is flawed. Against the framework that understands collective memory as competitive memory—as a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources—I suggest that we consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative. This shift in perspective allows us to see that while Muhammad and Michaels both speak of Holocaust memory as if it blocks memory of slavery and colonialism from view (the model of competitive memory), they actually use the presence of widespread Holocaust consciousness as a platform to articulate a vision of American racism past and present. This interaction of different historical memories illustrates the productive, intercultural dynamic that I call multidirectional memory.

In focusing on the politics of commemoration, Michaels criticizes the role memory plays in public discourse about the past and its impact on the present. As its title indicates, this book also places memory at the center of analysis, although it adopts a less skeptical position toward its object of study than does Michaels. But what is memory? And why does it feature so prominently in this book? These are crucial questions that I will return to below and throughout this study. The literature on memory is enormous and continues to grow at a staggering rate—a growth that has itself become an object of study!² For now, let me note the useful minimalist definition from Richard Terdiman that orients this book: memory is the past made present. The notion of a “making present” has two important corollaries: first, that memory is a contemporary phenomenon, something that, while concerned with the past, happens in the present; and second, that memory is a form of work, working through, labor, or action.³ As Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche write, “Memory [is] a symbolic representation of the past embedded in social action”; it is “a set of practices and interventions.”⁴ Multidirectional Memory considers a series of interventions through which social actors bring multiple traumatic pasts into a heterogeneous and changing post–World War II present. Concerned simultaneously with individual and collective memory, this book focuses on both agents and sites of memory, and especially on their interaction within specific historical and political contexts of struggle and contestation. Making memory the focus of this work allows me to synthesize concerns about history, representation, biography, memorialization, and politics that motivate many scholars working in cultural studies.⁵ Not strictly separable from either history or representation, memory nonetheless captures simultaneously the individual, embodied, and lived side and the collective, social, and constructed side of our relations to the past.

In both its individual and collective versions, memory is closely aligned with identity, one of the most contested terms in contemporary debate. What is the relation between memory and identity? As readers familiar with the writings of Walter Benn Michaels will know, his purpose in propounding an implicit theory of competitive memory is not in any way to valorize memory or collective identity. Indeed, much of Michaels’s work has offered a thoroughgoing critique of both memory and identity and what he sees as the straight line that connects them in mutual confirmation. This attitude certainly differentiates him from Khalid Muhammad, who enters the arena of competitive memory in order to stake out a claim for a militant black identity. My perspective differs from both of these polarized positions. Unlike Michaels, I don’t see all claims of memory or identity as necessarily tainted; instead, I see such claims as necessary and inevitable. But unlike Muhammad, I reject the notion that identities and memories are pure and authentic—that there is a “we” and a “you” that would definitively differentiate, say, black and Jewish identities and black and Jewish relations to the past. I differ from both of these positions because I reject two central assumptions that they share: that a straight line runs from memory to identity and that the only kinds of memories and identities that are therefore possible are ones that exclude elements of alterity and forms of commonality with others. Our relationship to the past does partially determine who we are in the present, but never straightforwardly and directly, and never without unexpected or even unwanted consequences that bind us to those whom we consider other. When the productive, intercultural dynamic of multidirectional memory is explicitly claimed, as it is in many of the cases I discuss in this book, it has the potential to create new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice.

The understanding of collective remembrance that I put forward in Multidirectional Memory challenges the basic tenets and assumptions of much current thinking on collective memory and group identity. Fundamental to the conception of competitive memory is a notion of the public sphere as a pregiven, limited space in which already-established groups engage in a life-and-death struggle. In contrast, pursuing memory’s multidirectionality encourages us to think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others; both the subjects and spaces of the public are open to continual reconstruction. Equally fundamental to the conception of competitive memory is the notion that the boundaries of memory parallel the boundaries of group identity, as we’ve seen with Michaels and Muhammad. As I struggle to achieve recognition of my memories and my identity, I necessarily exclude the memories and identities of others. Openness to memory’s multidirectionality puts this last assumption into question as well. Memories are not owned by groups—nor are groups “owned” by memories. Rather, the borders of memory and identity are jagged; what looks at first like my own property often turns out to be a borrowing or adaptation from a history that initially might seem foreign or distant. Memory’s anachronistic quality—its bringing together of now and then, here and there—is actually the source of its powerful creativity, its ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older ones. Finally, those who understand memory as a form of competition see only winners and losers in the struggle for collective articulation and recognition. But attention to memory’s multidirectionality suggests a more supple social logic. The struggle for recognition is fundamentally unstable and subject to ongoing reversal, as Hegel recognized with his famous “Master/Slave dialectic”: today’s “losers” may turn out to be tomorrow’s “winners,” and “winning” may entail learning from and adopting the rhetoric and images of the other. Generally speaking, moreover, the examples of multidirectional memory explored here are much too ambivalent and heterogeneous to reduce too quickly to questions of winning and losing—which is not to say that there is little at stake in articulations of collective memory, for quite the contrary is true.

In order to demonstrate the stakes of the past in the present, Multidirectional Memory takes remembrance of the Holocaust as its paradigmatic object of concern. Michaels’s and Muhammad’s choice to stage the problem of the stakes of memory and identity in relation to the Nazi genocide of European Jews is not accidental. Indeed, there is probably no other single event that encapsulates the struggles for recognition that accompany collective memory in such a condensed and global form. While, as historians have demonstrated in multiple national contexts, public Holocaust memory only emerged belatedly as a widespread collective form, the last half-century has seen such memory move toward the center of consciousness in many Western European, North American, and Middle Eastern societies—and significant inroads have been made throughout the rest of the world as well.⁶ The spread of Holocaust memory and consciousness across the globe sets the stage for and illustrates perfectly the multidirectional dynamic I draw attention to throughout this book.⁷ I argue that far from blocking other historical memories from view in a competitive struggle for recognition, the emergence of Holocaust memory on a global scale has contributed to the articulation of other histories—some of them predating the Nazi genocide, such as slavery, and others taking place later, such as the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) or the genocide in Bosnia during the 1990s. Because of the Holocaust’s salience to the relationship of collective memory, group identity, and violence, an exploration of its ongoing public evocation in multiple national contexts stands as the central example of this book’s exploration of multidirectional memory.

But multidirectional memory, as its name implies, is not simply a one-way street; its exploration necessitates the comparative approach I adopt here. My argument is not only that the Holocaust has enabled the articulation of other histories of victimization at the same time that it has been declared “unique” among human-perpetrated horrors (a point to which I return below). I also demonstrate the more surprising and seldom acknowledged fact that public memory of the Holocaust emerged in relation to postwar events that seem at first to have little to do with it. Here, we can observe that Michaels’s and Muhammad’s staging of Holocaust memory in competition with the memory of slavery, colonialism, and racism is also not accidental. As a series of case studies treating intellectuals and artists ranging from Hannah Arendt and W. E. B. Du Bois to French anticolonial activists and experimental documentarians will demonstrate, early Holocaust memory emerged in dialogue with the dynamic transformations and multifaceted struggles that define the era of decolonization. The period between 1945 and 1962 contains both the rise of consciousness of the Holocaust as an unprecedented form of modern genocide and the coming to national consciousness and political independence of many of the subjects of European colonialism.⁸ This book argues that far from being an arbitrary conjunction of two separate histories, this observation about the early postwar period contains an important insight into the dynamics of collective memory and the struggles over recognition and collective identity that continue to haunt contemporary, pluralistic societies. The fact that today the Holocaust is frequently set against global histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism in an ugly contest of comparative victimization—as is the case in Muhammad’s infamous speech and in the pronouncements of many “defenders” of the Holocaust’s uniqueness—is part of a refusal to recognize the earlier conjunction of these histories that I explore in Multidirectional Memory. But the ordinarily unacknowledged history of cross-referencing that characterizes the period of decolonization continues to this day and constitutes a precondition of contemporary discourse. The virulence—on all sides—of so much discussion of race, genocide, and memory has to do, in other words, partly with the rhetorical and cultural intimacy of seemingly opposed traditions of remembrance.

From Uniqueness to Multidirectionality

One of the major stumbling blocks to a recognition of the interactions that take place among collective memories is the belief that one’s own history, culture, and identity are “a separate and unique thing,” to adopt a phrase that W. E. B. Du Bois uses critically and that I discuss further in Chapter 4. This is especially true when it comes to thinking about the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Along with its “centering” in public consciousness in the last decades, the Holocaust has come to be understood in the popular imagination, especially in Europe, Israel, and North America, as a unique, sui generis event. In its extremity, it is sometimes even defined as only marginally connected to the course of human history. Thus, Elie Wiesel has written that “the Holocaust transcends history,” and Claude Lanzmann has claimed that “there is an unbreachable discrepancy” between any of the Holocaust’s possible historical causes and the ultimate unfolding of the events.⁹ Even arguments for uniqueness grounded in history sometimes tend toward ahistorical hyperbole. In an essay that seeks to differentiate the Nazi genocide from “the case of the Native Americans,” “the famine in the Ukraine” under Stalin, and “the Armenian tragedy,” Steven Katz argues that the “historically and phenomenologically unique” character of the Holocaust ensures that the Nazi genocide will differ from “every case said to be comparable to” it.¹⁰ Initially, asserting the uniqueness of the Holocaust served to counter the relative public silence about the specificity of the Nazi genocide of Jews in the early postwar period that many historians of memory and students of historiography have described. Such assertions thus played a crucial role in fostering understanding of the genocide and generating acknowledgment and study of its horrific particularities and traumatic legacies. Although one of my purposes in Multidirectional Memory is to complicate this view of the early years of silence by drawing attention to articulations of Holocaust memory that have remained absent from the standard corpus, I certainly agree that in the first postwar decades there was a necessity to assertions of the Holocaust’s specificity.

But, ...