On the politics of remembering (or not)
Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson
Almost daily, the founding of museums or lieux de mĂ©moire, of sites commemorating the past are reported, as is the staging of commemorative events which celebrate the end of wars, victories, the beginning of new eras or the creation of (trans)national states.1 These events usually all have at least one particular function in common: they mark the end of a collectively perceived traumatic experience and signal that âweâ have moved on. In this way, success stories are discursively constructed and promoted in the public sphere, which usually serve to unify citizens and create hegemonic narratives of national identity which find their way into the media, schoolbooks, and so forth.2 For example, in Chile
[A] new Museum of Memory and Human Rights will open ⊠next December [2009; the authors] to document the violations committed during the period of military rule, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. The Museum will be located in a 5,000-square-meter building in Santiago. On June 16, President Michelle Bachelet held a ceremony to thank the donors of the material to be exhibited. âNo one can deny, ignore, or minimize the tragedy of the violations of human rights in Chile. We are recovering our memory with the help of multiple vestiges and narrations, for everyone to read the past and reflect about the need of improving our coexistence,â said Bachelet.3
These events also serve to draw a line under agonistic struggles and conflicting interpretations. It seems as if only ONE past would exist, and ONE narrative which interprets it; or as quoted above, an officially acknowledged range of narratives (amongst many others which remain in the dark) are open to reflection. No further debates are deemed to be necessary.
This attitude also explains why radical challenges of hegemonic narratives sometimes entail massive debates and lead to huge conflicts in societies which have experienced traumatic events in their more recent past. One salient example was the two Wehrmacht exhibitions in Austria and Germany, 1995 and 2001, which both suddenly destroyed the myth of the âinnocent Wehrmachtâ during Word War II (see Heer, Manoschek, Pollak, & Wodak 2008). The exhibitions provided ample evidence that the German Wehrmacht had been actively part of the deportation and extermination of Jews, Roma and homosexuals during National Socialism, not only as had been commonly stated, the âevil men around Hitler or Hitler himselfâ (ibid.). As almost every family in Austria and Germany had been involved in the Wehrmacht (which had been a conscription army), uncles, brothers, fathers and grand fathers were suddenly asked by the younger generation what they had done during the war. After decades of silence, the traumatic pasts crept into the open, and war crimes could not be denied or tabooed any longer.
The many pasts, we claim, can never be entirely silenced; specific aspects, forgotten details, new information and new insights due to re/discovered information and historical sources trigger new debates. Moreover, current socio-political developments are influenced by the many pasts and frequently are only to be understood in their entirety if the range of narratives is taken into account â something Reinhart Koselleck has so rightly pointed to in his seminal book âVergangene Zukunftâ [Futures Past]: present and future are always influenced by the immediate past; indeed there is no present or future without taking the past into consideration (Koselleck 1972, 1984).4
Recently the elections for the European Parliament in June 2009 illustrated this claim well: the shift to the far right across almost all EU member states can be explained only very partially through global social and economic developments. The specificities have to be related to the histories and collective experiences in each member state. Thus, the seeming lack of collective memory when it comes to even recent authoritarian and illiberal political pasts demonstrates a continuing need for historic contextualisation of discourse.
In Britain, for example, the British National Party (BNP) attracted 943,598 votes (6.2% of the total), and achieved a sufficient percentage in two constituencies to elect two people as MEPs â the party leader and convicted Holocaust denier Nick Griffin for North West England (132,094; 8.0%), and veteran fascist and ex-member of the National Socialist Movement Andrew Brons for Yorkshire and the Humber (120,139; 9.8%). The election of Brons, in particular, indexes an unbroken ideological continuity between the contemporary BNP and open Nazism and Hitler-worship in the 1960s.
In Austria, on the other hand, the extreme right-wing populist party, FPĂ (the Austrian Freedom Party), attracted 12.7% and thus doubled their votes and MEPs (currently standing at two, one of them being Andreas Mölzer, the editor of the extreme right-wing newspaper Zur Zeit); the BZĂ (the second extreme right wing party in Austria) achieved 4.6% and thus failed the 5% benchmark.5 The results from the last national election, in 2006, indicate that the FPĂ in combination with the BZĂ won almost 30% of the votes in some districts of Vienna due to their Islamophobic and antisemitic propaganda (Horaczek & Reiterer, 2009), drawing on century-old exclusionary, prejudicial sentiments which are easily recovered from collective memory and instrumentalised for political ends. In Hungary, the openly antisemitic and anti-Roma party Jobbik, which employs a paramilitary organisation dressed in black with emblems resembling the Nazi Swastika, attracted 14.77%; their salient slogan is âHungary Firstâ, echoing slogans like âGermany Firstâ [âDeutschland Zuerstâ] or âAustria Firstâ [âĂsterreich Zuerstâ], all of which connote beliefs and ideologies about who is to be considered as a âreal Austrian, German or Hungarianâ, and who is not, based on traditional, latent and sometimes manifest, nativist and racist views (see Richardson & Wodak, this volume).
There are, of course, many other aspects which we have to neglect due to space restrictions. However, this special issue presents some salient examples of how the specific past impinges on the present and on future visions in a huge range of societies, in Europe and beyond.
Our collection opens with one of the more theoretically and methodologically challenging articles of the issue. Here, Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley examine the concept of trauma, arguing that its current treatment in memory studies is too expansive, loose and indiscriminate. In particular they take issue with an assumption, prevalent in memory studies, that there is a connection between individual victimsâ experiences, and understanding, of terrifying and traumatic events and âhow collectively tragic events are represented (or not) in communications media or in acts of public remembranceâ. Contrary to such expansive accounts, they argue âthe characteristic symptom of trauma [âŠ] remains the individual subjectâs inability to remember the past in a relatively coherent mannerâ (our emphasis). How, then, can such events be made âstory-ableâ? And is the concept âtraumaâ of any analytic use when considering the collective suffering of a nation, a society, a religious or ethnic community? They offer a detailed examination of two interviewees recalling an experience involving painful memories â one where such memories have become narratable and one where they have not â and conclude by arguing that discourse analysts need to attend to both the sayable and the not-said in any assessment of âthe extent to which painful memories have become integrated into successfully told storiesâ.
The said and the unsaid are clearly also issues for mediated discourse on past injustices. With this in mind, Richardson and Wodak trace the histories of nativist jobs discourse in the UK and Austria in order to contextualise and more fully elucidate its use in contemporary political debates. Even the recent past may not be merely sanitised in political discourse but ignored completely, in a rhetorical manoeuvre that renders the already ambivalent meanings of nativist jobs discourse less knowable. Richardson and Wodakâs historical deconstruction of loaded terms and slogans via the Discourse-Historical Approach combined with semantic history, illustrates that in both investigated countries nativist job rhetoric stems from antisemitic, nationalistic and fascist ideologies from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though implemented in significantly different ways due to Colonialism, on the one hand, and National Socialism, on the other. They suggest that, in spite of the salient historical differences, nativist ideologies across the EU and Europe appear to be converging.
Antisemitism is also examined in David Kaposiâs article, as constructed in Gershom Scholemâs letter to Hannah Arendt, written in the wake of the Eichmann trial. Kaposi first critically discusses the rather careless ways that this most famous exchange of letters has been approached and examined in scholarly literature: as a virtual family quarrel. This depiction, he argues, rests on dangerous and dubious misconceptions of Scholemâs letter which, in contrast, he characterises as âa piece of seriously problematic moral and political literatureâ. Through a close analysis, unsparing in its detail and erudition, Kaposi demonstrates that Scholem portrays Arendt as a Jewish antisemite: a person who is Jewish but by her acts has, in effect, forsaken this position. Consequently, he argues, âAny vaguely liberal person must address rather than evade the ultimate ground upon which Scholemâs accusation and genealogy was based: once a Jew, always and exclusively a Jewâ. The closing sections of his article discuss the wider political implications of the letter and the resulting relationships implicitly constructed between Judaism, the Jewish people and liberalism.
The second half of the issue examines what we could broadly label collective memory, and the (sometimes conflicting) demands for justice and reconciliation that can follow widespread social injustices and human rights abuse. The first of these articles, written by Mariana Achugar, analyses the Uruguayan militaryâs discursive construction of the historic period of military dictatorship, and the ways that these attempt to explain and justify its progressive wresting of power from the democratically elected government. Her critical discourse analysis concentrates on lexico-grammatical choices (focusing on transitivity and evaluation of social actors) in six communiquĂ©s produced between 1973 and 1978 by the authorised voice of the military, read in conjunction with two âorganic laws of the military that stipulate its purpose for beingâ. Clearly the militaryâs steady encroachment into political and state apparatuses are deviant actions. And so to justify these actions â and also its new political identity â Achugar shows how the military constructed a narrative that rationalised âtheir new role as sole political actors in charge of the nation and their disregard for the Constitution and the countryâs laws in the name of liberty and democracyâ (our emphasis). That is, they position themselves as a lawful state apparatus responding to an unlawful social context that is extreme and chaotic â an explanation that âenables them to ignore the contradictions between their actions and the legitimate role and conduct mandated by democratic normsâ.
The issue closes with two articles on South Africaâs Truth and Reconciliation Commission, arguably the most well-known Government-initiated reconciliation process. In the first, Annelies Verdoolaege examines the hearings of the Human Rights Violations Committee, focusing in particular on the discursive construction of personal and national reconciliation, and the roles that they are assumed to play in âa peaceful and unified future for South Africaâ. She discusses how this âreconciliation discourseâ: was worked up collectively between commissioners and victims; that it was frequently framed and prefigured by questions and testimony; that the TRC commissioners guided the victimsâ testimony and âsometimes urged the victims to speak out in favour of reconciliationâ; and that the terms reconciliation and forgiveness were repeated and emphasised by commissioners as âthe only way to build a new South African societyâ. These interpersonal aspects of the testimonies not only meant that victims found it difficult to ask for vengeance or retaliation, but also that the issue of compensation or redress was also sidelined. Nevertheless, Verdoolaege concludes by arguing that the TRC had a positive and a far-reaching influence on South African society, contributing to the process of nation building through helping establish a vocabulary of peace, giving a voice to previously silenced victims of apart-heid, and through demonstrating a community desire to live together peacefully.
Aletta Norval would perhaps agree with these conclusions, up to a point. Taking the political demands of South African victim support group Khulumani as her focus, her article takes up Verdoolaegeâs acknowledgement that the TRC started âwhat needs to be an ongoing process on many levels and in many areas of lifeâ. While not wanting to underplay the lasting contributions of the TRC â including âthe fostering of democratic subjectivity [âŠ] a provocation to open and democratic debate [âŠ] as well as reflection on the character of justice, truth and the role of memoryâ â Norval focuses our attention back on the unfinished business of the TRC and the continuing political struggle for justice. Approaching the relation between reconciliation and redress (as articulated in the discourse of the Khulumani Support Group) from a post-structuralist point of view, Norval discusses certain âfailures of the South African government to live up to their promises and commitments on reparation for victims of gross human rights abuses under apartheidâ. In acknowledging these failures, the Khulumani Support Group stress that âReconciliation does have a priceâ; that in order for all communities to âreceive equal treatment and equal access to opportunities [âŠ] a more just economic systemâ is required, amongst other things, not only an opportunity for previously silenced individuals to have their voice heard â as necessary as this unquestionably was.
Notes
References
Achugar, M. (2008). What we remember: The construction of memory in military discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Anthonissen, C., & Blommaert, J. (2006). Discours...