Recently, debates about the Holocaust and its legacies have occupied the German public sphere. But the focus on uniqueness obscures other important issues.
Ein Gastbeitrag von Michael Rothberg
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Over the lastyear and a half, a series of prominent debates about the Holocaust and itslegacies have occupied the German public sphere. Starting with the controversyover Achille Mbembe's invitation to the Ruhrtrienalle, continuing withresponses to the German translation of my 2009 book Multidirectional Memory, and culminating—for the moment—in the impassionedresponses to Dirk Moses's essay The GermanCatechism, thesedebates have resembled the Historikerstreit of 1986 in some respects. Like thatfamous dispute, the current debates also concern the question of the Holocaust'suniqueness as well as its place in Germany's public culture. Yet there are alsosignificant differences. While the Historikerstreit—a debate among male Germanintellectuals who had lived through the war—concerned the comparability of theHolocaust and Stalinist terror, today's debates take place among a more diverseand international set of interlocutors and concern especially the relation ofthe Holocaust to non-European and colonial history.
The questionsbeing raised today are essential ones, but my impression is that—especially inthe German Feuilletons—some of the most consequential issues have gone missingfrom these heated and often acrimonious exchanges. Those who oppose thecomparative approach to National Socialism and the Holocaust—which isundertaken in very different ways by scholars such as Mbembe, Moses, ManuelaBauche, Susan Neiman, Jürgen Zimmerer, and myself, and carried on as well atthe grassroots level by various activists of color in Germany—keep reiteratingthe same points again and again: the Holocaust was unique in world history andit cannot be described as a colonial crime. These points were repeatedfrequently by journalists in essays about my book and have reappeared in recentweeks in the responses to Moses's essay by such prominent historians as GötzAly, Dan Diner, and Saul Friedländer. Of course, these are crucial issues forcolonial historians and historians in Holocaust and genocides studies todebate. But the obsessive focus on uniqueness obscures other important issuesthat many of us have been highlighting. While the critics endlessly return tothe question of the Holocaust's uniqueness, I believe we need to re-center thedebate so that issues of cultural memory, historical responsibility, andnational identity come to the fore.
My book Multidirectional Memory does not argue that the history of the Holocaust canonly be understood through a colonial lens. It does, however, start from asurprising historical fact: since the end of World War II, a diverse scholarlyand cultural tradition has discussed and remembered the genocide of Jews inrelation to colonial violence and anti-Black racism. This tradition encompassesboth prominent European Jewish intellectuals who lived through the Nazi periodsuch as Hannah Arendt and André Schwarz-Bart and influential Black thinkerssuch as Aimé Césaire, FrantzFanon, and W.E.B. Du Bois. (It’s no small irony that the Nazis themselves werealso interested in pursuing these links, as the legal scholar James Q. Whitmanhas shown.)
In approachingthis tradition—which I named a tradition of "multidirectional memory"—my concern was not to establish the historicalorigins of the Holocaust. My question was instead: what can this traditionteach us about the workings of memory and the demands of historicalresponsibility? I drew three conclusions from consideration of thismultidirectional tradition—a tradition that has been particularly strong in theFrancophone sphere, but has prominent exponents in Anglophone circles as well.
First, publicmemory does not follow the logic of the zero-sum game. Specifically, the act ofbringing the Holocaust into relation with memories of colonialism and slaverydoes not "relativize" or minimizethe Shoah or vice versa; both can coexist in the same public space. Even more:I show that memories of the Holocaust and memories of colonial and racialviolence feed into each other; each memory tradition has taken on the form itdoes because of these interactions. This dynamic and dialogic process ofco-emergence is what I call "multidirectionality."
Second,instead of assuming—or constantly reasserting—the uniqueness of onecommemorative culture over against another, scholars should be open tounexpected resonances and exchanges, even between unlikely pairs of histories.This is a methodological point: we need to write more entangled histories ofmemory instead of presuming their separateness, as Moses also insists. Bybracketing what I thought I knew about the history of Holocaust memory I wasable to make discoveries that I could not have foreseen: for instance, that theperiod of the Algerian War of Independence in France saw Holocaust memoryemerging in direct contact with a late colonial war that involved mass tortureand concentration camps.