Memory and Totalitarianism

Luisa Passerini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351505987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Understanding Europe's past became an urgent matter with the events of August 1991 in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union. The invasion of Moscow's streets by Russian people rejecting an attempted coup d'etat was the culmination of a process that had been initiated years before and raised crucial questions: To what extent can these events be considered the end of an era stretching from World War I to the 1980s, when Europe experienced many forms of dictatorship? To what extent can the various forms of dictatorship Europe experienced in the twentieth century be grouped together? Can any sort of affinity be established between them?

The new introduction to the paperback edition of this volume in the Memory and Narrative series, Leydesdorff and Crownshaw underline the fundamental importance of the struggle for memory and its meaning. Memory and Totalitarianism explores the remembered experiences of individuals living under different totalitarian regimes, and examines the construction of memory in the aftermath of those regimes' collapse. It attempts to situate the findings of oral history in the context of contemporary memory. It wrestles with the most painful memories that Europeans have of this century at the end of the Cold War. These memories compare with oral history's research into such experiences as racist attitudes against blacks in the South, or the cultural and psychological effects of apartheid in South Africa, or the Aborigines' claim to their own history and to a new idea of history in Australia.

Totalitarianisms are products of the twentieth century that go far beyond earlier manifestations of absolutism and autocracy in their effort to completely control political, social, and intellectual life. They were made possible by modern industrialism and technology. Therefore the theme of the book expands to include many other experiences that relate to totalitarian mentalities.

1
Introduction

LUISA PASSERINI

Ich bin der Engel der Verzweiflung. Mit meinen Händen teile ich den Rausch aus, die Betäubung, das Vergessen . . . Meine Rede ist das Schweigen, mein Gesang der Schrei.

(Heiner Müller, Der Auftrag; words used for the composition Frau/Stimme, by Wolfgang Rihm)¹

I am the angel of despair. With my hands, I give you the narcotic, the anaesthetic, the oblivion . . . My discourse is silence; my song a scream.

In the play Memorial,² written by Else Marie Laukvik and directed for the Odin Teatret by Eugenio Barba, two stories of people who survived the concentration camps are told. The first tells of young Moshe, who, almost dying of cold, is standing in the snow in Mauthausen with other naked prisoners, answering an interminable roll-call. But a memory comes to him, a memory of his rabbi and of a song he used to sing. That memory saves Moshe, who dances the old song until he can break the ice that imprisons his feet, and defeat cold and death. The second story is one of little Stella, witnessing the Nazis’ assassination of her relatives and friends in her village in Galicia. She hides in a hole in the ground, where she remains for eight months. In that hole, among rats, her memory freezes in a desire for vengeance; but when liberation comes and she sees a public execution of Nazi officers, that vengeance appears incapable of real memory: vengeance does not reach back into the past, it remains chained to the uncontrolled screams of the excited crowd. Brought up short, Stella draws back, and in doing so perceives that only by distancing herself from the present can she retrace her true memory and her true self.

The two stories are taken from Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust by Yaffa Eliach, and in the play they are accompanied by beautiful Yiddish folk-songs. They remind us of two triumphs of memory: triumph over torture and over a ‘wrong’ type of memory, a frozen and rancorous one, in favour of life and innovation. But the play does not finish with this happy ending. It continues with a second part, where the main actress mechanically repeats pieces of memory—phrases, words, all jumbled up in an incoherent stammering—in which one can only distinguish some sense if one already knows the complete story: dreadful details of torture are mixed up with happy associations of times long gone by. And in the final ending, the two protagonists present the photographs of Primo Levi and Jean Améry (Hans Mayer),³ who both committed suicide many years after the concentration camps had ceased to exist. Their images challenge us to have a less optimistic view of memory, enigmatically posing the question of our time and its relation to the recent past of Europe.

What are some possible meanings of the enigma posed by the play? A first conclusion is that today it is not sufficient to survive physically. A second is that not even sheer remembering is quite up to the tasks of the present. What is required is indeed not a simple and spontaneous memory, not the one that stems from a need for vengeance, for instance, but a memory of a memory, a memory that is possible because it evokes another memory. We can remember only thanks to the fact that somebody has remembered before us, that other people in the past have challenged death and terror on the basis of their memory. Remembering has to be conceived as a highly inter-subjective relationship.⁴

In the first part of the play, memory struggles with a totalitarianism that wants to cancel a whole people and their culture from the face of the earth; in this corps à corps it finds strength in its own lability: it associates the great and the small, the important aspects and the details, lightly, asystematically, simply out of love for pleasure and life. In its very essence, memory repeats and replays, reproducing the stories of ancestors and old masters, their songs, their traditions. But the painful faces of Jean Améry and Primo Levi remind us of the destiny of memory in our contemporary world; their images break up the thread of the story as well as the thread of memory. Like the laughter of the crowd watching the execution of the war criminals—a crowd that has reverted to barbarity because it is not capable of fully remembering the past—the mere repetition of what is remembered by, or said to, those who do not really wish to remember, itself also sounds like a broken and stammering gramophone: one word here and one there, a mixture of associations that have lost their original meaning, a language of folly and of non-communication. There is nothing left to transmit if nobody is there to receive the message.

The richness of the original stories about Moshe and Stella is lost in a disorder which can be compared to the excess of daily messages that we receive today, whereby not silence but shouting and loud noise circumscribe and confuse the human word. In the play, the final image is that of a stranger singing and crying under a tree, and this image expresses our condition: a memory that is a stranger to the world, which will not be able to become a house for human beings without accepting that stranger and his estrangement. Those who committed suicide left, by their gesture, a message for us: now it is our turn to remember and sing again the old song of the rabbi, but sing it in a way that is up to date with our time, yet contrasts with this time’s tendency to forget. After all, memory is the tool we have in order to give meaning to our lives, if we understand it in the sense of an inter-subjective (or inter-human) word that connects different generations, times, and places.

This Yearbook, with which we start a series of annual books about memory and life experiences, tries to give some responses to the questions posed by the Odin Teatret in Memoria. It is not merely chance that led us to start this new publication with the theme ‘Memory and Totalitarianism’. Europe’s past has been brought up to date, and the question of understanding it has been made more urgent by the events of August 1991 in Moscow and in what used to be called the Soviet Union. The invasion of the streets by Russian people rejecting the coup d’état was the culmination of a process that had been initiated years before; once again it raises crucial questions in a way that cannot be eluded: To what extent can these events be considered the end of an era stretching from the First World War to the 1980s, when Europe experienced many forms of dictatorship? To what extent can these forms be grouped together? Can any sort of affinity be established beween them?

We are aware that the very title of this Yearbook runs the risk of equating all sorts of regimes under the label of totalitarianism. Such a ‘reductionist’ approach might be coupled with another possible impoverishment if we believed that the problem of memory could be reduced to a question of oral history or a collection of oral memories from living people. But the issue of memory today is such a massive one, involving much more than orality and individuals, that it would be absurd to think that we can do more than give our specific contribution to a much larger problem. What we shall try to do, therefore is to situate the findings of oral history in the context of contemporary memory, making some references to other fields, like the social sciences, but also to literature, music, the theatre, and the local toponymy. Thus, we can reasonably expect to avoid the second reduction we have mentioned; as for the first one, however, we ourselves cannot easily be reassured.

Let us put our stand in context. We speak from a place—Europe—which likes to portray itself as a laboratory for democracy, where the ability to speak (l’aptitude à la parole) appears to be the essential force of opposition. To be a democrat means to consider that the main political task is to acknowledge that every person has the right and should have the opportunity to speak and to engage in a real dialogue. We know all too well that our present means of expression very rarely serves the purposes of a real democracy, ‘yet to be created’, while ours is ‘chronically suffocated’,⁵ and that we lack a real ‘public word’, a real possibility of the expression of free opinion in the public sphere. Therefore we speak from a contradiction, and yet this is our only strength: we are under no illusion that we hold the truth; we know that democracy’s one truth lies in its rules, intended to let everyone express his/her truth. This is the European legacy, the main contribution that this part of the world has made to the world at large, although it must be added that until now democracy has been a very incomplete and imperfect legacy. On a historical level, there is much that would deserve further study in order to clarify the pluralistic nature of democracy in the European heritage. Suffice it to think of the multiple traditions of resistance to Fascism and Nazism: the roots of antitotalitarianism range from Communism to Liberalism in this case, and some of the most interesting areas for us today are represented by those minority groups that proposed hybrids like Liberal-Socialism, while trying to amalgamate the two contradictory ideals of justice and freedom.

On a theoretical level, we could say that, on the one hand, the concept of democracy emerging in Europe in the last two decades stresses formalism as an essential feature: ‘democracy, as counterposed to all forms of autocratic government, is characterized by sets of rules that establish who is authorized to take collective decisions and by which procedures’. On the other hand, increasing attention is being given to the actual situations that allow the rules to be enacted: ‘those who are called to decide, or to elect those who will decide, must be confronted with real alternatives, and able to choose between them’.⁶ In practice, the preconditions for the exercise of democracy include full respect for ethnic and gender differences. Contributions from movements based on such differences indicate that democracy must be pluralistic and must include various forms, such as the combination of direct and representative democracies; this is the only way to revive participation by people in democratic institutions.⁷ A major problem in theoretical and political terms would be for a ‘left’—if such a word were to take up some new meanings, given the collapse of the old ones—to reformulate the concept of democracy. The task would involve distinguishing the historical form it took through the Anglo-American heritage, and therefore its connection with imperialism, from its potential strength in terms of rights, focusing on the needs of the majority of people, until now excluded from the actual exercise of democratic rights.

The main task for the immediate future is to translate the principles of formal democracy into something meaningful for all the people of the south and east of the world (if we can still adopt the old idea of Europe, a western area closely linked with the United States, as a geographical point of reference). If we confront our contradictory situation with that of the regimes which are generically labelled as totalitarian, we find that it differentiates itself from them, because they are obliged to possess a truth, whether it is placed in the laws of history, as in Marxism-Leninism, or in biology and race, as in Hitlerism, or the State, as in Fascism.⁸ It thus becomes clear that, in our context, the use of the word ‘totalitarianism’ refers in the first place to the speaking or writing subject, i.e. ourselves. It is a subjective point of departure, which we assume will change during our research. We recognize that the dichotomy of despotism and free society has been essential to the self-awareness of Western societies, but at the same time we are aware of the elements of ideology in this dichotomy, implicit in the dialectics of enlightenment that originated it, involving at the same time both elements of domination and also of liberation.

It should be clear that the use of ‘totalitarianism’ on our part implies only a partial acceptance of its traditional implications. One of the most important ones is its link with the concept of ‘masses’, as containers that absolute powers fill with whatever contents they decide. It is a central assumption of most oral history that people always have something to say on what is proposed to or even imposed on them, or at least that potentially every individual has an understanding and an interpretation of his/her history as well as of History. From this perspective, we are all in some way the ‘masses’, in as far as we have all been subjected to the effects of uniformizing modernity, and yet, in certain respects, we all believe ourselves to be the subjects of our own lives, capable of counteracting those levelling influences. At the same time, we might see a powerful potential for equality in these forces, so long as we do not forget that any real equality must be based on the recognition and respect of differences.

As oral historians we use the term ‘totalitarianism’ in a partial and critical sense, but above all in order to remember that there have been similarities of oppression among systems of thought and power that were in many ways very different. In addition to this, there were even similarities and connections in the forms of subjectivity that Fascism and anti-Fascism fostered. This difficult theme has hardly been addressed by historians, but has not escaped the acute glance of literature. In the first volume of Peter Weiss’s novel Aesthetics of Resistance, the protagonist, enrolled in the International Brigades fighting in Spain, expresses the roots of those similarities in a lucid self-analysis:

associated with the desire for a fundamental change, for the construction of a new existence, there was the feeling of our affinity with the country where the domination of capital had been overturned and where workers’ power had been constructed. Our indignation and our rebellion would have been hopeless, had this country not represented for us something indestructible . . . Our own despair allowed us to understand that there too outbursts of folly and anger could take place. We approved of the intolerance with which they acted over there. Any wait-and-see policy had to be avoided. A reconciliation, an arrangement were inconceivable. One could talk about aberration, mistakes, panic, but for us any blow, any violence were justified. That country was isolated, as we were isolated and in that isolation we were linked to each other. That link gave us the only possible means for persevering, and it was in such perseverance that the peerless, seducing images of October lived on. No doubt, no hesitation could trouble those images.⁹

One future direction for historians should be the investigation of the nature of those images, their influence and roles, and their changes over time. Oral history could contribute some of the tools necessary to analyse memory for these purposes.

To outline our starting-point more precisely, we must emphasize that w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Antagonistic Memories
• 3 Where Were You on 17 June?
• 4 A German Generation of Reconstruction
• 5 After Glasnost
• 6 The Gulag in Memory
• 7 The Abduction of Imre Nagy and his Group
• 8 Mujeres Libres
• 9 A Shattered Silence
• 10 Don’t Forget