Aversion and Erasure

The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust

Carolyn J. Dean

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501707490
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

In Aversion and Erasure, Carolyn J. Dean offers a bold account of how the Holocaust's status as humanity's most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a "surfeit of Jewish memory" is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. Dean explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and Western Europe have become central to identity, with victims competing for recognition by displaying their collective wounds.She argues that this notion has never been examined systematically even though it now possesses the force of self-evidence. It developed in nascent form after World War II, when the near-annihilation of European Jewry began to transform patriotic mourning into a slogan of "Never Again": as the Holocaust demonstrated, all people might become victims because of their ethnicity, race, gender, or sexuality—because of who they are.The recent concept that suffering is central to identity and that Jewish suffering under Nazism is iconic of modern evil has dominated public discourse since the 1980s.Dean argues that we believe that the rational contestation of grievances in democratic societies is being replaced by the proclamation of injury and the desire to be a victim. Such dramatic and yet culturally powerful assertions, however, cast suspicion on victims and define their credibility in new ways that require analysis. Dean's latest book summons anyone concerned with human rights to recognize the impact of cultural ideals of "deserving" and "undeserving" victims on those who have suffered.

1

THE SURFEIT OF JEWISH MEMORY

Anti-Semitism creates a ‘Semitism’ that is radical, full of hubris, and often myopic and intolerant.

SERGIO ROMANO (1997)

Some sixty years after the Holocaust there now exists a voluminous testimonial literature, an array of theological, autobiographical, and philosophical debates, and theoretical discussions of “postmemory.” Over the last few decades, and particularly since the 1990s, as I have already argued, those discussions have increasingly focused not on how and what we remember but on accusations of an alleged “surplus of talk”—companion to the “surfeit of memory”—that the philosopher Berel Lang argues now characterizes attitudes toward Holocaust representation.1 At its best this discourse thoughtfully asks how Jews and others can most substantively engage the past in the context of ‘too much’ memory; at its worst, it accuses Jewish organizations of fostering a “Holocaust industry” to exploit the memory of Jewish victimization.2 But the so-called surfeit of Jewish memory is now articulated primarily as an argument about how Jewish memory exemplifies a pathological cultural attachment to having been or being a victim. It assesses the so-called surfeit in terms of the discrepancy between fantasmic concepts of ‘too much’ and the right amount of identification with victims, an apparently rational calculus that has gone awry. Critics thus argue that Jewish memory voids the substance of history and the value of empathy in pursuit of identification with Holocaust victims that narcissistically appropriates victims’ suffering and focuses on Jews’ victimization at the expense of others.

This argument may at first appear peculiar, since concern over the legacy of anti-Semitism should not by definition preclude concern about the persecution of others. Moreover, it is deeply at odds with the initial reception of Holocaust victims and their experiences. As is now well documented, many Jewish victims of genocide feared being doubted, and their experiences were often not acknowledged. Some, as Aharon Appelfeld reminds us, wanted desperately to speak and still others to erase all memory of painful pasts.3 But now, the dubious sacralization of survivors and the iconic status of the Holocaust have created a consensus about the ostensibly narcissistic appropriation of Jewish suffering, its consequences and impact.4 These concerns, while manifest all over Europe, are most debated rather than simply asserted in the United States and France, and are particularly powerful in the United States as a matter of intra-Jewish debate. Influential scholars and journalists who otherwise hold a variety of political views, including Peter Novick, Esther Benbassa, Michael André Bernstein, Alain Finkielkraut, Gabriel Schoenfeld, and Zygmunt Bauman, have all recently interpreted Jewish memory of the Holocaust by reference to a vast commentary in the United States and later in France on “victimology,” “victimhood,” and “victim culture” that first developed in the United States and Europe during the 1940s and ’50s.5

“Victimology” was coined originally in 1947, when the Romanian-born Israeli lawyer Benjamin Mendelsohn delivered a paper to the Psychiatric Society of Bucharest in which he argued for the creation of a new field, “victimology.” It is perhaps not a coincidence that it was a Jewish refugee from Romanian anti-Semitism who, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, sought to conceive the victim of criminal acts as a complicated social and psychological figure with specific propensities and sufferings not always acknowledged. Indeed, he was the first scholar to study victims as complex cultural constructions at a time when scholarship focused only on the criminals, by whose acts victims were created. In Mendelsohn’s earliest work he stressed the importance of the unconscious desire to be a victim and referenced the potential complicity of rape and sexual abuse victims in their own victimization. But he also referred to the role “insufficient national, religious, economic cohesion” might play in the creation of collective victims—a reference perhaps to the role he believed the absence of a strong Jewish state played in the genocide of European Jewry.6

Most research in the field of victimology until the mid-1970s emphasized how victims contributed to crimes perpetrated against them, and still focused largely on women and rape.7 It was not until then that victimologists’ focus moved from “victims’ complicity in the crimes they suffered to the material and psychological needs of victims.”8 And yet, as Alyson M. Cole argues, new therapeutic discourses that developed encouraged victims to take responsibility for and pride in themselves, and were often critical of those victims who made their pain public by blaming others for their plight. In so doing, they articulated another version of victim-blaming.9

On another level, in the 1980s, identity politics in the United States—group-based identities asserted by a wide variety of groups including Blacks and women—shared this insistence on pride but also sought recognition for past wounds. This sought-for recognition coincided with the so-called memory boom, including not only the belated recognition of the Holocaust, but also many colonial powers’ recognition of past crimes and national soul-searching in the West about its own past. In France, the same attention to memory and past crimes refers more specifically to criticism of the belated and presumably excessive recognition of the Vichy government’s anti-Semitism and was also an attack on American multiculturalism, whose pluralism many critics feared threatened the abstract French citizen and thus French republicanism at a time when women, gays and lesbians, and eventually French Muslims were demanding rights not as individuals but on the basis of their membership in groups which had been structurally devalued.

In short, though critics use victimology and victim culture promiscuously and without precise references, the attacks on so-called victim culture and the surfeit of memory developed initially as a critique of identity politics and multiculturalism and appear indebted to earlier motifs of victim-blaming.10 Critics like the Bulgarian-born French literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov draw on three decades of rhetoric that insists that victimization now confers social recognition, and they argue that the desire to have been a victim is now so pervasive that the enlightened imperative to care for others, even if they do not belong to our own group, has collapsed.11 Others, like the conservative critic Gabriel Schoenfeld, asked why the “Holocaust exert[s] such great fascination these days outside the Jewish community. And why are its images being abused by those who purport to be custodians of its memory?” In his view, the answer to both questions undoubtedly lies at least in part in the “rising culture of victimhood, visible in our society at large . . . As the ultimate in victimization, the Holocaust is simply assuming pride of place.”12 In 2006 the editor and historian Pierre Nora referred to the belated French memory of the Vichy period and the ostensible transformation of victims’ suffering into the violence of their demands for recognition: “I have elsewhere evoked a ‘tyranny of memory’,” he said, but “it would be necessary today to speak of its terrorism. So much so that we are less sensitive to the suffering that it expresses than to the violence that wants to make itself heard.”13

When such prominent intellectuals identify the surfeit of Jewish memory of genocide as the most visible symptom of new rhetorical constructions of victimhood, they do not only seek an antidote to perceptions of exaggerated claims, even though they wish to preserve the historical record from distortion. They are not obviously fearful of the vengeful intentions victims presumably harbor—the scenario imagined by the “counterrevolutionary” who knows what moral damage he has wrought and hopes to stave off the consequences.14 Instead, for example, in Alvin Rosenfeld’s view, the reduction of Holocaust memory to a “meaningless abstraction, ‘man’s inhumanity to man,’ ” is encouraged “within those segments of American culture intent on developing a politics of identity based on victim status and the grievances that come with it.”15 The Holocaust becomes a universal symbol of human evil devoid of specific historical content, and therefore one more particularly exemplary incident in the long history of human malfeasance. For Dagmar Barnouw, Holocaust remembrance has suffocated under the “seemingly irresistible appeal of memory stories of victimization, the more ‘incredible’ the better.”16 And Efraim Sicher asserts that post-Holocaust generation Jews “internalize the status of victim . . . [to] create an alternate Jewishness out of a legacy of suffering,” so that trauma founds identity and substitutes for a history we have not lived.17 Or more radically, this narcissism substitutes the psychological for the social dimensions of oppression so completely that only the subject’s psychic wounds guarantee his existence as such.

Because according to these critics everyone wants to or believes himself to be a victim, the problem is not the political task of reconciliation with and compensation for those whose victimization we acknowledge. The task set by most writers who allege the existence of a universal quest for victimhood is not to find cultural criteria to distinguish good from bad victims, such as those who behaved bravely or those whom we judge to be more ‘innocent’ than others. It is instead to separate ‘real’ victims from others who proclaim to have been injured, identify vicariously with the injured, or become overly and thus pathologically so attached to their wounds that they unwittingly obscure their own social oppression or justify that of others.

Such critics’ task is nothing less than to refine and clarify the putatively privileged category of victim, a task that exceeds the merely empirical verification that someone has suffered or not. Rather, that task requires that we determine what constitutes reliable memory of suffering at a historical moment when by the critics’ own account the appellation ‘victim’ has become promiscuous. Charges about attachment to victim status emerge with particular intensity when Jewish sufferers, their heirs, and often Jews more generally transform violated innocence into righteous rhetoric and demands for recognition for suffering that they often did not witness. They also emerge when those whose histories of persecution have barely been remembered make similar claims for restitution, as if all claims to injury were intrinsically insatiable and grandiloquent demands.

Identity Theft

Whatever the claims of various victim groups, the very act of making claims now raises questions about the extent to which such demands participate in the allegedly pervasive condition of wanting to have been or to be a victim. The notion that there are many people who wish to be victims both testifies to the pervasiveness of victimhood as a new and crucial category of being and seeks to address the conundrum of victims who become ‘too’ attached to their wounds. The narcissism and displacement that characterize a presumed relation to Jewish suffering has been examined extensively in the now voluminous literature on the “second generation”—the children of Holocaust survivors—some of which has expressed negative or ambivalent views about the impact of psychiatry in defining the nature of victims’ wounds.18 Undoubtedly for some critics, the unwillingness to engage medical or psychoanalytic literature on trauma is partly a repudiation of the “psychotraumas” or pathologies attached to survivors. For the historian Ido de Haan, the reduction of Jewish persecution to a “psychotrauma” set up Jewish survivors as “original victim[s] against which [sic] all other forms of victimization would be measured. But it also implied that various categories of victims were grouped under the common denominator of a psychotrauma, even if the events that caused these traumata differed dramatically.”19 Recourse to psychiatry originated in survivors having to prove themselves mentally afflicted by their experience in order to quality for German restitution after 1953, when West German indemnification laws allowed them to seek damages related to Nazi persecution—hence the invention of “survivor syndrome,” among other medically defined psychological conditions affecting former camp inmates.20

However sensitive this second generation of Jews was to the plight of their parents, or perhaps because they were, some of their work self-consciously cannot seem to escape what Ruth Franklin has termed “identity theft”:21 from the symbolically charged but admittedly boundary-blurring definition of the second generation as “children of the Holocaust,” to Eva Hoffman’s fear that in adult children of survivors “awe” of the Holocaust “may be . . . an element of that strange envy we felt towards our survivor parents. Authenticity of experience, in our period, is often conflated with catastrophe, with those traumatic histories with which we are so eager to identify.”22 Hoffman goes so far as to conclude that all the preoccupation with the “memory of the Holocaust” may have something to do with this generation’s “feeling of being, in relation to this history, subsidiary; secondary.”23

Critics of ‘victim culture’ tend problematically not to attend to post-traumatic symptoms of the sort articulated by de Haan and Hoffman, but conceive them instead as part of the presumably excessive affect attached to victims that voids historical understanding. In so doing, they do not reject the reality of injury itself but treat traumatic symptoms and their pot...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Victims, Suffering, Identity
• 1. The Surfeit of Jewish Memory
• 2. French Discourses on Exorbitant Jewish Memory
• 3. Minimalism and Victim Testimony
• 4. Erasures
• Epilogue