Genocide and the Politics of Memory

Studying Death to Preserve Life

Herbert Hirsch

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807862056
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Ideologie politiche

More than sixty million people have been victims of genocide in the twentieth century alone, including recent casualties in Bosnia and Rwanda. Herbert Hirsch studies repetitions of large-scale human violence in order to ascertain why people in every historical epoch seem so willing to kill each other. He argues that the primal passions unleashed in the cause of genocide are tied to the manipulation of memory for political purposes. According to Hirsch, leaders often invoke or create memories of real or fictitious past injustices to motivate their followers to kill for political gain or other reasons. Generations pass on their particular versions of events, which then become history. If we understand how cultural memory is created, Hirsch says, we may then begin to understand how and why episodes of mass murder occur and will be able to act to prevent them. In order to revise the politics of memory, Hirsch proposes essential reforms in both the modern political state and in systems of education.

TWO

Studying Death

I

Constructing Memory

SURVIVORS AND THEORISTS

Many different ways exist to study a topic such as genocide or a particular genocide such as the Holocaust. Among the possibilities are some of the major tools used to construct the memory of an event, including eyewitness testimony and memoirs; fiction; film; history texts, although, as we have seen above, they are influenced by images of time and paradigm; political science and/or sociology; psychology and psychiatry; philosophy, including religion and ethics; and museums. Many books summarizing some of these techniques and examining different genocides have been written. The best recent works include Chalk and Jonassohn (1990), which also includes a brief review of the literature, Charny (1982), Fein (1979; 1992), Kuper (1982), Lerner (1992), Lifton (1986), Lifton and Markusen (1990), and Staub (1989).

In this section, I examine the construction, explanation, and transmission of memory. Construction will be explored through the explication of two very different accounts of surviving incarceration in a Nazi camp. Explanation will be viewed via a critique of positivist social science and an examination of an alternative form of analysis, that of Robert Jay Lifton. I analyze transmission by deciphering how individuals develop the motivation to kill, how created memories are transmitted into the minds of individual human beings, how they become part of the collective memory of a group, society, culture, or nation, and what influence this has on a person’s behavior.

As I argued in section I, when people write history—when eyewitnesses or survivors write their memoirs and record what they believe they have been able to drag from the depths of their souls or when a social scientist analyzes data and draws conclusions—they are constructing, reconstructing, or trying to explain memory, and at the same time, they are affecting the future. How the past is portrayed influences how we think. Therefore, adopting one or another technique of constructing, explaining, and transmitting memory can have very different implications.

Since, as I have argued previously, personal memory is such an integral part of historical memory, and since eyewitness and survivor memoirs are among the basic building blocks of history, I first examine, in detail, two examples of eyewitness testimony. I then contrast the study of such accounts with the method used in modern, positivistic social science. My basic argument is that social science, based on the model of physics or other positivist assumptions, dehumanizes human memory, while the testimony of witnesses and survivors adds a human dimension to tedious facts and obscure variables. Only this human dimension has the possibility of establishing in the audience an empathetic identification that might lead to a determination to prevent such horrible events from reoccurring.

In short, one way of making the study of death a life-preserving activity is to inspire empathy for the survivor in those who are the inheritors of the memory. I have found that when I teach my course on “The Politics of Genocide,” my students are moved not by definitions and sociological accounts, although these are covered, but by the writings of survivors such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel and by films such as The Warsaw Ghetto and Shoah. The goals of reaching an audience, enhancing public understanding, and stimulating respect for memory may be obstructed by esoteric variables and incomprehensible definitions.

Fortunately, it is not necessary for scholars interested in studying genocide and human rights issues to forsake humanity for method. Social scientific rationality may be usefully contrasted with a focus on human beings. People—perpetrators, victims, and the people of the future, the children, who must understand and feel the torment of the victim and the injustice of oppression and violence—must be the central focus.

My own view is that we learn much more about life from the memory of those who have survived mass death than from any social science text. People who have struggled to survive and bear witness to evil are heroes and prophets. Survivors preserve life by testifying, and perhaps suffering, often speaking, in the manner of the Just Man in the tale recounted by Elie Wiesel, to unhearing ears.

One of the Just Men came to Sodom, determined to save its inhabitants from sin and punishment. Night and day he walked the streets and markets preaching against greed and theft, falsehood and indifference. In the beginning, people listened and smiled ironically. Then they stopped listening: he no longer even amused them. The killers went on killing, the wise kept silent, as if there were no Just Man in their midst.

One day a child, moved by compassion for the unfortunate preacher, approached him with these words: “Poor stranger. You shout, you expend yourself body and soul; don’t you see that it is hopeless?”

“Yes, I see,” answered the Just Man.

“Then why do you go on?”

“I’ll tell you why. In the beginning, I thought I could change man. Today, I know I cannot. If I still shout today, if I still scream, it is to prevent man from ultimately changing me.” (Wiesel 1978, pp. 94—95)

In short, survivors function as prophets, warning a seemingly unconscious humanity of what it does not wish to hear and forcing confrontation with what it may not wish to see. Survivors are those who have “encountered, been exposed to or witnessed death” and have remained alive. Very often they are witnesses to grotesque inhumanity who transmit memory of a qualitatively different experience. Their memory and the history written from it are among our only weapons in “the struggle of memory against forgetting” (Kundera 1981, p. 3), and we must listen to them.

Listen, for example, as Elie Wiesel describes, in Night, the punishment of a young boy suspected of participating in blowing up a power station at one of the industrial plants at Auschwitz. The boy is sentenced to death and is to be hung in front of the entire camp:

The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses.

“Long live liberty!” cried the two adults.

But the child was silent.

“Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked.

At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over.

Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon the sun was setting.

“Bare your heads!” yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping.

“Cover your heads!”

Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive. …

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking:

“Where is God now?”

And I heard a voice within me answer him:

“Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows. …”

That night the soup tasted of corpses. (Wiesel 1960, pp. 61–62)

Listen to Primo Levi relate how he survived and what he thinks his survival means as we examine the construction of memory through the firsthand narrative of a writer who survived incarceration at Auschwitz.

5

Primo Levi

If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1988)

Recording Memory and Teaching Humanity

Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, was a writer of great humanity and sensitivity whose life was devoted to bearing witness to the past and continuing horrors of the twentieth century. By his very existence, Levi forces any observer of the continuing crisis of genocide and mass murder to pause to ask the question: Is it possible for great humanity and sensitive intelligence to survive the recurring memory of inhumanity and massive destruction of human life, both actual and potential, which appear to dominate the twentieth century?¹

Primo Levi’s life and writings cast a harsh but moving and compassionate light on our troubled and troubling epoch. One of the tragic heroes of this century, Levi does not fulfill the traditional image of the hero as a person who gains martyrdom through death (Des Pres 1977, p. 3). Rather, Levi’s life validates the persuasive arguments put forth by Des Pres and Lifton (1987), who note that the successful struggle to survive and transmit the memory of evil is an act of heroism. The survivor preserves life in order to help shape the historical memory—in short, to tell unconscious humanity what it does not wish to hear and to live a life, and in Levi’s case to write words, that might force confrontation with the guilt of indifference and might compel historians to incorporate the survivor’s memory and vision into contemporary human chronology.

LIFE AND WORK

Primo Levi was a writer of immense humanity whose powerful evocation of human character in inhuman settings establishes him as a true teacher, one of the just from whom we are able to learn much about the human spirit. The details of Levi’s life are examined in Howe (1986), Levi (1984), and Hughes (1983).

Born in Turin, Italy, in 1919, Levi was raised in a middle-class assimilated Jewish family. As a young man, he studied to be a chemist, receiving his doctorate in 1941. Following the Fascist takeover of Italy, Levi joined a group of partisans in September 1943. He was arrested in December and was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His stories of his year in Auschwitz and his adventures in returning home form the core of his literary achievement. Their particular power derives from Levi’s ability to evoke and describe human character and from, in the words of Irving Howe, his “special gift for the vignette” (1986, p. 12). This gift is apparent throughout his work, but never more so than when Levi reflects on how he came to write about his experiences.

In the Afterword to the 1986 combined edition of his first two works, Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, Levi discusses his first book (1986c, pp. 375–97). He writes that Survival in Auschwitz has a destiny, a distant “birth certificate,” in the words, “I write what I would never dare tell anyone” (p. 375). Auschwitz gave Levi the need to tell his story, a need “so strong” that he began describing his experience in the camp, “in that German laboratory laden with freezing cold, the war, and vigilant eyes; and yet I knew that I would not be able under any circumstances to hold on to those haphazardly scribbled notes, and that I must throw them away immediately because if they were found they would be considered an act of espionage and would cost me my life.” The memories, however, “burned so intensely” that within a few months of his return to Italy, he wrote Survival in Auschwitz. Levi’s experience of a unique, consequential, and emotion-provoking event caused his memory to remain clearly etched in his psyche.

The story of the book’s publication is itself dramatic: “The manuscript was turned down by a number of important publishers; it was accepted in 1947 by a small publisher who printed only 2,500 copies and then folded. So this first book of mine fell into oblivion for many years: perhaps also because in all of Europe those were difficult times of mourning and reconstruction and the public did not want to return in memory to the painful years of the war that had just ended” (1986c, p. 375). It was not until 1958 that a large publisher, Einaudi, republished Survival in Auschwitz. Since then, the book has achieved public and critical acclaim and has been translated into eight languages and adapted for radio and theater. It is an amazingly humane account of inhumanity.

Captured on December 13, 1943, at the age of twenty-four, Primo Levi describes himself at that time as “with little wisdom, no experience, and a decided tendency—encouraged by the life of segregation forced on me for the previous four years of the racial laws—to live in an unrealistic world of my own, a world in-habited by civilized Cartesian phantoms” (1986c, p. 9). At Auschwitz he was confronted with another experience, out of which he emerged with wisdom. That he would retain his humanity despite having, in his own words, “reached the bottom,” is a tribute to this great writer.

Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name; and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains, (p. 22)

Thus Levi began his experience of the ultimate dehumanization. It was the most complete example in history of a program designed by human beings to dehumanize other human beings, to eradicate their being and the memory of their being, and to prepare for their ultimate extermination.

In order to understand this process, it is important to hear Levi’s description. He continues:

Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes; in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgement of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term “extermination camp,” and it is now clear what we seek to express with the phrase: “to lie on the bottom.” (1986c, p. 23)

So Primo Levi descended to hell and began adjusting for survival. Even in this hell, people, Levi notes, “gain a certain equilibrium after a few weeks” (1986c, p. 51). Such an equilibrium relies on humanity’s ability to adjust to the most horrible and degrading circumstances, and it is an equilibrium punctuated by tantalizing dreams:

One can hear the sleepers breathing and snoring; some groan and speak. Many lick their lips and move their jaws. They are dreaming of eating; this is also a collective dream. It is a pitiless dream which the creator of the Tantalus myth must have known. You not only see the food, you feel it in your hands, distinct and concrete, you are aware of its rich and striking smell: someone in the dream even holds it up to your lips, but every time a different circumstance intervenes to prevent the consummation of the act. Then the dream dissolves and breaks up into its elements, but it reforms itself immediately after and begins again, similar, yet changed; and this without pause, for all of us, every night and for the whole of our sleep. (p. 55)

Levi goes on to describe the continuing nightmare of the days of useless and grueling work; the cruelty and inhumanity of the Nazis and the guards; the chemistry examination that ultimately allowed him to work as a chemist, in a warm laboratory, and helped him survive; and, finally, the liberation, or more precisely, the German desertion of the camp. Through it all, he sketches a series of marvelously human characters. For example, he writes of his “friendship” with Lorenzo:

The story of my relationship with Lorenzo is both long and short, quiet and enigmatic; it is the story of a time and condition now effaced from every present reality, and so I do not think it can be understood except in the manner in which we nowadays understand events of legends or of the remotest history.

In concrete terms it amounts to little: an Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy and brought me the reply. For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward. (1986c, p. 109)

Imagine in Auschwitz a “good and simple” person who did not operate on the principles of selfishness so routinely institutionalized in contemporary society and so necessary for survival in extraordinary circumstances. Levi believes that “it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving” (1986c, p. 111).

Lorenzo appears again in Levi’s moving book, Moments of Reprieve: A Memoir of Auschwitz (1987). Here Levi paints a more complete portrait and adds to the earlier story. The soup Lorenzo brought Levi and his friends provided additional calories that allowed them to survive. It was “weird soup. In it we found plum nuts, salami peels, once even the wing of a sparrow with all its feathers; another time a scrap of Italian newspaper” (1987, p. 155).

Both Lorenzo and Levi returned to their homes in Italy after the war, and Levi went to Lorenzo’s town “to see him again and bring him a woolen sweater for the winter” (1987, p. 159). Levi found a man who was “mortally tired, a weariness without remedy. Lorenzo no longer worked as a mason but went from farm to farm with a small cart buying and selling scrap iron. He wanted no more rules or bosses or schedules. The little he earned he spent at the tavern; he did not drink as a vice but to get away from the world. He had seen the world, he didn’t like it, he felt it was going to ruin. To live no longer interested him.”

Levi attempted to help Lorenzo by finding him a mason’s job, but Lorenzo refused. Finally he told Levi “something which in Auschwitz I hadn’t suspected.” “Down there he helped not only me. He had other proteges, Italian and not, but he thought it right not to tell me about it: we are in this world to do good, not to boast about it. In ‘Suiss’ he had been a rich man, at least compared to us, and had been able to help us, but now it was over; he had no more opportunities” (1987, pp. 159–60). Having lived through Auschwitz, Lorenzo was adrift. He became ill, and after Levi took him to a hospital, he ran away. “He was assured and coherent in his rejection of life. He was found nearly dead a few days later, and died in the hospital alone. He, who was not a survivor, had died of the survivor’s disease” (p. 160).

Neither a military hero nor a political leader, Lorenzo was actually much more—he was among those moral men whose lives enhance ours by their simple existence. Lorenzo and Levi also demonstrate the unique power of memory, the ways in which an event such as incarceration in Auschwitz can be so powerful that memory of it never fades and, in fact, influences our actions from the time it occurs. Lorenzo’s memory may have killed him, and Levi’s memory and his realization that the world had changed very little may have eventually led to his death as well. It is the power of these memories that moved Levi to wri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• SECTION I. POLITICS, MEMORY, AND MASS DEATH
• SECTION II. STUDYING DEATH
• SECTION III. PRESERVING LIFE
• Epilogue. Memory, Hope, and Triumph over Evil
• References
• Index