After the Event: The Transmission of Grievous Loss in Germany, China and Taiwan by Stephan Feuchtwang (review)

While many scholars now seem to agree that there is nothing wrong about comparing the Third Reich with other violent and ruthless dictatorships, above all those from mid-twentieth-century Europe, the Holocaust has retained a singular status for reasons that are all too well known. Stephan Feuchtwang, an anthropologist who has done most of his research on China, is careful not to trivialize the Holocaust, yet he maintains that much can be learned from contrasting several incidences of state violence and massive loss, and from exploring how such traumatic events are remembered in different societies. Feuchtwang chose to work with three cases spread across space and time: the mass murder of European Jews during the Third Reich, the famine caused by Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, and the persecution and killing of suspected communists and spies in Taiwan during Chiang Kai-shek’s rule in the 1950s. At first glance, the selected case studies seem to have little in common. For the author, they are linked by occurrences of state violence, either in the form of “targeted violence” against enemy groups or of “aggravated indifference” to hardships that caused loss and destruction on a massive scale. They are also connected by various official and private efforts to transmit knowledge of the events from one generation to the next with the intention of commemorating and “working through” the past, as well as finding some sort of closure.

Bringing these very different events together enables Feuchtwang to identify important factors that shape the transmission of loss and grievance—or explain the lack and limits of it. The transmission and commemoration of these events are, for one, conditioned by the events themselves: their scale, their nature, and the underlying motives and discourses of the perpetrators. Equally significant is the political context after the event, for interpersonal transmission within the family or society is strongly affected above all by either political continuities or caesurae that created radically different politics. For instance, the general acknowledgment of the Holocaust in postwar Germany gradually gave way to a broad spectrum of efforts to keep memory of that event alive. In China, on the contrary, a “public transcript” was created that assigned blame to ultraleftist mistakes while exonerating the Communist Party itself, the state, and its leaders. In Taiwan, the end of martial law and the process of democratization led to a gradual exposure of what came to be called the “White Terror” of the 1950s and to a subsequent judicial consideration and evaluation of the crimes committed.

Finally, in all three cases, Feuchtwang finds that there were significant alternative narratives about the events and their consequences, in particular at the personal and familial level. This important insight is derived from his interviews and fieldwork in Germany, China, and Taiwan and is well supported by the evidence presented in the book. It allows Feuchtwang to question effectively the usefulness of exceedingly popular terms such as collective memory or collective trauma, which all tend to downplay the dynamics and interplay among the different levels of personal, interpersonal, familial, and societal narratives recalling events of loss and destruction. The approach of analyzing processes of transmission—instead of memory—and of highlighting the significant role of political, social, and cultural contexts and factors is convincing and clearly advances our understanding of how individuals and communities respond to political disasters.

Yet, questions arise as to the selection of the case studies. Are these three events really the most suitable cases for a comparison focusing on state violence? In the Holocaust, European Jews were mass-murdered in a systematic process informed by a racist ideology. There was a similar act of violence against a politically defined target group in Taiwan, though on a much smaller scale. In contrast, the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward did not affect certain target groups but rather the entire population...