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Chapter 18 History, Memory, and Moral Judgment in Documentary Film: On Marcel Ophuls’s Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie Susan Rubin Suleiman The hell with ‘‘teaching’’ the Holocaust! Denounce and be angry! —Marcel Ophuls 1 Memory loves a movie. —Patricia Hampl2 In an essay published more than forty years ago, Theodor Adorno asked the question: What does it mean to ‘‘work up,’’ to ‘‘process,’’ or—as the English translation puts it—to ‘‘come to terms with’’ the past? (Was bedeutet : Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit). The word ‘‘Aufarbeitung,’’ Adorno wrote in 1959, had already become a highly suspect Schlagwort, a ‘‘slogan,’’ for it did not imply a ‘‘serious working through of the past, the breaking of its spell through an act of clear consciousness.’’3 ‘‘Working through,’’ which is here contrasted with the suspect ‘‘working up,’’ is Freud’s word for overcoming resistance to difficult material: to work through such material (durcharbeiten) requires effort. Although Adorno himself did not use the Freudian term (instead, he said verarbeiten, yet another word for ‘‘working up’’ or ‘‘processing’’ ), the translators got his meaning right. For Adorno insists, in this essay, on the difference between a genuine working through of the past in the psychoanalytic sense (further on, he defines psychoanalysis as ‘‘critical self-reflection’’) and a mere ‘‘turning the page’’ on the past, which is actually a desire to wipe it from memory. That kind of ‘‘working up’’ is false and ineffective, as well as self-deceptive: ‘‘The attitude that it would be proper for everything to be forgotten and forgiven by those who were wronged is expressed by the party that committed the injustice,’’ Adorno notes with dry irony.4 354 Susan Rubin Suleiman In the West Germany of 1959, those words had a special significance. Although the Adenauer government had recognized, early on, Germany’s responsibility for the Nazi persecution of the Jews and had signed an agreement in 1952 to pay reparations to Holocaust survivors, the general mood in the country was not in favor of remembering. As many historians have noted, the main goal in West Germany after the war was ‘‘‘normalcy’ at all costs.’’5 The assumption of responsibility for the ‘‘Jewish question’’ did not, it has been argued, carry with it a full recognition of the ‘‘Nazi question’’: the role of National Socialism and of anti-Semitism in German life and politics before the war, and their prolongation within the postwar period.6 (In East Germany, the situation of memory was even worse, as Jeffrey Herf has shown.)7 Adorno’s essay reminded his fellow Germans that their desire to ‘‘get free of the past,’’ while understandable (for ‘‘one cannot live in its shadow’’), could not be satisfied as long as ‘‘the past one wishes to evade is still so intensely alive.’’8 The solution, according to Adorno, was enlightened pedagogy on a mass scale, a pedagogy at once ‘‘turned toward the subject’’—focusing on individual psychology and aiming for increased self-consciousness and ‘‘subjective enlightenment’’ on the part of individuals—and turned toward objective arguments about history: ‘‘Let us remind people of the simplest things: that open or disguised revivals of fascism will bring about war, suffering, and poverty.’’9 That particular reminder may be useful even today—though one may wonder whether Adorno wasn’t being overly optimistic in trusting in the power of rational argument, based on self-interest, to counteract the emotional appeals of racism and xenophobic nationalism. But another aspect of Adorno’s essay, his emphasis on the need for remembrance, may strike one as no longer pertinent: for haven’t we—we Western Europeans and Americans—experienced, in the past decade and more, not an excess of forgetting but rather a ‘‘surfeit of memory’’? Charles Maier, whose essay by that title has often been quoted, argued in 1992 that the current obsession with memory, especially with the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, in Germany and elsewhere, ‘‘is a sign not of historical confidence but of a retreat from transformative politics.’’10 For Maier, the fascination with memory, which today often takes the form of group memories vying with each other for recognition of their suffering, ‘‘reflects a new focus on narrow ethnicity’’ and acts as an obstacle to democracy.11 (For Adorno, by contrast, democracy required a self-critical working through of the past.) No wonder that Maier concludes his essay with the flippant but serious wish: ‘‘I hope...

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