The Holocaust on Post-War Battlefields: Genocide as Historical Culture (review)

“Today the pertinent European reference” is no longer Christendom or baptism, but extermination, argues Tony Judt recently in his well-praised history of postwar Europe.¹ The murder of six million European Jews serves as a point of departure for the construction of European identity. European civil society recognizes the Holocaust, demonstrates empathy with the victims’ suffering, and works continuously on a policy of “Never Again!” The Holocaust on Post-War Battlefields provides insight into both the fragility and the powerful action of this European reference. This volume is the sixth in the ambitious Swedish research project The Holocaust and European Historical Culture. Whereas two important previous volumes include papers on the meaning of the Holocaust in general European historical culture, this one focuses on different national developments—from France to Russia, Italy to Sweden (one essay deals with Israel).

Questioning the mainstream notion of collective memory, the Swedish project revolves around a concept that relates subsequent memory to earlier cultural traditions. As Frederik Lindström says in his case study of Austria, an event of the magnitude of the Holocaust has been “received by and integrated into an interpretative framework that is already in place, and which has been shaped over a long . . . time” (pp. 135–36). Since the late nineteenth century, Austrian political culture was divided into three social, ideological, and organizational camps. According to Lindström, strong antisemitism once bridged the gaps between the camps; yet after 1945 so did the Holocaust. Still, since the war all three camps have been eager to externalize the Holocaust, that is to see it as a product of the German Nazis, with Austria the first victim. Thus, the Holocaust, embedded in antisemitic traditions, provided the basis of a national historical culture. It was only with the Waldheim Affair in the 1980s that Austrian responsibility for the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes was put on the public agenda. Austrian historical culture regarding the Holocaust nonetheless fragmented. The major social and political factions were open to critically viewing Austria’s support of the Holocaust and to the revival of the Austrian-Jewish tradition; the new-right nationalism advocated by the Austrian Freedom Party, however, pushed strongly revisionist positions.

The long-term perspective of most of the contributions to this volume is one of its strengths. Another is their sensitivity for competing streams within particular national historical cultures. As usual in collective volumes, not all contributions are of equal quality; some are essentially reports about ongoing research already introduced in previous volumes. The ten national and two bi-national case studies are difficult to compare, not dealing with the same media; some chapters focus on extremist groups, whereas most outline hegemonic mainstream trends within a particular nation. The essay on Israel is limited to the 1960s and 70s; others, such as the one on Russia, focus on the 1990s.

Surveying scholarly works, Oscar Österberg examines Italy’s externalization of the Holocaust and its dedication to a narrative of antifascist resistance; in the 1990s, he argues, the “Holocaust Boom” challenged the myth of popular armed resistance, leaving it to new-right groups to defend the self-serving mythology. Relying on similar sources, Johannes Heumann investigates French historical culture. Only as a result of research from abroad (e.g., Robert Paxton, Eberhard Jäckel), was the old myth of near-universal resistance to Vichy undermined. Pär Frohnert analyses how German textbooks slowly made room for the Holocaust. In the 1990s, Germany developed a pedagogical use of the genocide that includes “interest in both the perpetrators and the victims, in commemoration, and in the political and moral lessons to be learnt” (p. 125). Thomas Sniegon examines the reception of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in the Czech Lands, thus focusing on media and political debates. Barbara Törnquist presents a small masterpiece of oral history—a methodically well thought-out study of antisemitic continuities in Szydłowiec, a formerly Jewish town...