The Holocaust as a Paradigm for the Congo Atrocities: Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost

As is now generally accepted, memory affects our moral criticisms, political analyses, and affective responsiveness to the past in the present. Yet, although few people in this post-Holocaust age would doubt the moral obligation to remember past catastrophes, there seems to be far less agreement on how precisely they should be remembered. Eclectic as they are in ideological and philosophical terms, postcolonial theories, on the one hand, and trauma theory and Holocaust studies, on the other, are among the fields of knowledge that put questions of remembrance, forgetting, and particularly the representational modes these could take, on the table. Although both fields have paid particular attention to the ways in which literature could offer particular modes of understanding and responding to catastrophic events and histories, they have often done so in parallel and disparate ways. For instance, narrative acts and discourses of witnessing have formed an important topic of both postcolonial and Holocaust discussions, yet these discussions have developed in strikingly dissimilar ways, with visible variations in emphasis and differences in theoretical concepts of violence, victimhood, and agency. Recently, a number of fruitful attempts have been made to build bridges between theoretical discourses of postcolonialism and the Holocaust in mutually productive ways, as well as to theorize the interconnectedness of distinct forms of violence. In his recent study Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg examines how memories of the Holocaust and postcolonial historical reconstructions interconnect, overlap, and influence one another, for instance, in the work of authors such as Caryl Phillips, Aimé Césaire, and Charlotte Delbo.¹ In what follows, I will build on these newer theoretical discourses by analyzing negotiations of Holocaust memory in Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, a historical nonfiction book about colonial violence and torture in the Congo Free State under Leopold II’s rule.²

Although various people—from Hannah Arendt to Nadine Gordimer—have brought the atrocities that happened in the Congo Free State into connection with the Jewish Holocaust, it was not until 1998, when Adam Hochschild’s bestselling King Leopold’s Ghost was first published, that the notion of a “forgotten Holocaust” gained the currency it currently has. In this essay, I examine the Holocaust paradigm in Hochschild’s historical account as a strategy of commitment to exposing the humanitarian disaster in the Congo Free State and assess the ethicopolitical repercussions of this portrayal of colonial history in contemporary commemorations of the colonial past and debates on its legacy in the Belgian context. Focusing in particular on analogies and comparisons between the Congo atrocities and the Jewish Holocaust and the deployment of tropes of forgetting, I will show how King Leopold’s Ghost’s negotiation of Holocaust memory strategically serves to commemorate and celebrate the actions and commitments of the late-nineteenth-century humanitarians who mounted resistance against Leopold’s colonial regime. In effect, the Holocaust paradigm provides Hochschild with a new vocabulary for—and effectively prompts a resurgence of—the nineteenth-century humanitarian discourse deployed by British liberal humanitarian Edmund Dene Morel, who is also the “hero” of Hochschild’s historical narrative. In so doing, however, King Leopold’s Ghost harbors the following rhetorical paradox: it relies on Holocaust metaphors and imagery while simultaneously appealing to a pre-Holocaust moral tradition of liberal humanitarianism that the Holocaust has rendered anachronistic—a point recently reiterated by Renzo Martens’s documentary art film Enjoy Poverty (2008), which, in ruthlessly exposing the multiple complicities surrounding Western humanitarian action in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, offers a compelling counterpoint to Hochschild’s account. Against this background, I explore a number of tensions and contradictions in Belgian postcolonial memory discourse in the wake of Hochschild’s book, in which the Holocaust plays a prominent role.

The Congo Atrocities as a Forgotten Holocaust

Published in 1998, the historical nonfiction book King Leopold’s Ghost by American journalist Adam Hochschild was immediately translated into various languages and reached best-seller lists in four countries.³ One was Belgium, where the book sparked considerable controversy, particularly surrounding the deployment of the Holocaust term...