Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate (review)

Both Jeffrey C. Alexander’s introductory essay and the critical responses to it in this volume address the contested balance between acknowledging the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its use as a moral standard to judge other historical events. With philosophical depth, historical insight, and methodological awareness, Alexander describes in detail the cultural transformations and social processes of American Holocaust memory politics from the immediate postwar period to the present. As a consequence of this transformation, the Holocaust metaphor becomes a bridge between past and present that serves as a moral standard to judge other atrocities and mass murders. While focusing not on the Holocaust, but rather on antisemitism as the incarnation of the political poisoning of a democratic, plural world, the United States distanced itself from Nazism and reestablished itself as the leading force in rebuilding the new “moral” world order.

Alexander reconstructs the social construction of the Holocaust as a moral universal, i.e., its transformation from a specific historical event into a general symbol of human suffering and moral evil. Improvements in the condition of humanity do not necessarily increase moral and social justice, which, on the contrary, might come as an unintended result of moral tragedies like the Holocaust. Western “defenders of civilization” distanced themselves from Nazism as the “other” with whom the Western world had nothing in common. They did not feel challenged by Nazism, but instead considered it a threat that could be dealt with efficiently through the usual means of politics, diplomacy, or, if necessary, war. Alexander proves that this distance also affected the inability of the democratic West to identify with the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution and mass extermination: they were viewed instead as victims of an alien, evil force. The shift from contrasting the “medieval barbarity” of Nazi crimes with “civilized modernity” to universalizing the Holocaust as the symbol of contemporary “sacred-evil” made it possible to comprehend the Holocaust as challenging the very core of modernity itself.

Some of the commentators suggest focusing on multidirectional Holocaust memory instead of talking about the moral universalism of the Holocaust. Martin Jay, for example, criticizes Alexander’s America-centric universalization of the Holocaust. Instead of taking the Holocaust as a universal moral example capable of inspiring greater tolerance and understanding, some Israeli scholars make the claim that only a Jewish state able to defend itself could prevent another Holocaust.

Bernhard Giesen deals with the intellectual roots of the negative anthropology that the Holocaust has generated. He adds the German postwar story of coping with the Holocaust to the American one that Alexander provides, while Michael Rothberg uses the French case to prove that the Holocaust did not simply become a moral standard applicable to other histories, but that those other histories helped to produce a sense of the Holocaust’s particularity. This leads to interesting parallels, such as the shared motive of claiming innocence as a people through purification—which, in the German case, meant putting individual Nazi perpetrators on trial “in the name of the German people” (116)—and expelling them from the nation so that the country could again view itself as innocent. This way, Germany and ordinary Germans could claim innocence while placing the blame on a few criminals who supposedly had nothing to do with the country that they had actually betrayed. Paradoxically, a new generation of Germans which, due to the “grace” of being born late, could indeed claim innocence, instead favored the narrative of collective guilt.