Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era: The Ethics of Never Again

182 Pages·2016·2.049 MB·English

by  Alejandro Baer, Natan Sznaider

Memory and Forgetting in
the Post-Holocaust Era
“This book is a courageous critique of generalizing the Holocaust into a univer-
sal frame for evil and victimhood, and making the commemoration of massive
violence a moral obligation. With sensitivity, the authors examine the costs of the
ensuing divisiveness, and propose dialogue, compromise, and the acknowledg-
ment of past suffering instead.”
– Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Utrecht University, Netherlands
T o forget after Auschwitz is considered barbaric. Baer and Sznaider question this
assumption not only in regard to the Holocaust but to other political crimes as well.
The duties of memory surrounding the Holocaust have spread around the globe
and interacted with other narratives of victimization that demand equal treatment.
Are there crimes that must be forgotten and others that should be remembered?
I n this book the authors examine the effects of a globalized Holocaust culture
on the ways in which individuals and groups understand the moral and political
signifi cance of their respective histories of extreme political violence. Do such
transnational memories facilitate or hamper the task of coming to terms with
and overcoming divisive pasts? Taking Argentina, Spain and a number of sites
in post-communist Europe as test cases, this book illustrates the transformation
from a nationally oriented ethics to a transnational one. The authors look at media,
scholarly discourse, NGOs dealing with human rights and memory, museums and
memorial sites and examine how a new generation of memory activists revisits
the past to construct a new future. Baer and Sznaider follow these attempts to
maneuver between the duties of remembrance and the benefi ts of forgetting. This,
the authors argue, is the “ethics of Never Again.”
Alejandro Baer is Associate Professor of Sociology, Stephen C. Feinstein Chair
and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University
of Minnesota, USA.
Natan Sznaider is a Full Professor of Sociology at the Academic College of Tel-
Aviv-Yaffo, Israel.
Memory Studies: Global Constellations
Series editor: Henri Lustiger-Thaler
Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA and Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France
T he ‘past in the present’ has returned in the early twenty-fi rst century with a ven-
geance, and with it the expansion of categories of experience. These experiences
have largely been lost in the advance of rationalist and constructivist understand-
ings of subjectivity and their collective representations. The cultural stakes around
forgetting, ‘useful forgetting’ and remembering, locally, regionally, nationally and
globally have risen exponentially. It is therefore not unusual that ‘migrant memo-
ries’; micro-histories; personal and individual memories in their interwoven rela-
tion to cultural, political and social narratives; the mnemonic past and present of
emotions, embodiment and ritual; and fi nally, the mnemonic spatiality of geogra-
phy and territories are receiving more pronounced hearings.
T his transpires as the social sciences themselves are consciously globalizing
their knowledge bases. In addition to the above, the reconstructive logic of mem-
ory in the juggernaut of galloping informationalization is rendering it more and
more publicly accessible, and therefore part of a new global public constellation
around the coding of meaning and experience. Memory studies as an academic
fi eld of social and cultural inquiry emerges at a time when global public debate –
buttressed by the fragmentation of national narratives – has accelerated. Soci-
eties today, in late globalized conditions, are pregnant with newly unmediated
and unfrozen memories once sequestered in wide collective representations. We
welcome manuscripts that examine and analyze these profound cultural traces.
Titles in this series
The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origin of Modernity
Martyn Hudson
Forthcoming in this series
War Memory and Commemoration
Brad West
Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia
Peter Manning
Memory and Forgetting in
the Post-Holocaust Era
The Ethics of Never Again
Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider
First published 2017
by Routledge
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© 2017 Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider
The right of Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider to be identifi ed as authors
of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Baer, Alejandro, 1970– author. | Sznaider, Natan, 1954– author.
Title: Memory and forgetting in the post-Holocaust era : the ethics of
never again / Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider.
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge,
[2017] | Series: Memory studies: global constellations | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2016025448 | ISBN 9781315616193 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Argentina—Public
opinion. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Spain—Public opinion. |
Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Europe, Eastern—Public opinion. |
Public opinion—Argentina. | Public opinion—Spain. | Public opinion—
Europe, Eastern. | Collective memory—Argentina. | Collective
memory—Spain. | Collective memory—Europe, Eastern. | Genocide—
Case studies. | Crimes against humanity—Case studies.
Classifi cation: LCC D804.45.A74 B34 2017 | DDC 179.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025448
ISBN: 978-1-4724-4894-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-61619-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
C ontents
List of fi gures vi
Acknowledgments vii
1 The Ethics of Never Again: global constellations 1
2 Nunca Más : Argentine Nazis and J udíos del Sur 28
3 Francoism reframed: the disappeared of the Spanish Holocaust 64
4 Eastern Europe: exhuming competing pasts 105
5 Beyond Antigone and Amalek : toward a memory of hope 132
Bibliography 152
Index 168
F igures
2.1 Photographs of members of the military Junta governments
(1976–1983) at the Sitio de Memoria ESMA museum, located
in the former Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA)
secret detention center. Photo: Natan Sznaider. 32
2.2 Installation with portraits of Desaparecidos at the Espacio
Memoria y Derechos Humanos (ex-ESMA) compound, located
outside of the former Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la
Armada (ESMA) secret detention center. Photo: Natan Sznaider. 37
2.3 Memorial wall with victims’ names at the Parque de la Memoria in
Buenos Aires. Source: http://parquedelamemoria.org.ar/descargas/ 40
2.4 A “Baldosa por la Memoria” in a Buenos Aires street. Photo:
Natan Sznaider. 52
3.1 Poster of a panel discussion titled “Exemplary Transition?
From the 1978 Constitution to the recovery of historical memory”
at Complutense University in Madrid, 2010. 75
3.2 Rally in support of Judge Garzón in front of the Supreme Court
building in Madrid, 2010. Photo courtesy of Oscar Rodríguez. 76
3.3 Photography on scale one to one of the twenty-nine bodies found
in the mass grave of La Andaya (Lerma, Province of Burgos) and
portraits of its victims at Puerta del Sol square in Madrid, 2010.
The mass grave was exhumed between 2006 and 2007.
Photo courtesy of Oscar Rodríguez. 80
3.4 Picture taken on July 18, 2009, during the exhumation of a mass
grave in the village of Milagros (Province of Burgos). Pedro
Cancho, from Riaza, displays a photograph of his grandfather,
of the same name, executed by paramilitary during the
Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and allegedly buried in that
grave. Photo courtesy of Francisco Ferrándiz. 83
3.5 Logo of the Foro por la Memoria. 86
3.6 Holocaust remembrance ceremony on January 27th, 2015, at
the Spanish Senate in Madrid, presided by King Felipe VI.
Speaking at the pódium is Spain’s chief Rabbi Moshe Bendahan.
Photo courtesy of Centro Sefarad-Israel. 90
4.1 Bandera Monument in Lviv (Ukraine). Photo: Natan Sznaider. 113
5.1 Quote from Y. Yerushalmi’s book Z achor at the Centro Cultural
Haraldo Conti (ESMA memorial compound in Buenos Aires).
Photo: Natan Sznaider. 145
Acknowledgments
O ur special thanks go to Prof. Francisco Ferrándiz, the head of the research group
on” Exhumations and Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain in Transna-
tional Perspective” at the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid. We both
had the opportunity to be part of this research group and to profi t from Ferrándiz’s
intellectual generosity. His ideas were a constant inspiration for our book. We are
grateful to University of Minnesota graduate students Arta Ankrava and Erma
Nezirevic for their help with literature reviews and bibliographies. We also thank
Anna Brailovsky for the careful proofreading of the book manuscript.
N atan Sznaider wants to express his appreciation to his institution, the Aca-
demic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo, for its generous support for this research proj-
ect. In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of the library,
which was always helpful in providing me with materials diffi cult to come by. I
thank Dr. Ahron Weiss for his intellectual kindness in the Ukraine in explaining
to me the pitfalls of this complicated country. At the University of Buenos Aires,
I was invited by Prof. Emilio Crenzel, Researcher at the National Council of Sci-
entifi c Research (CONICET). Prof. Crenzel provided me with many insights into
Argentinean memory politics. My thanks also go to the Parque de la Memoria
(Memory Park). I was also allowed to take some pictures, which are included in
the book. I appreciate the time I spent at the Sitio de Memoria ESMA (Memory
Site ESMA), and I am grateful to Alejandra Naftal, its director, who showed me
around there. I also visited the oral history archive of “Memoria Abierta” (Open
Memory), an alliance of fi ve Argentinian human rights organizations. My thanks
go to Susana Skura, who manages the project and took the time to talk to me about
it. I also thank Prof. Daniel Feierstein for the time he took to give me his thoughts
about the politics of memory in Argentina.
Alejandro Baer would like to express his gratitude to the Department of Soci-
ology, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the College of Lib-
eral Arts at the University of Minnesota. The Research Collaborative “Reframing
Mass Violence,” funded by the Institute for Advanced Study, fostered an extraor-
dinary interdisciplinary forum to discuss with local and invited scholars the
rich array of research on memories of mass atrocities and transitional justice.
I owe great thanks to my colleague in the Sociology department Joachim Sav-
elsberg and to Barbara Frey, Director of the University of Minnesota Human
viii Acknowledgments
Rights Program, for co-convening this initiative and for being exceptional sources
of intellectual inspiration. I am indebted to Centro Sefarad-Israel in Madrid for
generously sharing materials on Holocaust remembrance initiatives in Spain,
in particular to Yessica San Román and Henar Corbi. My thanks also go to my
friends and former colleagues Pablo Francescutti (Madrid) and Bernt Schnettler
(Bayreuth) for critical feedback on portions or chapters of the book. I presented
part of the work of this book in several places, including Stony Brook University’s
“Memory in the Disciplines” project (here I thank in particular Daniela Flesler
and Adrian Pérez Melgosa), Daniel Levy and Elazar Barkan’s “History, Redress
and Cultural Memory” seminar at Columbia University and the Annual Meetings
of the American Sociological Association. Everywhere I received helpful sugges-
tions and precious critiques. I also thank Catherine Guisan, Lisa Hilbink, Bruno
Chaouat, Liliana Feierstein, Joe Eggers and Claudia Feld, as well as the students
of my course “Never Again! Memory and Politics after Genocide,” with all of
whom I have discussed many of the matters raised in this book.
1 The Ethics of Never Again
Global constellations
Angelus Novus revisited: the memory of the future
T his is a book about how people think and feel about the past and how this affects
the way they wish to shape the future. It is a book about how people interpret past
evils and try to do something to prevent them from recurring. It is a book about
moral and political knowledge and how they relate to each other. Furthermore, it
is a book about global constellations and local circumstances and the relationship
between the two. It is also a study about accountability and responsibility, particu-
larly intergenerational responsibility.
H uman rights are grounded in the dystopian consciousness of a fragile world.
The Holocaust is always in the background, and it becomes a powerful frame
for reading near and distant atrocities. Even more important is the recognition,
mediated through memories of past abuses, of the body’s universality and vul-
nerability as it becomes inscribed in popular imagination and legal doctrine.
Since 1945 ethical thought has not been able to innocently appeal to the old
world and its transcendental certainties of reason. This is especially true for
Europe and European thinking. Human rights in this respect are fi rst of all
based on memories of evil, which are then translated into the hope that such evil
will not recur. This is the meaning of the cry “Never Again” that motivated the
human rights regime especially after World War II. Hence the Universal Decla-
ration of Human Rights of 1948 states in its preamble: “whereas disregard and
contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged
the conscience of mankind” – a paradigmatic example of the ethics of “Never
again.” Never Again means never again in general but also in particular: never
again Holocaust and genocide, never again communism and other dictatorships,
never again apartheid, never again colonialism. Thus Never Again connects uni-
versal principles with particular concerns. The ethics of Never Again means
also that besides fear there lies hope.
When we think about the past, it looks like a specter is haunting our global
world, and this is the specter of a fallen angel, the angel of history painted by Paul
Klee from almost 100 years ago. This angel has become immortal through the