Reviewing the the so-called “Second Historian's Debate”, in which he had played such an important role, in February 2022, Michael Rothberg wrote that the opponents to his multidirectional approach were confusing history and memory. “Naturally, history and memory cannot be entirely separated from each other, but the target of my own work and also of Moses's catechism essay is public memory, not historical scholarship.”Footnote 1 I understand what he means about not targeting the discipline. Rothberg and Moses are both aware that many positions controversial in the German public sphere have long been accepted in the academy, a distinction they clearly make in their critiques. But the comment did prompt me to wonder whether part of the problem of the debate is that Rothberg's and Moses's critique of memory practices is actually more about history than it lets on.
In an earlier article, Rothberg noted Jeffrey Olick's observation that the “initial Historiker-streit was always less about history than about memory—that is, about the meaning of the past for the present.”Footnote 2 It certainly was, but it was conducted largely as history. The stakes were contemporary, but the content historical. In the recent debates, the argument is more blurry. Both Rothberg and Moses make arguments seemingly about the memory of the Holocaust that in fact rest on assumptions about its history (and indeed, in his Geschichte der Gegenwart piece, Moses moves from the assault on the “catechism” to the claim that the Holocaust is merely one historical example of destructive efforts to attain “permanent security.”)Footnote 3 When Rothberg observes that the “postmigrant present” needs a new “memory regime,” this is, in fact, not just about memory.Footnote 4 It means rewriting the history of the Holocaust to meet the needs of the present. Without belying the obvious rigidity and defensiveness of many of Rothberg's critics, this hidden harnessing of history to memory explains my unease at the debate.
Unidirectional Memory, Multidirectional History?
Multidirectional Memory opens with an understanding of memory that is clearly separate from historical research. The comparisons and connections cannot be empirically validated for all parties and instead a “certain bracketing of empirical history … [is] necessary in order for the imaginative links between different histories and social groups to come into view; these imaginative links are the substance of multidirectional memory.”Footnote 5 A historian may swallow hard at “bracketing” the facts, but it seems legitimate as a description of the way memories intersect and borrow from one another.
In addition to the pleasure of encountering an acute reader addressing texts with insight and precision, Multidirectional Memory offers a highly original account of the way the Holocaust was invoked in postwar decades in explicit conversation with the process of decolonization. Often, as in Césaire's Discourse, the Holocaust (or in this case, more precisely, Nazi violence) figures almost as a cipher, while nonetheless playing an important role in arguments about European society and colonialism. In this way, Rothberg makes the case that the “memory” of the Holocaust did not remain contained within a narrow frame and migrated through different contexts. As a descriptive, rather than normative, proposition, the case for multidirectional memory is innovative and strong.
The seeming pluralism and liberalism of the embrace of multidirectionality is contradicted in the text, however, which is strikingly, and at times unremittingly, censorious. Arendt was “ahead of her time” but “falls victim to tendencies within colonial discourse.”Footnote 6 She unwittingly “confirms the racist suppositions of colonial logic.”Footnote 7 Her work “gets caught in its own ideological binds,”Footnote 8 “while also revealing how these insights are interlaced with blindness about race and colonialism,”Footnote 9 and on and on. In fact, it is only after four pages of almost continuous warnings about Arendt's “blindness and insight” that we finally get down to a close (and enlightening) reading of Arendt's argument about imperialism. This oddly anxious sidling up to the text makes us realize that behind the seeming pluralism of multidirectionality is a highly unidirectional take on what the outcome of interaction can be allowed to be. It is only now that the true import of an early sentence in the book comes into view, namely that it is “when the productive intercultural dynamic of multidirectional memory is explicitly claimed” (my emphasis) that “it has the potential to create new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice.”Footnote 10
It is strange to see Arendt's impressive analysis figuring as “memory,” and indeed, juxtaposing her book-length treatment of totalitarianism with Césaire's couple of sentences about Nazism (praising Césaire for what he got right and Arendt got wrong) also feels odd, not because Césaire is not himself powerful and insightful but because he does not offer any close analysis of the Third Reich. But this incommensurability would not matter if the book really were about multidirectional memory, that is, about the ways in which a historical phenomenon moves through representation and conversation. But we soon realize that the multidirectional is actually a category of history, not memory. “With their references to ‘chocs en retour’ and ‘boomerang effects,’ both Arendt and Césaire use metaphors of directionality. By charting what those metaphors make thinkable and where they break down, we can begin to imagine a specifically multidirectional approach.”Footnote 11 In other words, by exploring the nature and limits of these and other authors’ articulations of “historical relatedness,” we can begin to find a multidirectional logic that captures the different phenomena in their relations and their distinctiveness. That is why the book is later at such pains to look at Isabel Hull, and Jürgen Zimmerer, to prove that the authors were on the right track with their multidirectional approach. This is about constructing a historical genealogy.
Before I pursue the issue of imperialism, I just want to note that whatever the ambiguities of history and memory in Rothberg's approach, Moses's argument is, as noted previously, explicitly historical. Efforts to declare the Holocaust as unique, Moses argues, miss the shared logic driving the Holocaust and other genocides, and indeed other kinds of abuses and atrocities in the international sphere, namely, the drive for what Moses calls “permanent security,” or the unattainable aspiration to be invulnerable.
Beyond Imperialism and Colonialism
In other words, for all the arguments about appropriate forms of memorialization for the twenty-first century, both are seeking to make historical claims about the Holocaust's relationship to other events. For Rothberg and in much of the debate, the central issue has been the relationship between imperialism and colonial violence. There is no question that scholarship has uncovered useful intersections between imperialism and the Holocaust, be it the transformation of bourgeois liberal values in the context of the nineteenth-century struggle for empire, be it the intersection between imperially influenced race thinking and antisemitism, be it in the ideological interaction between Hitler's Lebensraum fantasies and his war against Jews, and finally the many points of contact between the war of conquest and the Holocaust itself.
At the same time, it is not hard to see the limits of this interaction. Just to take one aspect, antisemitism is not a variant of racism. It intersects with racism, but it has different qualities and different roots. Above all, despite being transmogrified in the modern period, its Christian roots retained a powerful and distinctive influence. Antisemitism intersected with nationalism, too, and indeed with Enlightenment thinking about emancipation and equality, and arguably had taken on critical modern qualities before race thinking came to influence it. Then again, many—me included—would argue that the decisive transformation of antisemitism, the creation of a global panic, was a function of the specific constellation of the post–World War I period, in which nation, class and revolution, total war, and the attempt to create a new international order all created a very specific conjuncture. The tenets of race continue to play their part, but to see it as a subset of racism is not to understand it.
Similarly, the Nazi assault on Jews preceded the acquisition of Lebensraum, followed somewhat different logics to the settlement projects, and continued long after any imperial ambition had foundered. In short, whatever the memory needs of a multiethnic twenty-first-century society, we should not be trying to squash the Holocaust into the imperial envelope to create an allegedly zeitgemäß frame of comparison and contextualization.
Uniqueness in Memory and History
The question of Holocaust uniqueness is far more convoluted than that of its imperial connections. Claims and counterclaims about uniqueness have been driven often by contemporary fears or struggles, as Rothberg notes, and thus are part of memory conflicts and processes. Even when more clearly located in efforts to understand the past, what is seen as unique has been surprisingly variable, including the impossibility of understanding the event, the Nazis’ “redemptive” intent, their global ambitions, their irrationality, and so on. Paradoxically, uniqueness is often traced back to the character of antisemitism, and in that sense to continuity rather than rupture.
At the same time, the a priori assumption that the claim of uniqueness is inappropriate does not ring true. All victims are equal, but all suffering is not. A “hierarchy of suffering” is not “morally offensive.”Footnote 12 Rothberg argues that uniqueness depends on narratives that cannot be objectively adjudicated. To a certain extent that's true, and uniqueness as a category is neither a usual goal nor a common claim in historical research. But it's also the case that we can deploy the evidence to look for similarities and differences in ways that can be illuminating. There is no doubt that comparative genocide research, work on imperial formations, but also all the work since the 1990s on the Nazis’ other victims has significantly changed and narrowed the ways in which we might see the Holocaust as unique. But it has also underlined its distinctiveness. It is surprisingly hard to accommodate it in generalized patterns of violence or even genocide. Although Moses seeks to insert the Holocaust into the larger story of permanent security, he also notes that in its enormity it has proved an unhelpful and inappropriate yardstick for approaching postwar transgressions, allowing them to be discounted because they did not quite come up to the standard the Nazis had set.
Regardless of whether one accepts the idea that the Holocaust has become a “screen memory,” it has clearly allowed other atrocities to be minimized, and for my students I see that it has become a paradoxically “comfortable” horror. There are questions to be answered about how to hold on to it while sharing the space with other human phenomena. But the answer need not require that its extraordinary character, extraordinary even when arrayed among other “transgressions,” be downplayed.
Israel and the Holocaust
When it comes to Israel, the critique raised by Rothberg and others is clearer. Memory of the Holocaust is being deployed to block criticism of Israel and to prevent distinctions from being drawn between antisemitism and criticism of national policy. Alon Confino's excellent article makes this point. More disturbing from my perspective than the attacks on Mbembe was the campaign that led to the resignation of the director of the Jewish History Museum and the attacks on the director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism. It was to underscore the distinction between antisemitism and Israel critique that I was somewhat involved in refining the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism and publicly defended it in Germany.
But the idea that the Holocaust should not be deployed for current ends cuts both ways. I was struck that both Moses and Rothberg end their books on Holocaust and genocide with Israel—Rothberg with the historian Benny Morris and his disturbingly comfortable embrace of a brutal politics of exclusion, Moses with a short chapter on “endless occupation,” in which Israel features prominently. Rothberg writes that “It is crucial for scholars of the Holocaust to acknowledge the ways their topic intersects with another ongoing conflict.” There are many ways they intersect—the Holocaust helped create the political constellation that allowed Israel to be born, and the Holocaust figures prominently in Israel's rhetorical justification of its position. For courageous historians of the Holocaust and of contemporary Israel, like Amos Goldberg and Alon Confino, it is logical to bring the Holocaust and the Nakhba into conversation. Without the Holocaust you can't understand Israel. The reverse is not true. To be sure, there are issues that one can bring into conversation—the dark side of democracy, the logic of ethnic cleansing, the dynamics of settler violence. But when looking for comparative and entangled phenomena to help understand the Holocaust, Israel is far down the list of crucial places. Moses's contention that the genocide convention was the result of Zionist machinations shows the danger of allowing present preoccupations to drive historical argument. Of course, the best history is always written for our own times. But present concerns should not drown out past realities.
Multiethnic Society and the Holocaust
Twenty or thirty years ago, when English-language studies on German memory were in vogue, I found prescriptive calls for what Germany needed to do to deal with its past often suspect. They hid what we would want “the Germans” to do behind the language of psychic health and necessity. Now, once again, Germans are being invited to accept a US normative agenda, or if you like, a new catechism.
Public representations of the past are often rather immune to efforts at prescription, particularly academic efforts. But that does not mean that attempts to engage in the marketplace of ideas are not worthwhile. Clearly, as time passes, as new generations emerge, and as society diversifies, older narratives lose their power. A changing international situation also creates new pressures and incentives for shaping domestic opinion. That the growth of the AfD has made many nervous about even considering new ways of thinking about the past is understandable. Anyone who has connections with Gedenkstätten or Jewish research institutes in regions where the AfD has political influence will know what kinds of provocations those institutions are being subjected to. No little part of the job of the director of the Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, for example, lies in responding (very effectively) to the latest effort by the Thuringian AfD to undermine his work, by - to take on example - posting provocative electoral placards on the terrain of the Memorial site. But as Rothberg says, the fact that such provocations take place on its own cannot be enough to render innovation inadmissible. I find the work of colleagues on who gets to perform Holocaust memory important and admirable.
Whatever proposals we make should not impose particular kinds of explanation for the Holocaust to enable it to “fit” in a multi-ethnic society. And if the Holocaust hasto share the stage of national recognition with other tragedies—as it clearly does—by all means encourage a multi-directional conversation, but do not rewrite the Holocaust's origins to fit. We should not make imperialism the new incarnation of Nolte's Gulag—a politically expedient narrative that meets some kinds of contemporary political needs. Obviously, Rothberg's logic is progressive, and there's not the same kind of exculpatory drive that influenced conservatives in the 1980s. But there is a common danger that the politics of memory might cloud the history.
