Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

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Memory in a Global Age Discourses, Practices and Trajectories

Edited by

Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad

Memory in a Global Age

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies General Editors: Andrew Hoskins and John Sutton The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’ under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination? Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (editors) MEMORY IN A GLOBAL AGE Discourses, Practices and Trajectories Brian Conway COMMEMORATION AND BLOODY SUNDAY Pathways of Memory Mikyoung Kim and Barry Schwartz (editors) NORTHEAST ASIA’S DIFFICULT PAST Essays in Collective Memory Forthcoming titles: Richard Crownshaw THE AFTERLIFE OF HOLOCAUST MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–23851–0 (hardback) 978–0–230–23852–7 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Memory in a Global Age Discourses, Practices and Trajectories Edited by

Aleida Assmann and

Sebastian Conrad

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad 2010 Individual chapters © Contributors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–27291–0

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Figures

vii

Preface

ix

Notes on the Contributors

x

Introduction Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad

1

Part I

Witnessing in a Global Arena

17

1 Addressing Painful Memories: Apologies as a New Practice in International Relations Christopher Daase

19

2 Australian Memory and the Apology to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous People Danielle Celermajer and A. Dirk Moses

32

Part II Moral Claims and Universal Norms

59

3 The Past in the Present: Memories of State Violence in Contemporary Latin America Elizabeth Jelin

61

4 Vietnam, the New Left and the Holocaust: How the Cold War Changed Discourse on Genocide Berthold Molden

79

5 The Holocaust – a Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory Community Aleida Assmann

97

Part III Global Memories and Transnational Identities

119

6 Globalization, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory Jan Assmann

121

7 Victimhood Nationalism in Contested Memories: National Mourning and Global Accountability Jie-Hyun Lim

138

v

vi

Contents

8 Remembering Asia: History and Memory in Post-Cold War Japan Sebastian Conrad

163

Part IV Global Icons and Cultural Symbols

179

9 Globalizing Memory in a Divided City: Bruce Lee in Mostar Grace Bolton and Nerina Muzurovic´ 10 ‘Fragments of Reminiscence’: Popular Music as a Carrier of Global Memory Ana Sobral

181

199

11 Neda – the Career of a Global Icon Aleida Assmann and Corinna Assmann

225

Name Index

243

Subject Index

245

List of Figures 9.1

Mostar Bridge, photo by Adin Šadic´

184

9.2

Church and Cross, Old Gymnasium

185

9.3

Minarets ‘Emerging’ from the Ruins, with kind permission from Adin Šadic´

186

9.4

Old Gymnasium, Abraševic´ Youth Center

189

9.5

Bruce Lee on Pedestal, with kind permission by Magazine Dani

191

Empty Pedestal: Mostar, photos of Project Group, Studienkolleg zu Berlin 2007

196

9.6

10.1 Asian Dub Foundation in Concert, photograph by Andrea Leone, http://www.flickr.com/photos/hanktattoo/sets/, copyright Andrea Leone, reprinted by kind permission of the author

206

10.2 Matisyahu in Concert, photograph by Peter Kim, http:// www.flickr.com/people/peterkimphotography/, copyright Peter Kim, reprinted by kind permission of the author

210

10.3 Gogol Bordello in Concert, photograph by Jessica Hitchman, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jesshu/, copyright Jessica Hitchman, reprinted by kind permission of the author

215

10.4 Music Video for ‘Jerusalem’, directed by Mathew Cullen: Still from video clip, http://www.motiontheory.com/work/ matisyahu_jerusalem#sub, copyright Motion Theory, reprinted by kind permission of Motion Theory and The Artists Organization.

220

11.1 Neda Agha-Soltan and Neda Soltani

230

11.2 Artistic transformations of Neda images, 1) artist: Taiwo Odunsi, http://taiwo.org/, reprinted by kind permission of the artist; 2) avaaz.org; 3) artist: Shahab Siavash, http:// designyoutrust.com/2009/06/23/neda-salehi-agha-soltan/, reprinted by kind permission of the artist; 4) http://www. thepunch.com.au/tags/twitter/; 5) http://iconbank. vii

viii List of Figures

blogspot.com/2009/06/neda-symbol-of-iranians-protests. html; 6) http://www.iranian.com/main/blog/david-et/ natars-neda-natars, reprinted by kind permission of iranian.com 11.3 Poster artwork designed in memory of Neda by Los Angeles-based street artist ABCNT in 2009, which was also pasted in Tehran’s streets, www.abcnt.info, reprinted by kind permission of the artist

234

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Preface The majority of the following essays were first presented in March 2008 at a conference organized by the International Research Institute for Cultural Studies in Vienna (IFK). The editors are grateful to its two directors, Professor Helmut Lethen and Professor Lutz Musner for their intellectual support and to the Institute staff who helped in bringing together colleagues from four different continents and hosting them in a highly stimulating atmosphere. Our thanks goes to Andrew Hoskins who kindly agreed to consider this volume for publication in the new series Memory Studies and to Christabel Scaife and Catherine Mitchell for their communicative cooperation in the preparation of this publication. We owe special thanks to Dr Linda Shortt for polishing the language and style of some of the essays. Last but by no means least, we wish to acknowledge our deep gratitude to Anna Stahl and Valerie Neumann for their assiduous and reliable assistance in the last and notoriously painstaking stages of the editing process. Every attempt has been made to contact copyright holders. If any have inadvertently been overlooked, the author and publishers will be happy to make the appropriate arrangements at the first opportunity. The Editors

ix

Notes on the Contributors Aleida Assmann teaches English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz (Germany). She has taught as guest professor at the universities of Rice, Princeton, Yale, Chicago and Vienna. Her research interests include the history and media theory of reading and writing, cultural concepts of time and historical anthropology. An ongoing focus of her research has been the study of memory as an individual, collective and cultural phenomenon, including the literary representations of trauma and of the Holocaust. Her publications include: Geschichte im Gedächtnis. Von der persönlichen Erfahrung zur öffentlichen Inszenierung (History in Memory. From Personal Experience to Public Staging of History), Munich 2007; Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit (The Long Shadow of the Past), Munich 2006; and Erinnerungsräume, Munich (4th edition) 2008; English translation: Arts of Memory, Cambridge 2010. Corinna Assmann received her MA in English and German literature at the University of Heidelberg (Germany). She travelled to Iran several times for her documentary film project Football under Cover, about the first official women’s football match in the Islamic Republic of Iran. She was part of the organizing team and played in the friendly match which took place in 2006. She also co-wrote and co-produced the film (directed by Ayat Najafi and David Assmann), which premiered at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival, won two Teddy Awards and was shown at various festivals around the world. Publication: (with Silke Gülker) ‘Football under Cover in Tehran’s Ararat Stadium’ in: Sybille Frank and Silke Steets (eds), Stadium Worlds: Football, Space and the Built Environment, London (Routledge) 2010, pp. 213–26. Jan Assmann is Professor Emeritus of Egyptology at Heidelberg University (Germany) and Honorary Professor at Konstanz University (Germany). He was a visiting professor at universities in Paris, Jerusalem and the US. His main fields of research are Ancient Egyptian literature and religion, archaeological field work in Egypt (Theban tombs), cultural theory (especially ‘cultural memory’), history of religion (especially the rise of monotheism in the ancient world) and the ‘afterlife’ of Egypt in Western cultural memory. His publications include: Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism, Madison 2008; The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, Ithaca 2006; The Price of Monotheism, Stanford 2009; and Das x

Notes on the Contributors xi

kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (The Cultural Memory: Writing, Memory and Political Identity in early Civilizations), Munich 1992. Grace Bolton is currently completing an M.Phil. in International Relations at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford and holds a BA in European Studies (Gold Medal) from Trinity College Dublin. From September 2006 to July 2007, Grace studied Modern European History at the Humboldt University in Berlin and was the first Irish student chosen to participate in the ‘Studienkolleg zu Berlin’ Programme. As part of this programme, Grace completed a group research project entitled ‘Film – New Perspectives for Mostar?’, on which her contribution to this volume is based. Grace co-edited the 2010 St. Antony’s International Review special issue on Secession, Sovereignty and the Quest for Legitimacy. In addition, Grace has won a number of academic awards and scholarships, including an Irish Government Easter Week Commemoration Scholarship (2004), Scholar of Trinity College Dublin (2006), Benefactors’ Scholarship for Cambridge University (2008) and a Prendergast Bequest Scholarship at Oxford University (2009). Danielle Celermajer is currently Director of the Asia-Pacific Masters of Human Rights and Democratisation, a European Union-funded project establishing networked postgraduate human rights education across the Asia-Pacific region. In the area of human rights, her research focuses on transitional justice and the question of how contemporary states and societies can deal with past violations, the relationship between human rights and religious norms and institutions, and human rights education. Her primary research areas in political theory include collective responsibility, conceptual frameworks for human rights and the relationship between secular philosophical and theological thought. She has held teaching positions at the University of Sydney and Columbia University and received her Ph.D. in political theory (summa cum laude) from Columbia University. Prior to entering academia, she was Director of Policy at the Australian Human Rights Commission, where she authored numerous reports on Indigenous human rights and was principal speech writer to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner. Her book, Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. She is editor of a collection on Hannah Arendt, Power, Judgment and Political Evil, Ashgate, 2010. Sebastian Conrad taught at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy). Since 2010, he is Professor of Modern History at the Free

xii Notes on the Contributors

University of Berlin, Germany. His recent work has focused on German and Japanese histories, colonial and post-colonial history and issues in global history. His publications include: The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century, Berkeley 2010; Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany, Cambridge 2010; Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s– 1930s, New York 2007 (ed., with Dominic Sachsenmaier). Christopher Daase holds the Chair for International Organization at the University of Frankfurt and is Director of the Research Programme on International Organizations and International Law at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (Germany). He has taught at the University of Munich, the University of Kent at Canterbury, at the Brussels School for International Studies and was Fellow of the SSRC-MacArthur Program in International Peace and Security at Harvard University. His research focuses on theories of international relations and security policy, as well as international institutions. Recent publications include: (with Oliver Kessler) ‘Knowns and Unknowns in the “War on Terror”: Uncertainty and the Political Construction of Danger’, Security Dialogue 38 (2007), 411–36; ‘Clausewitz and Small Wars’, in: Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe (eds), Clausewitz in the 21st Century, Oxford (Oxford University Press) 2007, pp. 107–26. Elizabeth Jelin is a Senior Researcher of Sociology at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) of Argentina and at the Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social (IDES) in Buenos Aires. She has published extensively on social movements, human rights, gender and family and has directed a large comparative research programme on collective memory and repression in Latin America. Her numerous books include: State Repression and the Labors of Memory, University of Minnesota Press 2003 (translated from Spanish). In 2007/08 Jelin was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and is currently a member of its Academic Advisory Board. Jie-Hyun Lim is Professor of Modern History at Hanyang University in Seoul (South Korea). He is Director of the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture in Seoul and has held visiting appointments in Cracow Pedagogical University (Poland), Warsaw University (Poland), Glamorgan (Wales), Nichibunken (Japan) and Harvard University (US). He has authored numerous books on comparative histories of nationalist movements, the socio-cultural history of Marxism in East Asia and Eastern Europe and issues of memory, colonialism and dictatorship in East Asia (in Korean). He is also series editor of the book series ‘Mass Dictatorship’ (four volumes) forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.

Notes on the Contributors xiii

Berthold Molden is Visiting Professor in Global History at the University of Vienna. His research fields encompass politics of history, the history of the Cold War and the theory of global history. Berthold Molden is currently working on the global politics of history of post-colonial activism. His books include: Geschichtspolitik und Demokratisierung in Guatemala: Historiographie, Nachkriegsjustiz und Entschädigung (Politics of History and Democratization in Guatemala. Historiography, post-war Justice and Compensation), Münster 2007, and (ed. with David Mayer): Vielstimmige Vergangenheiten. Geschichtspolitik in Lateinamerika (Polyphonic Pasts. Politics of History in Latin America), Münster 2009. A. Dirk Moses is Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney (Australia). His scholarly interests include genocide, intellectual history, colonialism and world history. He has published: German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge 2007); (ed. with Donald Bloxham) The Oxford Handbook on Genocide Studies, Oxford 2010; Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, Oxford/New York 2008; (with Dan Stone) Colonialism and Genocide, London/New York 2007; and Genocide and Settler Societies: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in World History, Oxford/ New York 2004. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Genocide Research and is presently completing two books: Genocide and the Terror of History and The Diplomacy of Genocide. Nerina Muzurovic´ is pursuing a doctorate at the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago (US). Her academic interests are interdisciplinary in nature and include literary approaches to cultural studies and, in particular, the theories of gift and exchange, the representations of trauma and traumatic memory and the narratives of civil wars and reconciliation. As a Fellow at the International Center on Responses to Catastrophes (ICORC), she designed the visual ethnography project HOMES (Houses of Memories and Expectations), which focused on literary and photographic representations of teenage refugees’ experiences. Muzurovic has also completed academic residencies in Vienna and Lake Constance, and served as author and editor of a variety of publications on narratives of political violence, trauma and memory. Ana Sobral was born and grew up in Angola, where her father worked as a surgeon and her mother as a teacher. She graduated in literature in Portugal and wrote her Ph.D. in Konstanz (Germany), where she finished her doctoral exams in 2009. Her dissertation deals with ‘Deviance and Generational Identities in American Post-War Cult Fiction’.

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Introduction Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad

In an influential essay, Arjun Appadurai described the emergence of the present state of globalization as a shift from stability to motion. The globalized world, he argues, is a world in motion, a world with different speeds, a world of disjunctive flows. To a large extent, it is the heir to older historical developments such as empires, monotheistic religion, colonialism and capitalism, but in its present stage, it is energized by new forms of mobility. While global actors such as nation states and industrial corporations deploy the global infrastructures of information, traffic and commerce to extend their power and wealth in forms of ‘predatory mobility’, other movements have entered the global stage to counter globalization not only by protecting and reinforcing the local forms of subsistence, but also by organizing new forms of counter-globalization or alternative forms of globalization. In his essay, Appadurai focuses on the phenomenon of ‘grassroots globalization’. He uses this term to describe movements that propel globalization from below, endorsing an emancipatory politics of globalization that can back up the counter vision of an international civil society. This counter vision requires creative imagination. For this reason, Appadurai resurrects the discourse of the imagination, reclaiming it in the political struggle for the losers of globalization (Appadurai 2000, 1–19). Almost a decade after Appadurai’s seminal essay, the editors of this volume argue that the focus in the globalization discourse has shifted from imagination to memory. Memory, of course, also requires imagination, but it rethinks the future in alliance with recasting the past. In the last decade, the field of memory has been dramatically reconfigured. Under the impact of globalizing processes, both the spaces of memory and the composition of memory communities have been redefined. To be sure, memory has always been articulated on different levels, 1

2

Introduction

from the individual to larger social groups. The collective memory of the nation was at the centre of memory debates, however, and it was also the focal point of studies on memory. Until recently, the dynamics of memory production unfolded primarily within the bounds of the nation state; coming to terms with the past was largely a national project. Under the impact of global mobility and movements, this has changed fundamentally. Global conditions have powerfully impacted on memory debates and, at the same time, memory has entered the global stage and global discourse. Today, memory and the global have to be studied together, as it has become impossible to understand the trajectories of memory outside a global frame of reference. This shift has affected all levels of memory production. The global has become the defining arena for all political actors, be they nation states, transnational institutions or grassroots movements. The developments and challenges in this recent global transformation have forced state and non-state actors alike to engage with a globalizing public sphere. We are no longer dealing with clear-cut forces of globalization and counter-globalization; instead, we are witnessing new forms of crossover and interaction between these two poles. Increasingly, the values of counter-globalization have invaded the hegemonic memory constructs of the nation state and they have reasserted claims to moral comport and accountability. On the other hand, some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have taken up the political agenda of nation states, helping them to expand their range of power and influence on a supranational level.

Memories on the move1 Memories are carried across national borders and they enter a global arena through all available channels, starting with human carriers. Memories migrate from one continent to another with individuals. Wars and genocide, natural disasters, famine, financial crises and economic decline weigh heavily on individuals and break up communities, disrupting and dislocating their cultural traditions and personal memories. As migrants carry their heritage, memories and traumas with them, these are transferred and brought into new social constellations and political contexts. The multicultural classroom is a site in which heterogeneous and potentially competing memories are crowded into small spaces. It ostensibly demonstrates that the integrating force of homogeneous national memories is dwindling. Clear-cut territorial boundaries of memory communities have also been pierced through increased global tourism and the worldwide


3

exchange of academic discourses which have contributed to creating a new framework of mutual attention, promoting the circulation, comparison and self-reflective assessment of national memory policies. On an institutional level, memories are increasingly transmitted and supported via political actors in the shape of transnational networks and corporations. Though nation states have in no way been superseded as political actors, they are more and more integrated into transnational networks such as the European Union (EU), World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), sharing common interests and responsibilities. The aim of these collective agents – bound together by formal criteria of membership, a common bureaucratic infrastructure and a joint political agenda – is to cope with problems and regulate processes with a worldwide scope. In the case of UNESCO, for instance, memory is an obvious and central concern: new global challenges such as the preservation and ranking of cultural heritage have become highly politicized issues (Amrith and Sluga 2008, 251–74). But issues of memory have also sneaked into the political agenda of other transnational organizations, especially when it comes to acknowledging a traumatic past and creating a shared memory. NGOs, ‘which have their roots in the progressive movements of the last two centuries in the areas of labour, suffrage, and civil rights’ are considered by Appadurai ‘as crucibles and institutional instruments of most serious efforts to globalize from below’ (Appadurai 2000, 15). These organizations, which circumvent the level of nations and are based on worldwide networks of civil commitment, have now also begun to focus on memory issues, building up solidarity with victims of war and aggression. It is important to note that NGOs are not only addressing problems that lie outside the range of nation states, they also engage with problems that are caused, repressed and ignored by nation states. Members of NGOs increasingly challenge national memory politics and propound a counter memory that focuses on what the states have officially suppressed. Globalization, in other words, should not only be understood in terms of a mobility conditioned by the exigencies of global capitalism; it also serves those without power by acting as ‘watchdogs of war’ and transporting their discourses, values, claims and images across new channels and networks of communication.2 However, the most obvious and basic paths along which memories move, crossing boundaries and extending to a global level, are the satellites of telecommunication, the channels of mass media, and the Internet. Andrew Hoskins describes the ‘emergent digital network memory’

4

Introduction

as a new phenomenon ‘driven by the connectivities of digital technologies and media’ (Hoskins 2009, 92). Under the impact of the digital as a forceful accelerant, memories themselves have become more mobile, ephemeral and fluid, undergoing constant transformations. The co-evolution of technology and memory is today frequently addressed in terms of ‘emergence’, referring to a process that evolves beyond agency and control along largely unforeseen trajectories. An important part of this transformation concerns the public sphere that is radically transformed as decisive events are increasingly witnessed synchronically in real time by a worldwide spectatorship in a global arena of attention. Through the Internet and its interactive communication forums, this global arena is linked to new forms of democratic participation. The new concept of ‘networked publics’, defined as linked sets ‘of social, cultural, and technological developments’, replaces the notion of passive consumption formerly attached to the word ‘audience’ (Ito 2008, 2–3). It is this active global spectatorship that has become the new horizon for political claims and action. Sociologists investigate the new forms of communication and increasing attention in this global arena. They have introduced terms such as the ‘career of themes’, ‘agenda-building’ and the ‘media-induced selection and condensation of communication’. While the flow of information is continuous, attention is discontinuous; it stops and thickens this flow of information from time to time, according to the parameters of emotional impact and relevance. Condensations of communication occur wherever ‘basic values, institutions and social resources are at stake’ (Tobler 2002, 267). To an unprecedented extent, the discursive dynamics of the public sphere are rooted today in the staging of images and messages. On a national level, media events ‘synchronize societies in a collective heart beat; they reinforce the loyalty vis-à-vis the society and its legitimate authorities’ (Dayan and Kath 1992, 9). On a transnational level, media events synchronize the witnessing of worldwide events for a global spectatorship. As this audience transcends the nation, it has the power to critique and challenge national myths and authorities. It is in this global arena that memory activists currently vie for worldwide resonance for their claims, agendas and values. The resonance in the global media arena emerges from issues charged with particular emotional weight and moral valence. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, issues of collective memory have become prominent candidates in this category, as the past has increasingly been seen as a source of continuous conflict and a resource for collective and competitive identity formation. Today, nations no longer construct their past in a totally self-contained fashion. Instead, they find themselves increasingly under the observation


5

and subject to the criticism of other nations. Since the turn of the century, issues of memory have moved into the centre of public attention. Through the shaping and negotiating of issues of memory, pressing issues of cultural values, national identity and social integration are redefined. The influence of the global cuts both ways. On the one hand, local memory practices have global reverberations. In her study on Berlin as a memorial landscape in a rapidly changing built environment, Jennifer Jordan observes that ‘memorial projects and historical preservation efforts operate in an increasingly international context, one in which artists, donors, survivors, historians, political officials, and even the people who visit sites of memory are often aware of the actions of their counterparts in far-off places’ (Jordan 2006, 22). On the other hand, the transnational effects of mutual influence and imitation are equally palpable on the national level. An obvious example is the spreading of a European discourse of guilt with respect to the Holocaust, which, in the 1990s, undermined many a self-serving national myth in countries such as Austria, Poland, France, the Netherlands or Switzerland. Heidemarie Uhl sees in this development a clear indication of a ‘transnational synchronization of memory cultures’ (Marchart et al. 2003, 308). Jan-Werner Müller speaks of a new liberal-democratic, post-nationalist consensus in memory politics and emphasizes that in the case of the EU, it is not a unified supranational memory that is in the making but shared panEuropean norms for dealing with the past (Müller 2007, 166–75). Such a ‘memory without borders’ based on the universal norm of human rights is also at work in various ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commissions’ and the ‘politics of regret’ publicly staged by various former colonial regimes (Olick and Coughlin 2003, 37–63). With the attention of a global audience and its growing moral consciousness, the arena for public acts of commemoration has been widened. Today, this global audience has an important impact on political action and on the interpretation and evaluation of historical events. With the dramatic extension of communication in a global arena, the competition for worldwide attention and the strategies for securing one’s political or moral claims are intensified. This global arena and the emerging transnational public spheres have a decisive impact on changing power relations. Political actors invoke the global audience as an anonymous mass of spectators and bystanders, using them to enforce their propaganda; the victims and spokespersons of a civil society also appeal to the global audience as a world tribunal of witnesses endowed with moral responsibility. Mass communication is obviously not a oneway street; new forms of interaction are currently being explored and

6

Introduction

invented with the help of new digital technology, such as virtual demonstrations in or with the help of the Internet (Hein 2009). While some memories are currently anchored on a national level in museums and monuments, others are exported across national boundaries. They are shared and transmitted in larger memory communities while other memories have no institutional support and receive little or no media attention. This unevenness invites a series of questions concerning the path of memories from the local to the global: How are memories transformed, mutually eclipsed and politically contested as they reach a wider audience and move into a supranational arena of attention? How do memories spread and travel around the world? How are memories changed when they transcend their former habitat and move into the framework of global spectatorship, traffic and commerce? What role do the new media play in the construction and transmission of memories in a world of growing interconnectedness and intervisuality?

Three levels of analysis The various forms of transnational communication and exchange, and the structures of global interaction more generally, have fundamentally altered the conditions of memory production across the globe. Two broader developments, already indicated above, merit particular attention. Firstly, the globalization process has placed a question mark over the nation state as the seemingly natural container of memory debates. Secondly, synchronic interactions and entanglements are of increasing importance, as memory debates not only unfold within national communities of pride or attrition but are connected across borders. This implies, essentially, a spatial turn in our understanding of memory dynamics.3 Until recently, memory appeared mainly as a temporal relation between significant moments in the national past that linger on as memories for generations to come. Within this scheme, an idealized or traumatic moment was remembered internally in metaphors of a ‘past that does not go away’. Historians, therefore, portrayed the trajectories of memory through a tunnel vision of the past, where influence from and entanglements with other national memories were marginalized. In our globalizing present, this language of temporality – that is re-enacted in events of celebration and commemoration – itself needs to be situated within its synchronic, and potentially global, contexts (Halas 2008, 103–18). What does this imply for the grammar of memory in a global age? In what ways has the globalizing process impacted on the agency of


7

memory activists, on the constitution of memory coalitions and on the structures of debate? Is there an inbuilt tension between memory as a distinctive and divisive force on the one hand, and of memory with its expanding and integrating tendencies on the other? Are transnational connections prone to level national differences, or does memory serve to foster particularist identities in the face of the challenges of globalization? Is memory in a global age equivalent to global memory? Analytically, it is important to differentiate between three levels of interpretation that help structure a complex and at times confusing field of debate. Firstly, the past decade has witnessed the emergence of a global public sphere that has turned memory into an issue of global accountability. The plethora of international apologies – the Pope to the Jews; Belgium to the people of the Congo; the British Queen to the Maori; the American president to Africans and native Hawaiians, and so forth – can only be understood vis-à-vis the globalization of national political consciousness: politicians, governments and social agents act as if ‘the whole world is watching us’ (Brooks 1999; Amstutz 2005). This trend is not entirely new. In a way, the international war crimes trials, in particular the early post-war military trials in Germany and Japan, had already invoked a global audience in their quest to legitimize the meting out of punishment under conditions of transnationality. (Heberer and Matthäus 2008). The gesture of public apology has also been employed, as by German chancellor Willy Brandt in the former Jewish ghetto in Warsaw in 1970 (Schneider 1989). But since the 1990s, the pressures of accountability have increased dramatically, and the public space within which issues of the past are negotiated has expanded.4 This is due, in the first place, to the communication revolution and concomitant transformations of transnational public spheres described above. But it has also to do with the end of the Cold War and the attendant demise of the framework of memories divided along ideological lines which this entailed. Indeed, the divisions between capitalist, socialist and post-colonial worlds have been dismantled in the post-Cold War era, and claims to the past are increasingly negotiated in arenas that cut across the paradigm of the Three Worlds. In this context, the colonial past and the long history of imperialist interventions, repression and genocide have emerged as privileged issues in a politics of global accountability. In a way, it is possible to read these attempts to symbolically rectify colonial wrongs not only as an effect of the era of globalization, but also as a particular attempt to come to terms with the uneven history of globalization itself. The politics of apology and of reparation payments are driven by a complex

8

Introduction

set of motivations and interests, among which the moral impetus and the coalition of oppositional and grass-root claims to recognition of victimhood and suffering frequently monopolize public attention. These claims, however, are situated in a complex relationship to processes of political and economic integration. These processes structure and call for forms of symbolic politics that soften and alleviate the tensions and asymmetries they entail. Public apologies, in this reading, also serve the homogenization of nation states and the expansion of markets. Critics have therefore pointed to the legitimizing function that transnational memory politics may have in an age of global capital (Rolph-Trouillot 2000, 171–86). Secondly, memory claims themselves are increasingly globalized. The most salient example, albeit a highly contested one, is the Holocaust, which has been turned by some protagonists into a universal legacy of mankind. ‘The Holocaust’, holds the Israeli historian Tom Segev, ‘no longer belongs exclusively to Israel and the Jews. Today, it belongs to the whole world.’5 The cross-border appropriation of the Holocaust – frequently also incorporated into national memories – allows for the reframing of a particular event in terms of a universalized memory of humanity. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, in particular, have interpreted this trend as the emergence of what they call a ‘cosmopolitan memory’: ‘We observe an increasing process of “internal globalization” in recent years which implies that issues of global concern are able to become part and parcel of everyday local experiences and moral life worlds of an increasing number of people’ (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 87–106). There can be no doubt that, in many conflict regions, the Holocaust has emerged as a yardstick against which to measure other atrocities, and it is also used to legitimize legal and moral claims (Hirsh 2003; Fournet 2007). In this way, the Holocaust has indeed embarked on a global career, and one can speak of its virtual ubiquity in terms of references to it across borders and cultures (Levy 2006; Diner 2007; Novick 1999; Flanzbaum 1999). However, this raises the question to what extent the Holocaust has indeed turned into the referential core of a spatially and culturally de-centred and universal memory that aims at global solidarity and humanistic care. On the one hand, it is doubtful whether the Holocaust has really entered the life world of broader segments of the population and has repercussions in their ‘everyday local experiences’, as Levy and Sznaider imply. More importantly, critics have pointed out that the Nazi genocide of the European Jews was a particular event, and its mourning is rooted in a specific place and cultural tradition – and


9

thus, it cannot be easily appropriated everywhere. Claims to the Holocaust’s universality, therefore, are received in many parts of the world as a form of Euro-American imperialism in the field of memory. It may well be that imperialism/colonialism emerge as competitors of the Holocaust as the fundamental historical experience on which to base claims of morality, recognition and recompensation. To ‘many observers from outside the Atlantic world’, as Charles Maier has phrased it, ‘their moral-atrocity narrative maintains that the domination of the West over the massive societies of what once could be called the Third World established the preeminent historical scaffolding’. (Maier 2000, 807–31). The colonial experience implied foreign rule, economic exploitation and cultural dispossession, and its varying legacies guarantee its lasting status as a crucial site for understanding not only the past but also the present, and to derive values for a globalizing age. Frequently, these values are connected to forms of cosmopolitan thinking that diverge from the type propagated by Levy and Sznaider in privileging local difference and diversity (Appiah 2005; Cheah 2006). Thirdly, even in cases in which memory is not invested with universal claims, contemporary debates about the past are nevertheless informed by the global context in which they unfold. In other words: globalization has an impact on memory production on different levels – and not only in the global arena. Individual memory, and local, national or supraregional memories, are also shaped and transformed in correspondence with and in response to the challenges of globalization. The global then, as is now commonplace, is in the local; and global structures may also reinforce national memory communities that at first appearance they seem to supersede (Conrad 2003, 85–99). One of the most striking trends in this context is the emergence of new transnational memory alliances as a consequence of, and sometimes as a reaction to, global flows and interactions. Memory activists across borders – be it in Latin America, Eastern Europe or East Asia – appeal to regional connections and to shared pasts to back up a common moral or political agenda. In Latin America, the demise of authoritarian regimes has opened up a space for transnational grass-roots cooperation that carries political claims across borders and thus secures broad media attention (Barahona de Brito et al. 2001; Straßner 2007). Similarly, in East Asia the issues of forced prostitution and forced labour during wartime have clustered, since the mid-1990s, around oppositional movements that connect actors across the former Japanese empire (Jager and Mitter 2007). But the renewed significance of regions as realms of memory is not simply confined to the level of actors and institutions. At the same time,

10

Introduction

regional connections are re-appropriated as objects of memory. Some of these regions – such as the Southern Cone and East Asia – are thus constructed via processes of remembering and commemorating, and frequently they serve as critical counterpoints that promise to balance the levelling and homogenizing effects of global capitalism. Needless to say, regional memory is not by definition an oppositional force but one that frequently overlaps, in ambivalent and contested ways, with processes of political integration and the emergence of economic blocks (Katzenstein 2005).

The architecture of this book This publication presents essays in an interdisciplinary and international perspective. They are written from the points of view of historians, scholars from cultural studies, literature, political science, sociology and psychology. The volume offers an insight into the various problematics of memory in a global age. It presents analytical categories to chart the terrain, and richly documented case studies that both explore different geographical areas and illustrate the complexities of new contemporary ways of appropriating the past. Written from different cultural positions and from different disciplinary backgrounds, the collection of essays highlights and gives meaning to the positionality of memory production in a rapidly widening context. The book is divided into four parts. The first three parts take the analytical levels outlined above as their point of departure. They deal with issues of global accountability, the universalization of memory, and transnational memory coalitions, respectively. The fourth part, memory and media, is particularly devoted to an engagement with symbolic representation and the emergence of global icons that can be understood as a characteristic feature of memory in a global age. Part I, global accountability, is dedicated to the practice of official apology as a crucial example for the dynamics of public memory under the conditions of transnationalized public spheres. Christopher Daase analyses how and why in recent years public apologies have increasingly become standard practice in international relations. He discusses different explanations for this phenomenon and the different ways of morally and politically coming to terms with it. The contribution shows how political apologies as a public form of atonement are made possible through the emergence of a global sense of shared human history. Danielle Celermajer and Dirk Moses focus in their contribution specifically on the Australian case and the 2008 apology by Prime Minister


11

Kevin Rudd to the so-called ‘stolen generations’ of Indigenous people. Nowhere has the fractious nature of political apologies been as central to the national drama as in Australia. The authors provide a brief history of the apology and then go on to survey the reaction of Indigenous people. In a second part, they analyse post-liberal and post-colonial critiques that read public apology as a renewed form of colonial domination and an effacement of difference, arguing, however, that an unqualified celebration of radical difference obstructs rather than opens up new relational spaces. Part II, universalization of memory, is concerned with the moral claims and universal norms underlying recent developments in the field of transnational memory production. Elizabeth Jelin looks at memories of state violence in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil since the 1970s and describes the interrelated framework within which these countries, after the end of dictatorship, came to terms with their violent pasts. She focuses on the emergence of different languages and interpretive frames that vie for global recognition: the national narrative of the state and the unofficial voices of societal actors who base their claims on a human rights paradigm, activating a transnational, highly interconnected and integrated network of civil solidarity. The essay makes the important point that whereas human rights discourse and networks are global, they are appropriated, and active, on a regional and local level. It demonstrates that Latin America witnessed the first emergence of an institution that later went on to a global career: the investigative National Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP) in Argentina was an early antecedent and pioneering model of what years later would be ‘truth commissions’ around the globe. Berthold Molden moves the discussion back in time and shows that the year 1968 witnessed a crucial development in the dynamics of memory. The article focuses on the Russell Tribunal in which the Western memory of Nazi crimes was linked with the issue of the Third World and was appropriated by diverse actors in the decolonization process. This is particularly true for the discourses of opponents to the Vietnam War who often created explicit analogies between Nazi Germany and the United States. This rhetoric contributed to the construction of a global frame of reference and helped connect revolutionary avant-gardes in the Third World to European and American student and civil rights activists. Aleida Assmann deals with the Holocaust as the paradigmatic case in which a collective memory has broken up the national container and emerged as global memory. The essay investigates the institutions and

12

Introduction

infrastructure of this growing memory community and discusses the differences in the quality of this memory. Crucially, global dispersion does not imply sameness. The quality and extension of the memory of the Holocaust is bound to differ greatly, depending on whether it is framed as a historical trauma, as part of a political agenda, as a cosmopolitan reference, as a universal norm or as a global icon. Assmann argues that in relation to the respective status of this memory, the commemorating community will be smaller or larger, limited or open. Part III, transnational memory coalitions, deals with the ways in which globalized memory shapes and transforms transnational identities. Jan Assmann takes us back in time, to the historical period of Hellenism (300 BC–300 AD), making a general argument which has an immediate bearing on issues of our time. He begins his essay with a distinction between globalization and universalism, two terms that in current usage are often conflated. He then goes on to discuss Jaspers’ theory of an Axial Age that links the cognitive breakthrough towards universalist notions to a specific historical period (around 500 BC). Through his historical case study, Assmann argues that memory and globalization work in opposite directions. While memory is inherently divisive and contributes to the cohesion of collective identities, he argues, globalization tends to erode the markers of cultural difference. Operating both within a comparative and transnational framework, Jie-Hyun Lim develops his original concept of Victimhood Nationalism. In many countries, a particular type of nationalism has emerged since the Second World War that paradoxically focuses on victimhood. In this discourse, a ‘chosen trauma’ – in its various forms of military defeat, occupation and repression – is appropriated as the defining moment in the nation’s past (Volkan 1997). Frequently, these debates are consumed by distasteful contestations over who suffered the most. Victimhood nationalism is a distinctly transnational phenomenon, linking issues of national memory across borders. This wide-ranging article with a decidedly comparative perspective explores the dynamics of victimhood nationalism in Poland, Israel and Germany, as well as in North and South Korea and Japan, and situates them in a global frame of reference. While Lim is interested in national memory that has been worked over by the dynamics of globalization, Sebastian Conrad uses the case of Japan to explore the concept of the regionalization of memory. Since the 1990s, as the dichotomies of the Cold War have begun to fade, a process of regional integration in East Asia has commenced that also plays out in the field of memory in Japan. Driven by memory activists, the media, professional historians and social interest groups, the Japanese past is


13

increasingly situated within a larger framework of East Asia. This discourse is far from homogeneous, as social actors have appropriated the discourse of ‘Asia’ for their particular purposes. As a consequence, transnational cooperations and tensions bearing upon the interpretations of the past have multiplied. They have manifested themselves on two levels, both of which are explored in this article. Firstly, on the level of memory production, an increasingly complex set of actors is intervening transnationally in debates that are no longer confined to Japanese voices. This mechanism is particularly evident in the case of the memory of forced prostitution, the so-called ‘comfort women’. Secondly, regionalization also affects the content of memory, as the Japanese past is inscribed into a larger framework of East Asian history. The article discusses the case of Japan’s long period of seclusion in the early modern period that has in recent years been re-interpreted in the context of a history of East Asia. Finally, Part IV, memory and media, specifically singles out the issue of global icons and cultural symbols as a characteristic feature of current globalizing memory cultures. Already back in 1931, Ernst Jünger was convinced that ‘[w]e need no special gift of prophecy to predict that very soon any event will be visible and audible at any place’ (Jünger 1931, 16). Today, the images of the past and the constructions of collective memory are embedded in the production and circulation of popular and media culture. The three case studies presented here all focus on salient examples of ‘globalization from below’, tracing the worldwide diffusion – and the particular appropriation and localization – of pop icons. Amplified by media resonance, global icons are chosen as common referents to overcome the impasse of national conflicts or to re-invent traditions of marginalized groups that provide cultural cohesion for a transnational youth culture. Grace Bolton and Nerina Muzurovic´ explore the fascinating role that references to Bruce Lee play in the war-torn city of Mostar in BosniaHerzegovina. After the Balkan War, Mostar – once a vibrant multicultural city at the crossroads of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires – is a divided city with a manifest segregation of all institutions of public life. There is two of everything in Mostar: two universities, two school systems, two cultural centres, two television stations, two mobile phone networks, two waste disposal services, two football clubs, even the police and sewerage systems operate separately. The essay focuses on a number of civic initiatives that try to promote social integration or at least a peaceful coexistence. The most notable of these is the ‘paradoxical intervention’ of two artists who tried to erect in Mostar a statue of the kung fu actor Bruce Lee with the idea of restoring a pop icon of former

14

Introduction

Yugoslavia in an attempt to overcome a traumatized history that is continued in hyper-politicized memories. Within the field of mass-media representation and symbols, it has been observed that popular movies, in order to be successful at box offices (as well as in media stores) around the world, increasingly use hybrid aesthetic mixing styles and conventions from various cultural traditions in a ‘megahybrid’ form (Ott 2008). Ana Sobral looks at pop music and its lyrics, which she discusses as a paradigmatic case for the emergence of a global audience and memory. These forms of musical memory are indeed constructed as a patchwork of local and global expressions, styles and experiences. As a hybrid phenomenon, global music mixes sounds and rhythms from all over the world which are disseminated globally through commercial labels, live performances and video-clips on electronic platforms. The essay introduces four groups with a global resonance and analyses them in terms of their self-presentation as members of minorities on the margin of dominant cultures with a special appeal to transnational and global citizens. Special attention is paid here to the global memory which is constructed in music and text to back up an essentially oral culture in a ‘global village’. The last contribution, by Aleida Assmann and Corinna Assmann, discusses the topic of pop icons on a political level. It takes its starting point from a specific media date: the proclamation of Neda as ‘Person of the Year’. Neda Agha-Soltan was a student who was shot in a demonstration during the 2009 Iranian election protests in Tehran. It traces the recent career of her global image on various levels. Firstly, it reconstructs the events that preceded and accompanied the production of the image. Secondly, it describes the launching of the image in a process of grassroots globalization with the means of cell phone cameras, web communication and image performances in local demonstrations. Thirdly, it analyses the emotional impact and cultural elaboration of the image which is framed in a narrative of martyrdom that, it is argued, backs up a cosmopolitan affirmation of human rights.

Notes 1 For the use of this term, Aleida Assmann wishes to acknowledge her gratitude to Anne Rigney and Gerd Buelens. 2 Boli (2004). The role of NGOs in memory production was discussed under the title ‘Watchdogs of War: The Media and NGOs in Russia’ in May 2007 at the London School of Economics (in memory of Russian journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya). 3 For a debate on shifting relationships of time and space, see Harvey (1989), Soja (1989) and Döring (2008).


15

4 Excuses d’Ètat, theme issue of Raison publique 10 (2009). 5 Tom Segev in an interview with Wiener Zeitung, 27 May 2006.

Bibliography Amrith, Sunil and Sluga, Glenda (2008), ‘New Histories of the United Nations’, Journal of World History 19, 251–74. Amstutz, Mark R. (2005), The Healing of Nations: The Promise and Limits of Political Forgiveness (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield). Appadurai, Arjun (2000), ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’, Public Culture 12, 1–19. Appiah, Kwame A. (2005), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Allen Lane). Barahona de Brito, Alexandra, González-Enríquez, Carmen and Aguilar, Paloma (eds) (2001), The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Boli, John (ed.) (2004), Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Brooks, Roy L. (1999), When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice (New York: New York University Press). Cheah, Pheng (2006), Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Conrad, Sebastian (2003), ‘Entangled Memories: Versions of the Past in Germany and Japan 1945–2001’, Journal of Contemporary History 38, 85–99. Dayan, Daniel and Kath, Elihu (1992), Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Diner, Dan (2007), Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse: Über Geltung und Wirkung des Holocaust (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Döring, Jörg and Thirlmann, Tristand (eds) (2008), Spatial Turn: Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften (Bielefeld: transcript). Flanzbaum, Hilene (ed.) (1999), The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Fournet, Caroline (2007), The Crime of Destruction and the Law of Genocide: The Impact on Collective Memory (Aldershot: Ashgate). Halas, Elzbieta (2008), ‘Issues of Social Memory and their Challenges in the Global Age’, Time & Society 17, 103–18. Harvey, David (1989), The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell). Heberer, Patricia and Matthäus, Jürgen (eds) (2008), Atrocities on Trial: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press). Hein, Dörte (2009), Erinnerungskulturen Online: Angebote, Kommunikatoren und Nutzer von Websites zu Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz). Hirsh, David (2003), Law against Genocide: Cosmopolitan Trials (London: Cavendish). Hoskins, Andrew (2009), ‘Digital Network Memory’, in: Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (eds), Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter), 91–106.

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Ito, Mizuko (2008), ‘Introduction’, in: Kazys Varnelis (ed.), Networked Publics (Cambridge: MIT Press), 1–14. Jager, Sheila Miyoshi and Rana Mitter (eds) (2007), Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Jordan, Jennifer (2006), Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Jünger, Ernst (1931), ‘Über die Gefahr’, in: Ernst Jünger (ed.), Der gefährliche Augenblick (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt), 11–6. Katzenstein, Peter J. (2005), A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Levy, Daniel and Sznaider, Natan (2002), ‘Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory’, European Journal of Social Theory 5, 87–106. Maier, Charles (2000), ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era’, American Historical Review 105, 807–31. Marchart, Oliver, Öhner, Vrääth and Uhl, Heidemarie (2003), ‘Holocaust Revisited – Lesarten eines Medienereignisses zwischen globaler Erinnerungskultur und nationaler Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, 307–34. Müller, Jan-Werner (2007), ‘Europäische Erinnerungspolitik Revisited’, Transit 33, 166–75. Novick, Peter (1999), The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin). Olick, Jeffey K. and Coughlin, Brenda (2003), ‘The Politics of Regret: Analytical Frames’, in: John C. Torpey (ed.), Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), 37–63. Ott, Michaela (2008), ‘Tendenzen sich globalisierender Filmästhetik’, in: Ulfried Reichardt (ed.), Vermessung der Globalisierung: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven (Heidelberg: Winter), 257–71. Rolph-Trouillot, Michel (2000), ‘Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era’, Interventions 2, 171–86. Schneider, Christoph (1989), Der Warschauer Kniefall. Ritual, Ereignis und Erzählung (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz). Soja, Edward (1989), Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Routledge). Straßner, Veit (2007), Die offenen Wunden Lateinamerikas: Vergangenheitspolitik im postautoritären Argentinien, Uruguay und Chile (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag). Tobler, Stefan (2002), ‘Zur Emergenz transnationaler Öffentlichkeiten. Konfliktinduzierter Kampf um Definitionsmacht und transnationale Kommunikationsverdichtungen im Politikprozess, Internationale Steuerpolitik im EU- und OECD-Raum’, in: Kurt Imhof, Otfried Jarren and Roger Blum (eds), Integration und Medien (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag), 260–84. Volkan, Vamik (1997), Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux).

Part I Witnessing in a Global Arena


1 Addressing Painful Memories: Apologies as a New Practice in International Relations Christopher Daase

Introduction Collective memories of nations, for the most part, relate to events of either glory or victimhood. They depict the national self as triumphantly victorious or tragically defeated hero respectively – but nevertheless as hero. There are other kinds of memories, however, that undermine heroic narratives and the self-stylization of nations: painful memories of perpetration and guilt. It has been common practice to repudiate such memories by suppressing historical pangs of conscience and rewriting national histories. Thus, colonialism has been portrayed as benevolent civilization of savages, massacres and genocides have been denied and land-grabs downplayed. In the age of globalization, however, the memory of such wrongs is more difficult to repress than in the past. This, I will argue, has led in recent years to a new practice in international relations to publicly acknowledge historical wrongs and apologize for political injustices committed in the past (Cunningham 1999; Thompson 2002). The Pope apologized for the Inquisition; President Bill Clinton apologized for the slave trade; Queen Elizabeth II apologized for the suppression of the Maoris in New Zealand; South Africa’s President F. W. de Klerk apologized for the apartheid system; President Jacques Chirac apologized for the Dreyfus Affaire; UN Secretary General Kofi Annan apologized for the UN’s failure to act during the Rwandan Genocide; and, recently, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to the Indigenous peoples of Australia. Clearly, we live in an ‘age of apology’ (Brooks 1999). On the one hand, this global trend is hailed as political progress towards a more civilized world. Apologies are praised as indication for a new interest in genuine political reconciliation (Montville 1993; Cooper 2001; 19

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Addressing Painful Memories

Cohen 2004), and some authors see the development of a new international norm of apology (Barkan 2000; Löwenheim 2009, 532). On the other hand, this trend is ridiculed as a civil-religious penance ritual (Rolph-Trouillot 2000; Lübbe 2001) and criticized for its superficial moralization of international politics that invites false accusations and misguided concessions (Nawratil 2002; Thompson 2006). It is impossible, though, to ignore this trend altogether. The demand for official apologies and the willingness or unwillingness to grant them often raises emotional reactions that can lead to or foment domestic and international conflict. The public display of remorse, no matter whether it stems from instrumental, rhetorical or normative motivations, does play a key role in collective conflict and reconciliation processes. Even if apologies are first and foremost linguistic and symbolic acts (Austin 1961; Tavuchis 1991, 27), they are not ‘cheap talk’, since the actions involved are linked to high material and political costs and frequently determine the final outcome of conflicts. A number of questions arise from this new international practice: What are the reasons and causes of this trend? Why do actors apologize for some but not for other deeds? Why do some actors express sorrow more easily than others? What are the effects of apologies on reconciliation processes? But there are also more fundamental theoretical questions to be asked. What is political guilt in the first place, and can there be collective responsibility for historical wrongs? How are apologies in international relations possible at all? And what, if any, consequences do they have on the parties involved and the political environment in which they act? In what follows, I will concentrate on these three theoretical issues in order to establish the meaning of international apologies and to assess their possible value for the collective memory of nations and the normative framework of international relations.

What is political guilt? The problem of guilt and atonement is politically very sensitive. It raises a number of complicated theoretical and philosophical issues. Politically the most controversial and theoretically the most difficult question is whether such a thing as collective guilt exists – since if there were no collective guilt, there would be no need for collective apology in the first place. Therefore, to establish the meaning and value of political apologies, a number of questions have to be answered. The first question is what guilt is and whether collectives can incur such guilt politically or morally. If answered positively, the next question

Christopher Daase 21

would be whether such guilt also applies to those who have not done anything wrong individually, and whether it extends even to those who have not yet lived when the wrongs were done. On this basis one might further ask whether collective remorse is possible and in what public form it can be communicated to the former victims or their heirs. From there the next question would be whether the victims (individually or collectively) can accept such an apology and indeed forgive, and whether this is also possible if they are only the descendants of the actual victims.1 For each account of this argumentative chain one can raise legitimate objections with the aim to show, as Hermann Lübbe tried, that no ethical basis exists ‘which allows treating members of a current national population with their highly different and contingent personal histories as responsible heirs of their fathers’ sins’ (Lübbe 2001, 75). If this were indeed the case, collective political apologies would be nonsensical. I will show, however, that – in a specific sense – collective guilt is possible and that the commonly felt responsibility for historical injustices is not unfounded theoretically. A good starting point for such a discussion is the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who is still ranked among the most authoritative authors dealing with political guilt. In his booklet Die Schuldfrage,2 first published in 1946, Jaspers distinguishes four kinds of guilt – criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt and metaphysical guilt – in order to come to grips with the crimes committed by Nazi Germany and the individual responsibility of the German population (Jaspers 1946, 10–1). Criminal guilt exists, he argues, if concrete deeds can be objectively attributed to an individual perpetrator. Hence, collective criminal guilt, as restated more recently by Daniel Goldhagen (1996), is unimaginable and unacceptable. Individual criminal guilt must be established by a court of law (or tribunal) and is acquitted by punishment. Political guilt, on the other hand, is a collective phenomenon. After war, political guilt is imposed by the victorious state or states on the defeated enemy. The entire population is liable for the misconduct of the state and all citizens have to bear the costs of reparations, which the victor can impose in accordance with international law. Moral guilt, in turn, does again only concern the individual. Individuals experience moral guilt as violation of their own personal moral standards. These standards reside in the individual human conscience and atonement can be achieved through remorse. Metaphysical guilt, finally, is also a personal matter and exists if a human being feels guilty before God without being guilty in a criminal, political or moral sense. Metaphysical guilt results from the basic solidarity between human beings which makes everybody co-responsible for the wrongs

22


and injustices in the world, especially, but not exclusively, with regard to deeds conducted in their time and with their knowledge (Jaspers 1946, 32). Atonement can be achieved in this case through confession, penance and absolution. It seems, then, as if Jaspers clearly speaks out against collective guilt when he argues: ‘Collective guilt of a people or a group among peoples does not exist – with the exception of political liability – neither as criminal, nor moral, nor metaphysical guilt. To declare a collective guilty is an error that stems from the laziness and arrogance of ordinary uncritical thinking’ (Jaspers 1946, 40). However, Jaspers’ account is not without contradictions (Schefczyk 2008, 81–104). Several pages later, Jaspers tacitly accepts collective guilt, arguing that every German-speaking human being is, willingly or not, co-affected (‘mitbetroffen’) by what has happened in the Third Reich: ‘Not the liability of a state citizen but the co-affectedness (Mitbetroffenheit) of the human being who belongs to the German spiritual and emotional life and co-exists with others of the same tongue, same descent, same fate becomes the basis not for tangible guilt, but for an analogon of joint guilt (Mitschuld)’ (Jaspers 1946, 70–1). Just by being a member of a particular collective, individuals experience a certain responsibility for the acts this collective has done. Indicating the possibility of an ‘analogon’ of collective guilt, Jaspers tries to mitigate the two major problems of his theory, namely first to reduce political guilt to the decree of the victors and secondly to limit moral guilt to the sentiment of individuals. Thus, building on Jaspers’ rather cryptic allusions, a fifth category of political guilt could be developed: the moral guilt of collectives. This guilt would not be the sum of individual moral guilt, but the guilt – most theorists speak rather of ‘responsibility’ – collectively shared among the members of a group (Arendt 1968; Gilbert 2006). The appropriate authority to which such a collective would have to respond could be described as the ‘human consciousness’ or ‘world opinion’, concepts increasingly used in international affairs (Hill 1996). Such a ‘consciousness’ is more than the moral reasoning of individuals and something entirely different than a victor’s verdict. Rather, it is the set of ethical and political principles that constitute the normative structure of international (or even world) society (Bull 1984; Hurrell 2007). Such principles and norms, in turn, can either be assumed to exist through natural law (what Jaspers seems to believe), or to be constructed discursively in the realm of transnational civil society or world public sphere. However, neither the normative proof of the former nor the empirical evidence of the latter can be provided in this article. But it should have become clear that Jaspers, even though


he consistently argues against collective guilt, leaves some room for the experience of collective responsibility, shame and even guilt. A second important problem concerning Jaspers’ typology of guilt is that he seems to ignore historical guilt. Given the fact that in 1946 the central concern was the recent genocide of the Jews conducted by Germans, this neglect is understandable. But for long-term peace building and the healing of historical injustice, the question is crucial to what extent subsequent generations of victims and perpetrators are affected by past events. The idea of trans-generational historical guilt can be rejected on the grounds that it is impossible for individuals to become morally guilty for actions they have not committed, and even more so for actions that have been committed in times in which they were not even born. Historical guilt for collective deeds would then disappear with the death of the last true perpetrator. But this does not do justice to the widespread intuition that people are, or at least should feel, co-responsible for actions done by fellow nationals even in the past. Again, Jaspers’ allusion to membership guilt and collective responsibility could provide an answer. Since collective actors have histories that go beyond individual histories – that is, lives – of their members, each member also has a share in the trans-generational history of the collective. Qua membership, individuals participate in the historical identity of collective actors and can experience glory or shame for actions they have not done themselves (Gilbert 1997). Interestingly enough, this assertion is often repudiated by politicians – although half-heartedly. Often, those who reject the idea of collective guilt are those who support the idea of national pride, like the former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl (Spiegel 1). And those who acknowledge the collective responsibility for historical injustices, like former German President Johannes Rau, hesitate to accept the possibility of national pride, arguing that one could only be proud of something one has achieved by oneself (Spiegel 2). Both positions are equally problematic. If we accept the possibility of national pride, we have to accept the possibility of national shame, and vice versa. To the extent that we perceive of ourselves as members of a collective, for example a nation, we participate in both, the nation’s historical achievements and its historical crimes, its greatness and its infamy, even if it originates in times reaching back far beyond our birth.

How are apologies possible? If we understand collective guilt as the perceived moral co-responsibility of members of a group for the deeds – current or historical – of their fellow

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members and their group as such, the notion loses its enormity and apology becomes possible. Margaret Gilbert has provided the philosophical ground for conceiving collective actors as ‘plural subjects’ (Gilbert 1992), building on earlier notions of ‘co-affectedness’ (Jaspers 1946) and ‘collective responsibility’ (Arendt 1968), as well as supporting concepts such as collective memory and conscience (Halbwachs 1992; Assmann 2005). On this basis Gilbert argues that genuine political apologies are possible, but have to be given in a particular way. Before apologies are discussed, however, it has to be stressed once more that they are a relatively recent phenomenon. There are a number of more traditional forms of dealing with guilt in international relations so as to achieve reconciliation and atonement. The classical form to deal with guilt in international politics is to burden not only the costs but also the blame of a conflict on the defeated party. Reparations thus serve not only the purpose to provide monetary and material compensation for the losses the victor suffered during war, but also to symbolically strengthen the new power relation and its normative basis. Another form of atonement was introduced by the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals after World War II. Their purpose was to de-collectivize political guilt and to prosecute those who had criminally violated international law and basic humanitarian principles. The International Criminal Court, established in 2002, functions as a permanent tribunal and prosecutes individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. A third form of atonement first emerged in Latin America and then spread to Africa: truth commissions. Truth commissions not only concentrate on the perpetrators, but also on the victims. They provide a public forum to give individual victims and their offenders the opportunity for truth telling, reconciliation and healing. While the literature on these forms of ‘transitional justice’ is large (Kritz 1995; Teitel 2000), relatively little has been written about political apologies which constitute a fourth type of atonement. But if we take Jaspers’ argument seriously, that every form of guilt has its own appropriate form of retribution, political apologies could be the right way to deal with non-justiciable collective moral guilt. An apology is the recognition of a past violation or harm in conjunction with the admission of responsibility and the plea for forgiveness. This plea puts the apologizer into a position of vulnerability since he risks admitting his guilt without being forgiven. Psychologists see this reversal of social roles as the crucial purifying element in apologies. The formerly powerful offender becomes powerless and vulnerable, while the formerly inferior victim is empowered and his honour restored


(Tavuchis 1991; Schneider 2000; Lazare 2005). Apologies are often said to be successful only if forgiveness is granted or if at least the apology is accepted. However, forgiveness is no precondition for an apology. Quite to the contrary, the apologizer must take the risk that forgiveness will not be granted. Only then has the apology the chance to transform the conflict and restore lost trust. They cannot undo the past, but they can change the present to enable the future (Smith 2008, Chapter 6). While this sounds reasonable on the individual level, it becomes, again, problematical on the level of social collectives. So far I have argued against methodological individualists who try to reduce social phenomena to the behaviour of individual actors and that, on the contrary, the assumption of collective agency is necessary for understanding certain social facts. Margaret Gilbert provides a useful conceptualization of ‘plural subjects’ to understand collective moral guilt and responsibility. The question is, however, whether such collective guilt can also be collectively acknowledged and repented, and, if yes, how such remorse can be expressed appropriately. Gilbert has demonstrated that collective remorse can be conceived in very different ways. Firstly, as the sum of individual remorse, a group can be said to feel remorse if all members of a group feel personally sorry for their individual deeds. If all members of a group say ‘I am sorry for what I did’, we can speak of (some kind) of collective remorse. However, this only applies to cases in which every member is indeed personally responsible, which is not the case in collective historical guilt. Secondly, we may conceive of collective remorse as the sum of individual remorse about group behaviour. If somebody says ‘I am sorry for what my group did’, he or she feels collective responsibility as member of a group. In this case, he or she may be personally completely innocent, and yet participates in collective remorse. Strictly speaking, however, this is still not collective remorse, but an aggregation of individual membership remorse. Therefore, Gilbert proposes a third kind of collective remorse: group remorse. Group remorse exists if a collective as a whole expresses sorrow for an action; that is, if its members collectively feel remorse and say for example, ‘We regret what we did’. According to Gilbert, only this would qualify as correct representation of an apology for collective moral guilt (Gilbert 2001). But assuming such collective remorse is possible, how can it be effectively communicated? Membership remorse is apparently communicable through personal apology for group actions. Thus, even individuals of later generations can express individual regret for historical injustices. But true collective remorse as group remorse has to be transmitted

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through the whole group, that is, through an official representative. This is the reason why political group remorse requires the public apology by a statesman or woman which has to be given not as personal avowal, but as official statement for the entire group. Then, and only then, may we speak of a proper collective political apology. Official apologies can fail, however, if the ‘rhetorical agency’ (Villadsen 2008, 34), which is necessary for convincingly speaking on the behalf of a collective, is lacking or inadequate. A number of factors have been identified and are currently tested in a research project on ‘Apologies and Reconciliation in International Relations’ at the University of Munich (Daase and Engert 2008). Four conditions are considered to have an influence on whether apologies contribute to reconciliation or not: the person issuing the apology, the credibility with which the apology is uttered, the level of remorse that is expressed, and the level of collective domestic acceptance or resonance for the need to apologize on the part of the apologizing actor.3 With regard to the person who makes an apology, two aspects seem to be crucial: status and role. On the basis of the theory of political representation it can be assumed that apologies are the more effective the higher the representative is ranked in the state hierarchy and the more official and public the statement is. The effectiveness of a political apology may also be dependent on the credibility with which it is presented. Since credibility is difficult to capture as a motive, it can be operationalized as the willingness to bear two kinds of costs, material and political costs. When a perpetrator is willing to pay a material compensation for the damage or suffering caused, it could be considered to enhance the apology from a purely symbolic act and add visible proof of remorse (Minow 1998, Chapter 5). Whether there is a necessary link between material compensation and symbolic apologies (Brooks 1999) is an open question that has to be answered empirically. Furthermore, political costs also play a role: when apologies have to be accomplished despite domestic resistance, the credibility of the remorse displayed by the apologizing representative towards the former victim increases. However, the overall credibility might suffer, since societal acceptance of an apology is also an important factor. Thus, an apology may be more effective the larger the societal approval of such an act is (Gilbert 2001). As long as the former victim has the impression that the apologizing actor does not speak in the name of the whole collective, the victim has to worry about a change in public mood or a change of government that could bring the old regime back to power. In this respect the level of acceptance of collective moral responsibility and the influence of political veto groups have to be analysed. A final variable


to be considered is the level of demonstrated remorse. Here the various levels of ‘collectiveness’ previously discussed, as well as fine semantic nuances of unreservedness, are to be taken into account. It is beyond this article to identify systematically the factors that influence the rhetorical agency of an apologizer and thus determine the success of political apologies. What is important, however, is the fact that not only the formal shape of an apology, but also the social environment, including the reactions of the victim and offender collectives, are crucial for an apology to succeed.

What are the consequences? We can summarize now that political apologies are public expressions of collective remorse over political deeds, whereby collective responsibility is assumed and guilt is accepted without excuse and justification for the past and forgiveness is asked for. Hence, political apologies are extremely ambitious speech acts that require – if they are to be successful – full commitment of the apologizing collective actor and a clear understanding of the theoretical and practical implications of apologies. No wonder then that so many apologies in international relations fail or are given imperfectly such that they cause new conflicts and stir up even more resentment than they tried to defuse. The case of Japan is paradigmatic with its long history of more or less futile attempts to acknowledge its militarist past vis-à-vis China and Korea (Buruma 1994; Dower 1995). But it also makes understandable why it is easier for France to pressure Turkey to apologize for the Armenian genocide than to face up to its own colonial history, for example in Algeria. And even Germany, ‘a pioneer of the phenomenon of state apologies in the twentieth century’ (Löwenheim 2009, 533), took quite a while until it was able to unequivocally acknowledge its guilt vis-à-vis the Jews, and even today struggles with an official apology to the Herero and Nama, the victims of genocidal colonialism in German South-West Africa a hundred years ago (Engert 2009). Under what conditions political apologies are given or not and why they succeed or fail is eventually an empirical question. But what is ‘success’? It would be unrealistic to make full reconciliation and forgiveness the benchmark for successful apologies. A wrongdoing that requires an official apology is usually ‘perceived in the collective memory of the victim group as an injustice that resonates beyond its temporal context, a crime that is aimed at all members of the group as a unit and cannot be forgiven’ (Löwenheim 2009, 540, my emphasis). But why

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then take pains to collectively apologize, if forgiveness is unattainable? This question leads to the paradoxes of political forgiveness, since, as Jacques Derrida claimed, ‘forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable’ (Derrida 2001, 32). In face of the ‘radical evil’ of genocide and mass murder, granting forgiveness is just as inconceivable as asking for it. And yet, both are necessary to transform the relationship between victim and offender and their respective identities. Political apologies are not meant to be ‘successful’ the easy way. To apologize and be acquitted is just as impossible as to forgive and forget. Thus, more than speaking to the victim, apologizing actors speak to themselves and try to create a new moral identity. This is what Jaspers had in mind when he talked about ‘purification (Reinigung)’ of the body politic which can only be achieved through acknowledging moral responsibility and a collective ‘consciousness of guilt (Schuldbewußtsein)’ (Jaspers 1946). By representing collective regret in official apologies, this consciousness is focused and the collective memory of a group or nation transformed. Elisabeth Kiss argues that if a state or nation is not willing to do so, ‘self-serving myths of innocence and one-sided tales of victimization can dominate images of the nation and strangle serious and open public debate on moral issues’ (Kiss 1998, 392). Hermann Lübbe has argued that political apologies indicate a destructive moralization of politics (Lübbe 2001). I argue that not only politics is moralized, but collective actors (such as states, ethnic groups, international organizations and multinational corporations) are ‘moralized’ through apologies and thereby individualized as moral agents. The fact that not only states but also non-state actors increasingly demand and offer apologies demonstrates that globalization creates new opportunities to develop moral and thus political agency: ‘Groups formerly barred from voicing their needs and wishes publicly have increasing success in gaining public hearing and in demanding recognition of their suffering as caused by past policies’ (Villadsen 2008, 29). Whether such moralization is destructive remains to be seen. True, the ‘global culture’ does not yet exist that could serve as a unifying framework for judging appropriate behaviour with respect to past injustices, as Michel-Ralph Trouillot argues (Rolph-Trouillot 2000). But this global culture is emerging and the discourse on apologies is a crucial element of it. Maybe the ethics does not yet exist to judge political collectives for historical wrongs, as Lübbe maintains (Lübbe 2001). But this ethics is developing. The new practice of collective apologies can be seen as a stepping stone to a cosmopolitan morality of acknowledging past injustices.


Conclusion Under the condition of globalization, collective actors – first and foremost states, but also non-state actors – feel compelled to address their historical wrongs and come to terms with their painful memories. Apologies in one form or another are a way to create a new relationship with former victims and to embark on the path of reconciliation. What is more, apologies provide an opportunity to reinvent the collective self and to purify national identity after gross political misconduct. The more political actors are willing to participate in the new practice of international apology, the more a cosmopolitan morality grows that allows moral argument in international relations. Maybe this is the true meaning of apologies, their individualizing and socializing effect on collective actors as moral subjects and the creation of what will ultimately be a world community that takes collective political responsibility seriously.

Notes 1 Obviously, to prove the entire chain is a daunting task. I will therefore concentrate on the possibility of apologies and leave the question of forgiveness, that is, the reaction of victims, aside. But see Wiesenthal (1998), Digeser (1998), Minow (1998), Enright (1998) and Govier (2002). 2 English translation ( Jaspers 1961). 3 The independent variables all refer to the actor issuing the apology. But because reconciliation is a bilateral process, one has not only to consider the perpetrator but also the willingness of the victim to forgive, as well as the existence of alternative forms of atonement as intervening variables.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah (2003) [1968], ‘Collective Responsibility’, in: Jerome Kohn (ed.), Responsibility and Judgment – Hannah Arendt (New York/NY: Schocken Books), 147–58. Assmann, Jan (2005) [1992], Religion and Collective Memory: Ten Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Austin, John L. (1961), ‘A Plea for Excuses’, in: James Opie Umson and Geoffrey James Warnock (eds), Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 85–101. Barkan, Elazar (2000), The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York/NY: W.W. Norton). Brooks, Roy L. (1999), ‘The Age of Apology’, in: Roy L. Brooks (ed.), When Sorry isn’t Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice (New York/NY: New York University Press), 3–11.

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Bull, Hedley (1984), ‘The Emergence of a Universal International Society’, in: Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 117–26. Buruma, Ian (1994), The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York/NY: Farrar Straus Giroux). Cohen, Raymond (2004), ‘Apology and Reconciliation in International Relations’, in: Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov (ed.), From Conflict Resolution to Reconciliation (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 177–96. Cooper, David (2001), ‘Collective Responsibility, “Moral Luck”, and Reconciliation’, in: Aleksandar Jokic (ed.), War Crimes and Collective Wrongdoing (Oxford: Blackwell), 205–15. Cunningham, Michael (1999), ‘Saying Sorry: The Politics of Apology’, The Political Quarterly 79/3, 285–93. Daase, Christopher and Engert, Stefan (2008), Guilt and Atonement in International Politics: The Role of Apologies in Reconciliation Processes, paper prepared for the International Studies Association Annual Conference 2008 in San Francisco/US. Derrida, Jacques (2001), On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London: Routledge). Digeser, Peter (1998), ‘Forgiveness and Politics: Dirty Hands and Imperfect Procedures’, Political Theory 26/5, 700–24. Dower, John W. (1995), ‘Japan Addresses Its War Responsibility’, The Journal of the International Institute 3/1, 8–11. Engert, Stefan (2009), ‘Politische Schuld, moralische Außenpolitik? Deutschland, Namibia und der lange Schatten der kolonialen Vergangenheit’ in: Sebastian Harnisch, Hanns W. Maull and Siegfried Schieder (eds) Solidarität und internationale Gemeinschaftsbildung: Beiträge zur Soziologie der internationalen Beziehungen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus), 277–303. Enright, Robert D. and North, Joanna (eds) (1998), Exploring Forgiveness (Madison/ WI: University of Wisconsin Press). Gilbert, Margaret (1992 [1989]), On Social Facts (Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press). Gilbert, Margaret (1997), ‘Group Wrongs and Guilt Feelings’, Journal of Ethics 1/1, 65–84. Gilbert, Margaret (2001), ‘Collective Remorse’, in: Aleksandar Jokic (ed.), War Crimes and Collective Wrongdoing (Oxford: Blackwell), 216–35. Gilbert, Margaret (2006), ‘Who’s to Blame? Collective Moral Responsibility and Its Implications for Group Members’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 30/1, 94–114. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah (1996), Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Abacus). Govier, Trudy (2002), Vengeance and Forgiveness (New York/NY: Routledge). Halbwachs, Maurice (1992) [1952], On Collective Memory (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Hill, Christopher (1996), ‘World Opinion and the Empire of Circumstances’, International Affairs 72/1, 109–31. Hurrell, Andrew (2007), On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Jaspers, Karl (1946), Die Schuldfrage: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Frage (Zürich: Artemis).

Christopher Daase 31 Jaspers, Karl (1961), The Question of German Guilt (New York: Capricorn Books). Kiss, Elisabeth (1998), ‘Saying We’re Sorry: Liberal Democracy and the Rhetoric of Collective Identity’, Constellations 4/3, 387–98. Kritz, Neil J. (ed.) (1995), Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes. 3 vols. (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press). Lazare, Aaron (2005), On Apology (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Löwenheim, Nava (2009), ‘A Haunted Past: Requesting Forgiveness for Wrongdoing in International Relations’, Review of International Studies 35/3, 531–55. Lübbe, Hermann (2001), ‘Ich entschuldige mich’. Das neue politische Bußritual (Berlin: Siedler). Minow, Martha (1998), Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press). Montville, Joseph V. (1993), ‘The Healing Function in Political Conflict Resolution’, in: Dennis J. D. Sandole and Hugo van der Merwe (eds), Conflict Resolution Theory and Practice: Integration and Application (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 112–27. Nawratil, Heinz (2002), Der Kult mit der Schuld: Geschichte und Unterbewusstsein (München: Universitas). Rolph-Trouillot, Michel (2000), ‘Abortive Rituals. Historical Apologies in the Global Era’, Interventions 2/2, 171–86. Schefczyk, Michael (2008), Verantwortung für historisches Unrecht: Eine philosophische Untersuchung. Habilitationsschrift im Fach Philosophie, Universität Zürich. Schneider, Carl D. (2000), ‘What It Means to be Sorry: The Power of Apology in Mediation’, Mediation Quarterly 17/3, 265–80. Smith, Nick (2008), I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Spiegel 1: Der Spiegel, 5/1984, 30 January 1984, 27–8. Spiegel 2: Der Spiegel 13/2001, 26 March 2001, 29–30. Tavuchis, Nicholas (1991), Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation (Stanford/CA: Stanford University Press). Teitel, Ruti G. (2000), Transitional Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Thompson, Janna (2002), Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Justice (Cambridge: Polity). Thompson, Janna (2006), ‘Collective Responsibility for Historic Injustices’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 30/1, 154–67. Villadsen, Lisa Storm (2008), ‘Speaking on Behalf of Others: Rhetorical Agency and Epideictic Functions in Official Apologies’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38/1, 25–45. Wiesenthal, Simon (1998), The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (New York/NY: Schocken Books).

2 Australian Memory and the Apology to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous People Danielle Celermajer and A. Dirk Moses

Introduction: Global Memory and Australia The transformation of global politics in the early 1990s marked the end of the ‘short twentieth century’ (Hobsbawm 1994) and its Cold War certainties. If the collapse of the Soviet Union, end of apartheid in South Africa and fall of Latin America dictators indicated the victorious extension of the international liberal order, the outbreak of genocidal ethnic conflict in Rwanda, Yugoslavia and the Caucasus also heralded the return of integral nationalism. These events marked a new temporality and resultant new type of politics (Olick 2007). Because socialist hopes of a post-nationalist horizon had been dashed, grievances were now framed in terms of ethnic and national histories, which some observers interpreted as a regressive political imaginary of identity politics that divided peoples and occluded the persistence of structural oppression and inequality (Rolph-Trouillot 2000, 171–86; Torpey 2006). In particular, the plethora of official apologies, truth commissions and reparations payments for ‘historical injustice’ suggested a preoccupation with the past rather than the future.1 Certainly, there is no doubting the transnational extent of apologies by governments, heads of state, professional and commercial groups, religious organizations and spiritual leaders to exploited individuals and abused communities, living and dead (Celermajer 2009; Nobles 2008; Torpey 2002; Cunningham 1999, 285–93). Consider the following sample. In 2001, the Roman Catholic Church and the Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski apologized for the massacre of Jews by Christian Poles in Jedwabne in 1941. Pope John Paul II made numerous apologies for the Church’s past imperialist endeavours, such as the Church’s historical ridiculing of African cultural beliefs. In January 2004, at the tomb of a leader 32

Danielle Celermajer and A. Dirk Moses

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of the Herero people in present-day Namibia, the German Ambassador expressed his country’s ‘profound regrets’ for Imperial Germany’s role in the massacre and starvation of some 80,000 Herero and Nama people between 1904 and 1907 in what had been German South-West Africa. Belgium apologized to the Congolese people for the 1961 assassination of the country’s Prime Minister following the release of its own parliamentary commission’s finding that Belgium had been ‘morally responsible’ for his death. In November 1995, the Queen of Great Britain signed an apology expressing regret for the seizure of Maori land in New Zealand by the British colonizers in 1863. British Prime Minister Tony Blair dabbled with, but skirted, an apology to the Irish, first in the more remote context of the Great Potato Famine and second with respect to more recent violence. President Bill Clinton expressed regret for US support of African dictators during the Cold War, and in 1993, he signed Public Law 103–50, the Apology Resolution to Native Hawaiians, marking the hundredth anniversary of the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii. Earlier, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, declaring that historical injustices ought to be amended, granting a formal apology and authorizing US$20,000 in compensatory redress to each survivor of America’s Second World War programme of mass exclusion and detention of Japanese Americans. The transnational violations of slavery gave rise to an appropriately global (though short-lived) apology debate, which took place when a collective, international apology for slavery and the slave trade rose to become one of the key issues and points of contention during the United Nations World Conference on Racism in Durban in 2001. A particularly dramatic apology was the Reconciliation Walk repenting the crusades and more generally the wrongs of Christendom. In this case, there was no representative leader, but rather over 2150 Christians, mostly evangelical Protestants, who began their new crusade on Easter Sunday 1996 in Cologne, the same city where the Crusades had begun 900 years earlier, and retraced the steps of the original Crusades, going from town to town and offering their apology. Liberals are optimistic about these trends. Elazar Barkan, for instance, heralds ‘the new global trend of restitution for historical injustices’ as evidence of a ‘neo-Enlightenment’ context in which national and ethnic groups are finally granted many of the rights that liberal philosophers ascribed to individuals. Because international public opinion is ‘increasingly attentive to moral issues’, there is ‘a potentially new international morality’ and a ‘new globalism’ that could even constitute a ‘new international system’ (Barkan 2001, 317; Barkan and Karn 2006). Where

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Australian Memory and Apology

post-liberals deplore the new memory politics for forgetting economic injustice, liberals think that highlighting past abuses of power promotes its responsible use in the present (Gibney and Roxstrom 2001, 911–39). Nevertheless, even post-liberal sceptics agree that ‘the international’ constitutes the horizon for the many apologies made in the 1990s and 2000s. Without the globalization of national political consciousness – acting as if ‘the whole world is watching us’ – there would have been less compulsion to apologize to groups or nations that ‘one’s own’ had oppressed. Correlatively, it was the fact that nations were watching the whole world that created the conditions for apology to spread from one national or regional stage to another. But far from celebrating the renewed rhetoric of human rights and ‘transitional justice’ (Arthur 2009; Teitel 2002) post-liberal critics see this manifestation of globalization as little more than the extension of the North Atlantic (neo)liberal economic and political order, with the commensurate blindness to structural inequality. The preoccupation with historical injustice encourages a debilitating victim mentality, they argue, setting ethnic and national groups against each other instead of empowering them to band together against the common enemy: transnational capitalism. For instance, the anthropologist Michel Rolph-Trouillot caustically observes: Steeped in a language of blood and soil, collectivities are now defined by the wrongs they committed and for which they should apologize, or by the wrongs they suffered and for which they should receive apology. Further, the historical necessity of joining a collectivity of collectivities best known as ‘the international community’ prompts these newly redefined subjects to play out the liberal social contract on a global scale. (Rolph-Trouillot 2000, 183) Philosophically questionable as attributing individual liberal rights to large groups may be, the intensely emotional debates about national pasts, which evoke guilt and shame on the one hand and pride and honour on the other, indicate that analysis limited to the function of such acts omits their important affective and symbolic dimensions. Trauma, whether experienced personally or transmitted inter-generationally, is not just a cultural construction, and powerful arguments have been advanced about the therapeutic expression of anger and resentment by victims of abuse. If political apologies, truth commissions and other reparatory gestures are enabled by globalization, they are experienced


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locally by subjects for whom ethnic and/or national belonging and trauma associated with such identities are elemental to their sense of self (Volkan 2003, 217–36; Brudhold 2008). Nowhere has the fractious nature of political apologies been as central to the national drama as in Australia. From the later 1990s, following the official recommendation of the report of the National Inquiry into the Removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families – the ‘Bringing Them Home Report’ of 1997 (HREOC 1997) – significant numbers of Australians began campaigning for their national government to officially apologize to Indigenous people for removal policies. In the years immediately following the release of the report, state (that is, provincial) governments, churches, police forces and other groups apologized pursuant to its recommendations. The conservative federal (that is, national) government, however, stubbornly refused. Indeed, this refusal became a signifier for its broader repudiation of the view that contemporary politics ought to be conducted in the light of Australia’s troubled past. Only the election of a centre-left Labour government in late 2007 saw the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, deliver an apology, his first act in the new parliament, on 13 February 2008. Making front page news around the world, Rudd’s gesture was emulated months later by the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who apologized to the approximately 150,000 First Nations victims of the country’s boarding school policy of assimilation (Diebel 2008). From the first, Rudd’s announcement of an official apology provoked controversy. Some Indigenous leaders campaigned for reparations to be included, and when they were not, Indigenous academics and activists abroad said the government had engaged in ‘cheap reconciliation’ (Corntassel and Holder 2008, 465–89). In an unlikely coalition, conservative commentators shared this hostility to perceived ‘glib compassion’ and feared that an apology would be ‘abject’ (Albrechtsen 2008). Indeed, consistent with the long-standing arguments of the previous government, many Australians continued to feel that they were being found collectively guilty for the acts of past generations. These acts were well-intentioned, if misguided, they claimed, and they resented the implication that they were ‘irredeemably racist, sexist, and xenophobic’ (Henderson 2008). Then there was confusion about what an apology actually meant, while philosophers wondered whether it made sense to apologize for deeds which, had they not been committed, may have meant that the current generation would not exist (Le Couteur 2001, 146–58; Thompson 2000, 470–5).2 Leftist critics, for their part, were disappointed that the Prime Minister did not mention that the ‘Bringing

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Them Home’ report judged the removal policies to be genocidal, and that he failed to apologize for colonial occupation as a whole. And they were suspicious of the accompanying ‘reconciliation’ rhetoric which suggested that Indigenous trauma had now been tidily addressed in a healed and conflict-free nation (Barta 2008, 201–14; Attwood 2008, 217–38). It is true that the apology omitted frontier violence, that it offered an opportunity for settler Australians to feel morally upstanding (‘a warm inner glow’ was the common phrase), that it was not coupled with reparations and that it was couched in the charged language of ‘national healing’ and a ‘reconciled’ future. But the striking fact is that many Indigenous Australians welcomed it nonetheless. If the addressees of the apology accepted it as a meaningful, effective and not merely ideological act, then scholarly analysis needs to explain how and why it could be an exemplar of ‘political action’ (Arendt 1958) rather than pontificating about supposed shortcomings deduced from theoretical postulates. That is our aim in this chapter. We proceed in four steps: first, we provide a brief history of the apology in Australia; secondly, we survey the reaction of Indigenous people; thirdly, we analyse its post-liberal critique; and lastly we turn to our own argument about apology’s efficacy.

The apology Indigenous disquiet and activism in the 1980s and early 1990s about the forced removal of children culminated in a demand for a national inquiry into a practice and policy which, despite its persistence right into the late 1960s, was virtually unknown beyond Indigenous communities and certainly unacknowledged in any official sense. The federal (then centre-left Labour) government initiated such an inquiry in 1995, to be conducted by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC). In a slightly earlier development, in 1991, the same federal government had established the ‘Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation’ (CAR) to commence a formal process of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, an alternative to a treaty, the latter having been advocated by many Indigenous groups but regarded as politically unviable by the government. The Council’s mission was to promote its goal – ‘A united Australia which respects this land of ours; values the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage; and provides justice and equity for all’ – within ten years by educating non-Indigenous Australians about Indigenous issues (CAR). In 1997, the HREOC tabled its nearly 700-page long report, ’Bringing Them Home’, which recommended, inter alia, that all Australian


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parliaments and other responsible agents tender formal apologies to Indigenous Australians and that a national ‘Sorry Day’ be established.3 It also recommended that all Australian parliaments, as well as police forces and the churches and other non-governmental organizations that played a role in removal, officially acknowledge responsibility of their predecessors, and that they negotiate an appropriate form of words for public apologies to Indigenous individuals, families and communities (HREOC, Recommendations 5a, 5b and 6). These recommendations underpinned the formation of a ‘National Sorry Day Committee’, which organized the first ‘Sorry Day’ ceremony in 1998. Henceforth, ‘saying sorry’ became a national obsession, but also one entangled in the broader discourse of reconciliation. The apology was, for example, a central plank of the ‘Corroboree 2000’ conference of the CAR, when approximately one million Australians marched in state capitals across the country with banners saying ‘sorry’. ‘Sorry Books’, open for any Australian to sign, circulated the country. People could also register their names on the apology website, which in early 2004 contained about 250,000 names. ‘Seas of Hands’, made up of coloured hands that individuals planted to mark both apology and the desire to ‘reconcile’ sprang up across the country from Bondi Beach to Uluru and the lawns of Parliament House. The reasons for such popular empathy lay in the nature of the ‘Bringing Them Home’ report. Here was a story of children (many of whom were the contemporaries of the politically active public), who had committed no crime other than being born to an Aboriginal mother, but who had suffered horrors anyone could relate to in a very personal way. Perhaps even more staggering was the national silence that had accompanied the practice. Against this national silence, the Commission compiled extensive evidence of the history, drawn from written and oral submissions from government departments, non-governmental agencies, expert witnesses and, most importantly, hundreds of Aboriginal people who had themselves been removed or had been directly affected by removal.4 Indeed, what lent the report its particular power was the way in which this text, the official report of the Australian Commonwealth, built its vision of history and its policy arguments from the first-person testimonies of Aboriginal people. Each section was suffused with the voices of Aboriginal people telling the very stories that had been excluded from the official history of the Australian nation and, above all, telling them with their own voices – the voices that had not qualified as legitimate subjects (as distinct from objects) of history. Their memories became our history and, critically, part of the history of the nation.

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After ‘Bringing Them Home’ called for an apology, saying sorry and performing repentance became a national motif. Apologies proliferated across the social, geographical and political landscape. First, there were apologies from groups directly nominated in the recommendations. All Australian parliaments (with the notable absence of the Commonwealth, right until 2008) tendered official apologies staged as part of dramatic, performative sequences held in their ceremonial chambers.5 Chief magistrates apologized and apologies were tendered on behalf of state police forces, as well as on behalf of a range of governmental agencies. The official organs of a number of churches apologized, specifically those that were directly involved in the process of removal, but also some with no direct historical role.6 Apologies also went well beyond the formal recommendations, issuing from a plethora of groups not specifically mentioned, but which nevertheless felt called to the discourse. Some drew an explicit connection between their role and the practice of removal.7 But others, with no apparent connection with removal, such as trade unions, civic clubs and associations, schools and parents’ and citizens’ associations, also saw fit to tender formal apologies. Against this cacophony of repentant voices, Prime Minister John Howard’s explicit long-term refusal to apologize resounded in its silence. His main objection was that it was wrong for contemporary Australians to apologize for something for which they were not personally responsible, but he also defended the policy as well-intentioned and even occasionally highly successful, albeit perhaps (in retrospect) mistaken. He was willing to express his sadness for the suffering of individuals, but only in an entirely personal and not a representative capacity. When, at the launch of the report at the National Reconciliation Convention in May 1997, Howard offered a carefully circumscribed expression of personal sorrow, members of the audience rose and turned their backs – a strong mark of contempt and refusal to recognize or respect his authority.8 Howard was certainly not alone and his stance attracted support from a significant number of Australians.9 Its unintended effect, however, was to raise the stakes of the debate. Many of the groups that had apologized now turned their public statements to calls for the Prime Minister to apologize. If the apology movement had had some intrinsic half-life, Howard’s silence – or more accurately the particular form of words he was willing to enunciate,10 and his deployment of the issue as a rallying point for his version of Australian identity, politics and history – ensured that the issue would remain on the public agenda. And so it did, right until the change of government ten years later, where it


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became the staging for the new Prime Minister to announce a change in Australia’s political culture. In 2007, after 11 years, the Howard-led conservative government was defeated by Labor, with a national apology explicitly at the top of its political agenda. Indeed, in a remarkably powerful piece of political performance, on 13 February 2008, at 9 a.m. sharp, as the first piece of business of the new parliament, and in the presence of members of the stolen generation and their families, the new Prime Minster tendered a formal apology. Four former Prime Ministers from both sides of the political divide were present, although the most recent was present only in the form of the new Prime Minister’s pointed reference to the ‘stony, stubborn and deafening silence’ of the nation’s parliament for more than a decade. That morning, silence took on a different form as the members and guests inside, the thousands of people watching giant screens on the lawns outside, the tens of thousands gathered in city squares and the 1.3 million watching as every television station in the country simulcast the apology were transfixed by Rudd’s words. The apology itself was a masterful piece of political rhetoric and broadly acknowledged as such (CoA2). It began with a statement of respect for Australia’s Indigenous peoples, briefly moved through reflection on the blemished aspect of Australia’s history and then paused to declare that we had come to a pause in history, the time to right the wrongs. Rudd then enunciated five apologies: for the laws and policies of successive governments and parliaments that had inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on fellow Australians; for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, communities and country; for the pain, suffering and hurt of the stolen generations, their descendants and their families left behind; for the breaking up of families and communities; and for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and culture. He then requested that the apology be received in the spirit in which it had been given, and made seven statements about the future: that this moment opens a new page of the future; that by virtue of acknowledging the past, we might lay claim to a future that embraces all Australians; a future where the injustices of the past must never happen again; a future where we harness the determination of all Australians (Indigenous and non-Indigenous together) to close the socio-economic gap; a future of new solutions to enduring problems; a future based on mutual respect, resolve and responsibility; and, finally, a future of genuine equality. Following the formal apology, Rudd meticulously described the history of removal, the abuses inflicted, his own encounter with people’s

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resultant suffering and the reasons why it was critical for the nation to apologize. Occupying both the symbolic body of the representative of the nation and the very human body of a man profoundly affected by shame and sadness for the suffering of particular human beings, his speech navigated the complex personal and political character of the apology. His address closed with a call to the nation to bring the two centuries of Australia’s racially divided history to a close, and to enter the future with new eyes and new forms of mutual recognition. He invited all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, government and opposition, State and Commonwealth, first peoples, the first white arrivals and the most recently arrived Australians to turn the page and begin to write a new history. There was a palpable sense that a new future had been laid out in front of the entire nation. The aspirational national unity was of course imperfect. After much internal struggle, the former party of government, now the opposition, resolved that it would support the apology, but continuous with its ambivalence, the speech that Brendan Nelson (the Leader of the Opposition) gave immediately following Rudd’s was peppered with qualifications, including references to the often ‘well-intentioned’ nature of the policy (CoA3). Consistent with a decade’s battles over history, Nelson went to great pains to ensure that for every acknowledgement of the wrongs experienced by Indigenous peoples, there was a parallel narrative about the struggle of the non-Indigenous peoples who ‘settled’ the nation. Like Rudd, he called for an act of imagination whereby we place ourselves in the shoes of others, but his concern was to ensure sympathetic imaginings of those who might be perpetrators. What he saw as balance, however, others experienced as insult; gatherings of people watching the performance turned their backs on the screens or turned the sound off altogether. The opposition’s speech raised the ire of many people who resented its meanness on a day that seemed to be about unqualified recognition, but in a relatively short time it fell back to the status of an annoyance, like an irritating fly on a perfect day. Those who might have thought that after years of feet-dragging the moment, when it came, would mean little could not have been more wrong. Many people who had expressed cynicism about the apology, even those who were not sympathetic to the new government, found themselves profoundly involved and affected. Over the following days and weeks, the press, radio talk-back and face-to-face conversations were full of deeply emotional responses by Australians to the words ‘I say sorry’ given pride of place by the national government, and the unprecedented


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hope that this might indeed be a turning point in Australia’s political culture. As Don Watson, the historian who had penned the famous Redfern address to Indigenous Australians for former Labour Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1992, put it a few days later: I think it’s a different country since Wednesday […] It’s a bit different in most of our heads, whether we’re for or against it. And I think that Kevin Rudd has given a sort of moral compass to the matter of our relations with Aboriginal Australia […] It’s the sort of thing by which we can steer in future […] next time a bureaucracy, State government, Federal, or whatever, fails to provide those things they have promised to provide, or are supposed to provide in Aboriginal communities, then they can in some way be held to moral account. That’s what words can do for the country, and I think Kevin Rudd’s words were of that order. (Radio National)

Indigenous reactions Watson’s analysis was similar to that of Indigenous leaders and ordinary folk, many of whom had travelled to Parliament House in Canberra to watch the apology on large public viewing screens. We quote their responses at length so that their voices may be heard. They reveal a number of themes: first, that acknowledgement of their suffering was personally significant; and second, that they now felt part of the national story, which was future-oriented and optimistic. They were engaged in both an Indigenous and broader national journey. Integration into the political community (‘the nation’) did not entail the effacement of their Aboriginality. On the contrary, their new feeling of full citizenship enabled them to make distinctive and enduring claims. The official acknowledgement of the Stolen Generation was welcomed effusively by Indigenous people. Tom Calma, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, said that the ‘national apology will directly benefit members of the Stolen Generations by validating their experiences and the rest of society as a whole by building a bridge between all Australians’ (HREOC 2008). ‘I thought it was wonderful, a light shone upon us’, declared Chris Stewart, whose grandmother and mother had been stolen (Herald 1). Michael McLeod explained the effect of the apology thus: ‘I never expected to hear that in my lifetime. Personally, this is part of my healing process – just the recognition on

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that level. It’s moving and it’s hit me’ (Karvelas and Rintoul 2008). The popular Olympic athlete, Cathy Freeman, echoed these sentiments: [S]aying sorry will mean so much to so many people. It is going to be a really proud moment for us. For my family, it allows some kind of healing and forgiveness to take place where there is less anger and bitterness in the hearts of people. It takes away the pain. We will never forget, but this allows us to forgive. In the Prime Minister doing this, we are seeing understanding and acknowledgement. (Koch 2008) The reaction of Christine Fejo-King, a Larrikia, Warrangumu woman from the Northern Territory and co-chairperson of the Stolen Generations Alliance, was characteristic: For members of the Stolen Generations, their descendents and families, it was a day filled with high emotions. We shed tears of sadness and joy. We hugged with happiness and for comfort. And for many of us, it was the relief and peace we had been searching for, for so long […] Saying ‘Sorry’ was the right thing to do. Past government policies and practices of removing Indigenous children have damaged so many peoples’ lives. Saying ‘Sorry’ acknowledged the past, the trauma it caused at the time, and the hurt and suffering it continues to cause today. (Fejo-King 2008) Full membership of the national community now seemed like a realistic possibility. Brian Butler, who had led the earliest calls for the Inquiry in the 1980s, said that the apology meant that ‘we can feel that we are part of Australia. We are part of society’ (Irvine 2008). Noel Tovey, who had been removed as a child, agreed: ‘It wasn’t just saying sorry for what happened, but I’m sorry for 200 years, and now we are all part of Australia. It’s the start of a new beginning. It’s hugely important’ (Patty 2008). Chris Sarra, head of the Indigenous Education Leadership Institute, agreed that the apology made ‘a profound difference’. It gave ‘people confidence that here is a government that is prepared to do things with Aboriginal communities rather than to Aboriginal communities’ (Coorey 2008). The theme of ‘national healing’ was prominent in Indigenous responses. According to Christine Fejo-King: The Federal Government’s apology to the Stolen Generations was not just about healing for Aboriginal people. It was also about the healing


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of our nation. It was a proud moment when we, as a country, were mature enough to recognise a dark chapter of our history, face it, and look towards a better future for all. The act of saying sorry laid an important foundation stone for all of us to move forward together. (Fejo-King 2008) Marcia Langton, Professor of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, likewise addressed this theme: The nation would be healed if we could consign this history to our past by admitting that it was wrong to take children from their families in order to prevent Aboriginal ways of life and traditions from continuing. I ask that all Australians understand this part of our history and recognise that such terrible wrongs must never be repeated. (Langton 2008) For prominent Indigenous legal scholar, Larissa Behrendt, the apology was part of a journey of healing for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians: The apology is […] another step in the healing process for many Aboriginal people who are on the journey home after being removed from their families. It’s also another step forward in the broader narrative that Australians want to tell themselves about who they are, where they have come from, where our country is headed, and what the political value of home means in Australia. (Behrendt 2009, 84) Although the apology apparently took the past as its referent, the repeated references to new national membership and the notion of journeys, ‘going forward together’, ‘new chapters’ and even ‘rebirth’, implied that it trained people’s eyes towards open futures. Torres Strait Islander Lydia George said, ‘The first [Rudd] speech was very symbolic … I was thinking of my granddaughter and her future is now, not tomorrow. She’ll face a new future that will be bright. The healing process has began [sic]’ (Narushima 2008). Aboriginal actor Ernie Dingo said, ‘[It is] a chance to rejoice, rebirth … knowing that what has happened over the last 80 years has not been swept under the carpet’ (Irvine 2008). Noel Tovey said, ‘It’s also now possible after today for everyone to go forward. I’ve had people say sorry many times in my life, but that had a particular

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meaning’ (Patty 2008). Ray Fine told a journalist: ‘My family had been affected directly and I felt like a chain had finally broke from us. There’s still racism to deal with but hopefully from this day we’ll go forward together’ (Narushima 2008). Rhonda Dixon-Grovener, from a family that had 13 members removed, remarked, ‘To hear this and see this and be part of this in my lifetime, it’s made me feel that maybe there is a new beginning for Aboriginal people in Australia’ (Herald 2). Walgett-born elder Aunty Beryl Van-Oploo said that she had ‘been in tears for two days just from remembering the people that fought for our rights. Because my dad had not […] I do applaud the Prime Minister and I do applaud the Parliament […] I hope we can all move forward together’ (Herald 2). These themes of a better Indigenous and common Australian future were ubiquitous in speeches by Indigenous leaders. Christine Fejo-King said of the apology: ‘We’ve just had the most momentous thing happen in the history of this country […] This is a journey that we’re on. We haven’t reached the end’ (NIT 1). She continued: [The apology] cannot erase the memories and experiences that scar many members of Stolen Generations. But it’s the start of a new chapter. Now is the time for us to write a new future for all Australians so that no child will grow up to be discriminated against because of their race or the colour of their skin. And all children will have the same opportunities to achieve and be the best they can. (Fejo-King 2008) Chris Graham, editor of the National Indigenous Times, who overcame his deep scepticism about the apology after the event, summarized his new position thus: Rudd’s speech marks the end of ignorance and arrogance. The work, obviously, is far from done. And don’t doubt for a minute that Rudd won’t be at the centre of plenty of disputes as we move forward. But in apologizing to members of the Stolen Generations, Rudd has provided a roadmap to the future for this nation, built on mutual respect and understanding. Or in his own words, a ‘new beginning’. (Graham 2008) Professor Mick Dodson, a member of the Yawuru peoples, co-chairman of Reconciliation Australia, director of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at the Australian National University and co-chair of the original National Inquiry, echoed this when he said, ‘The apology


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to Indigenous Australians is not about dwelling on the past, it’s about building a future’. The significant action being taken today by the Australian Parliament will provide a foundation of respect on which we can build a proper relationship and work together to make things better. It is only one piece of the complex puzzle of reconciliation, but it is the corner piece that sets us on our way. I am inspired by this apology as an act of true reconciliation towards Indigenous Australia. It allows us to move forward with honesty, an acceptance of shame about parts of our history and with courage, pride, maturity and hope. It is delivered in an environment of determination that may just see us addressing the unfinished business of reconciliation, demonstrated in stark terms by the 17-year life expectancy gap between our children. (M. Dodson 2008) His brother, Patrick, chairman of the Lingiari Foundation and the founding chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, likewise hailed the historical significance of the apology for opening up both an Indigenous and a common Australian future: A simple word has opened the door to a better future for all. […] We have at this point in Australian history an opportunity for a national renaissance based on modern settler Australia connecting with those who have occupied and managed these lands for countless millennia. In this process we have the liberating potential to forge a unique national identity and purpose; one that rises above the tragedy of our colonial and racist history and enshrines respect for cultural diversity as a pivotal cornerstone of our nation’s existence. The saying of these few words in our national Parliament does open the bridge to the future, a future we can share, a future we can shape, a future we shall achieve if we have the courage. For the first time in many years the resolution of the unfinished business between us seems possible. (P. Dodson 2008) Larissa Behrendt referred to both a national and an Indigenous agenda. For the former, now constituted by an Indigenous and non-Indigenous collective ‘we’, there were common tasks. For the Aboriginal people I spoke to, it was uplifting to see that so many Australians did not share Howard’s view, one that had

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dominated for so long, but instead clearly understood that they could not escape what happened in the past and should acknowledge that, without guilt, but with a positive view about how we can do better in the future. (Behrendt 2009) The apology was not of course seen by Indigenous peoples as a universal panacea. Indigenous leaders Lowitja O’Donoghue, Mick Dodson, Pat Dodson, Larissa Behrendt, Michael Mansell and others insisted that it was not inconsistent with and should not put an end to the demand for material compensation (NIT 2; Coorey 2008). ‘The Fight [for compensation] Continues’, declared Indigenous journalist Amy McQuire eleven months after the apology (McQuire 2008). And there was ambivalence from other Indigenous people. Walangari Kartanwarra said, ‘I still have mixed emotions. It will probably be a year later before things start to happen and people start to feel Aboriginal people belong’ (Jopson 2008). Edward Alfred Lovett, Elder of the Gunditjmara Nation, said: So how can I accept an apology without proper compensation for all the injustices, pain and suffering that I experienced as an Indigenous person that resulted from government policies and procedures? Words alone can never make up for the loss of family and for what many of us suffered in institutions. The word ‘sorry’ cannot mean anything to me as an individual without compensation for the pain and suffering that occurred during the colonization and dispossession of my people. (Lovett 2008) John Moriarty was upset that the apology omitted ‘cultural genocide’, while Mick Edwards doubted that any gestures would suffice: ‘How can you compensate for a broken mind?’ (Karvelas and Rintoul 2008; Cooke 2008).

Post-liberal critique of reconciliation and the apology The principle intellectual opposition to the apology and ‘reconciliation’, however, came not from Indigenous intellectuals or even conservatives, who were defeated politically in late 2007 and who, largely for pragmatic reasons, grudgingly supported the apology. It came from post-colonial critics for whom apologies are the latest technique of colonial domination. The means of oppression is no longer outright racism but the


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optimistic liberalism of multiculturalism that allows national elites and populations to think they have solved the problem of Indigenous (or minority) alterity. This style of argument is popular in North American anthropology in particular, which has made ‘late liberalism’ its object of inquiry (having lost interest in ‘late capitalism’). Multiculturalism and human rights discourses in Guatemala and Mexico, for instance, are held to be a greater ‘menace’ to Indigenous people than previous policies of assimilation (Hale 2002, 485–524; Speed 2005, 29–47).12 Elizabeth Povinelli has applied this paradigm to ‘Australian liberal multiculturalism’, which she regards as ‘an ideology and practice of governance’ (Povinelli 2002).13 The principal fear of post-colonial/post-liberal critics is that the presumed totalism of liberal governmentality and liberal (for example non-Indigenous) subjectivity effaces the radical alterity of indigeneity. But there is a danger of essentializing Indigenous otherness as a form of resistance to colonialism and the capitalist imaginary, and of these critics projecting the ‘rebellious academic subjectivity’ into their ethnographic observations (Brown 1996, 729–35; Morton 1998, 355–85). This move is particularly evident in a much-cited critique of apologies by Haydie Gooder and Jane Jacobs, who mocked the apologizers as ‘sorry people’ (Gooder and Jacobs 2000, 229–47). The problem with apology, according to this line of attack, was that even as the apology acknowledged a historical failure, it nevertheless affirmed a core of goodness, providing assurance that at base, the nation did have the right norms, be they equality, unity or respect for the law; the only problem was that some people had misunderstood or misinterpreted them, or failed to realize them in historical time. Thus, it was not those fundamental orienting norms that needed to be corrected, or amended, but rather their historical realization. But what if it is not the failure to realize those foundational norms, but rather the norms themselves that are the source of the violation? If that is the case, then realizing them in however perfect a form would only reinforce the problem. In other words, if the nation is, at core, constituted around inequality or non-recognition of a particular type of other, then apology’s dynamic of return to those fundamental values can never break through the conceit that underpinned the abuse. To understand the thrust of this critique, it is important to differentiate it from more standard criticisms for which it might be mistaken; that is, those that see apology as hypocritical or worthless because it is a superficial, merely symbolic/rhetorical measure, substituting words for harder forms of ‘real’ justice, for example monetary compensation.14

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This analysis accepts the value and importance of the symbolic in politics, but faults the type of symbolic work of reconciliation afforded by the apology.15 Apology is seen here as pasting together the political imaginary of the nation in a way that forecloses representation of the very real divisions and inequalities. Because harmonious unification is its ultimate value, the apology renders invisible the differences that persist without actually addressing them. From the point of view of these critics, the Australian apology prematurely glossed the ‘fractured Australia’, whereas what Australians needed to do was keep this fractured image firmly in view as continued incentive for the long road of justice that lay ahead. The apology may have claimed to affect a form of restorative justice by attending to the losses suffered by Indigenous people. Indeed, in apologizing it might have sounded like white Australia was returning to Indigenous people their lost ideal and objects. In fact, if the apology was returning anything, it was the ‘settlement’ that the settler nation had been gradually losing. A litany of public remembrances of its violent past had disrupted white Australia’s long and comfortable slumber in the ignorance of its own illegitimate political heritage. When these were capped by the very intimate and affecting narrative of stealing Aboriginal children, Australians could no longer avoid the ugly mirror. Still worse, the legitimacy they could no longer find in their own postcolonial identity now seemed to be firmly rooted in Aboriginal Australia. If, in the classical colonial narrative, indigeneity had been the mark of illegitimacy, now, as Gooder and Jacobs observe, it ‘assumed a legitimacy in excess of that which can be claimed by the colonial’ (ibid., 236). Faced with their experience of lack (of a long or dignified history and legitimate sovereignty) and the corresponding projection of Indigenous Australia as abundance (of history and authentic connection to the country), white Australians looked for a strategy to return their lost object. And it was at this juncture that they apologized, turning to Indigenous Australians for forgiveness as a way of restoring the lost ideal of legitimate place and nationhood. If restitution was at work here, what was restored was white Australia’s national imaginary: its conception of itself as the principled, legitimate sovereign nation. The argument puts a bitter twist on what had been touted as an act of recognition and respect. The Indigenous other is asked to affirm their oppressor as worthy of love after all, even as legitimate in its sovereign claim, despite the very history that this process has brought into view: a history of hatred and disrespect on the part of non-Indigenous Australia. The past, then, does no more than serve as an earlier stage in a


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progressive, even a redemptive history. All the threads and perspectives, no matter how disparate, can apparently be stitched together into the grand, national narrative, now in the form of the ‘sorry’ nation. Ideally, there would be no residues, no experiences, events, perspectives or patterns of relation that resist integration and remain uncoded, unspeakable, beyond apology. All that would have been left behind. As theorized here, then, apology appropriates the aspect of shame and the language of inclusion only so as to reconstitute the self-same national form and institutional rules, but now with their lost legitimacy returned to the fold. True, it involves the recognition of the historical conflict between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous; but this is only a way station to blurring the difference between them so that all can become legitimate Australians. By distancing themselves from the acts of dispossession, white Australians symbolically join with the dispossessed and perform their allegiance to the rightful values of respect and recognition. With this they can re-settle, but without subjecting those values themselves to the critical evaluation that the Indigenous perspective should be opening up.16 Cleansed of the sullying sense of itself as the perpetrator of an illegitimate theft (of children, of land, of sovereignty), Australia can now stand proud in its national identity and better carry on the basic neo-colonial project.17 Indigeneity is thus symbolically revalued, but in a tamed, reappropriated version. It becomes Australia’s unique token, the icon it places at the beginning of its Olympic Games’ opening ceremony, the identity it can now use to distinguish itself from an increasingly culturally flat West. In this sense, the apologetic act is ultimately one of narcissism and not recognition.18

The apology: Just more colonialism? The lynchpin of these critics’ argument is that apology is always bound to the original norms. No matter how sorry we are, we are always at best affirming our original views about how things ought to be, albeit in a slightly expanded version. Justice for Indigenous people, however, does not simply require a quantitative expansion of norms that are, after all, fundamentally neo-colonial. A full justice for the first Australians requires a more radical qualitative break with those norms. The issue is not simply one of re-evaluating who should be included, but also what they should be included in. Indeed, the very assumption that justice for Indigenous people can be done through the expansion of the existing vision of justice and citizenship in Australia is just another product of the underlying failure to recognize the different political culture and

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social organization of Indigenous peoples. At best, what apology can recognize is that the historical Australia has not been true to its own normative claim to be a liberal egalitarian nation and seek to repair the disparity between the vertical (ideal) and horizontal (historical) norms. It can even expand the conceptualization of those vertical norms themselves: for example, to whom equality applies and what it means. But it cannot fundamentally contradict the essential normative orientation of the neo-colonial state. If it did, it would be affecting an absolute break in its identity and undermining its own legitimacy. And this, these critics contend, is logically beyond the limits of apology. In evaluating the post-liberal argument, the critical question is thus whether the reform of the self can only involve an aesthetic rearrangement of existing norms, or whether it can put those norms into question. Is the voice of the excluded other admitted only conditionally, through the filter of entrenched norms that will always exclude its most challenging claims or cast them in its own image? Or might it enter into the apologetic discourse to challenge the polity’s fundamental rules? Can apology force revision of the norms around which a political community has constituted itself, or is it essentially a conservative act, reinforcing the original norms? The important point to note here is that this line of criticism is not simply accusing Australians of a lack of political will, or of abusing their apologetic discourse so as to conserve their original values and orientations. This is not an empirical critique of the failure of the movement to live up to apology’s potential. Rather, it suggests that this type of conservative action is located at the heart of the apologetic dynamic. We must ask, however, what is the structural or logical reason that apology necessarily entails a return to original values? Why, in apologizing, would the subject necessarily be looking back to its constitutive norms, rather than looking out to other extrinsic sources? When apologies were the property of religious communities, where the constitution of the community itself seemed to be based on a thick set of absolute immutable norms, one could understand this insistence, but one might think that by definition liberal democracies allow for the revaluation of values in the light of ongoing experience.19 If not, then in the background is an accusation that despite its apparent normative fluidity, the secular nation is also constituted around certain thick and immutable norms and that its identity is bound up with these to the core. If so, then to the extent that its apology is oriented by norms drawn from an extrinsic and new source, they would not be its norms. Correlatively, to the extent that the members of the community adopt those new norms now as their norms,


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they would have become a different political community. In so doing, however, the polity would also be breaking with its old self, and so cannot assert the continuity of identity implied by apology. The appeal of what claims to be a purely structural argument is certainly strengthened by the empirical facts: a country characterized by a continuous thread of structural racism. One is well entitled to expect that the next step in that trajectory will be another version of that theme, albeit in the ideological language of remorse. What this argument fails to allow, however, is that it is precisely this logic of continuous normative identity that the dynamic of apology calls into question, and to which it offers an alternative. The paradox, or tension that apology uniquely holds in place is the assertion of a continuity and a break between two conflicting normative positions or identities, and it does so by allowing that the expansion of norms in fact requires historical experience and the encounter with the other. To insist that apology’s reconstitutive work is monochromically conservative is to overlook that unique and most powerful quality that Hannah Arendt noted when she observed the radical and unique power of forgiveness (Arendt 1958, 236). What distinguishes the dynamic of apology is precisely this: it opens the possibility of a different future only because it simultaneously asserts continuity, but cannot be fully, logically derived from the past. In saying sorry, Australia was indeed asserting that it was the nation that sanctioned removal, even that it was still a nation that fails to fully recognize the rights and dignity of Indigenous Australians. At the same time, apparently paradoxically, it was declaring that it was not that. Within the apologetic moment, it occupies the conflicting normative identities, and gestures the movement from one to the other. What this implies is that this apology does not integrate all moments of the abusive past into a grand, harmonious narrative stretching from Australia’s beginning to its current incarnation. On the contrary, it allows that there are some things that Australia, as constituted, cannot make right, that the historical Australia has committed wrongs that are beyond repair, beyond redemption, even beyond sorry. At best, it can create a punctuation point, a moment to take breath and face the past without explaining it away. Moreover, what makes apology’s radical break possible is the fact that the ones apologizing do not find the source of the condemnation in who they are already (as a bounded individual or political community), but only by virtue of the perspective of the other. It is only an encounter with the other that allows for a development of the existing

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norms beyond their historical expression. At worst, apology may be a narcissistic, monological act in which I look to the other as a voiceless projection of my own needs. But at best the apology encounter is one in which I judge myself according to a perspective that I could only attain by virtue of being open to the other. It was the other’s speech, here literally the testimony of Indigenous Australians, which tore nonIndigenous Australia out of itself, and gave it a different view of itself. Taking on that perspective may be deemed appropriation, but it may also be the occasion for an expansion of the original identity. Which of these trajectories emerges will depend on the degree to which the perspective of the other actually penetrates the discourse of the nation. And this is a contingent and empirical matter, not a logical one. Other scholars have argued, similarly, that a totalizing harmony is not the apology’s only implication. ‘Negotiated forgiveness’ would require ‘a dialogue between the parties and ultimately for the wrongdoer to accept accountability and responsibility for offending actions’ (Mellor et al. 2007, 1–36). The apology is only a moment in the process of negotiation, then, suggesting the opening up rather than closing down of political discourse, as the determination of Indigenous people to insist both on their autonomous agency and their participate in the collective ‘we’ of the Australian political nation indicated. The apology ‘should be understood as a willingness to work together without a presumption of having overcome the past’ (La Caze 2006, 448). This is an open process that is now much more inclusive of Indigenous people than before, rather than imposing finality or closure as feared by post-colonial critics (La Caze 2006, 447–68). Post-liberals may object that such a dialogue not only presupposes a non-existent power symmetry but also a nefarious incorporation of indigeneity into mainstream discourses. The Indigenous people quoted in this chapter indicated that the situation is far more complex than the either/or dichotomy of resistance/incorporation posited by the critics. To theorize out from the experience of people involved in an apologetic drama, rather than from the outside in, shows that, for Indigenous people in Australia, the apology did not simply reinforce old norms (for example neo-colonialism), but opened a space for those norms to be renegotiated into a now open future. Far from experiencing apology as a new version of an old relational trope (assimilation), their words indicate that it opened a new relational space in which they would participate as subjects or authors of the national narrative. Of course, apology did not itself write that narrative, but it seemed to make a clearing in which it might then be co-written. In seeking to make sense of novel


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political acts like apology in real and not imagined contexts, it is critical that we listen not only for what we think Indigenous people ought to be saying but to what they actually say. The danger of the post-liberal critique, then, is that, in its theoretically driven imperative of recognizing alterity, it confuses the alterity before us with theorists’ projection of what alterity ought to be. What is more, the preoccupation with alterity is insufficiently theorized because it presumes a consensus about its universal value, a disavowed consensus that Thomas McCarthy calls ‘multicultural universalism’ (McCarthy 1992). After all, can radical difference be conceived, let alone advocated and defended, without such a consensus? Far from the apology, reconciliation and multiculturalism representing greater menaces to Indigenous people than the explicit racism of assimilation, as supposed by critics of liberal governmentality, they signal that, perhaps for the first time in Australian history, non-Indigenous people might start listening attentively to Indigenous people.

Notes 1 They have spawned a huge secondary literature: Tavuchis (1991), Brooks (1999), Amstutz (2005) and Daly and Sarkin (2006). 2 Thompson (2002) argues that political apologies for historical injustice can be philosophically coherent. 3 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), ‘Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families’ (Sydney, April 1997). Report available online at www.hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/bth_report/index.html. 4 The Inquiry took evidence from 535 Indigenous people around the country affected by removal. Significantly, not a single mother whose child had been removed came forward to give evidence. 5 See ‘Content of apologies by State and Territory Parliaments’, available at www.humanrights.gov.au/social_justice/bth_report/apologies_states.html (last visited 5 January 2009). 6 A number of church apologies can be found on the Reconciliation and Social Justice Online Library at www.austlii.edu.au/au/special/rsjproject/rsjlibrary/ hreoc/stolen/stolen31.html#Heading112 (last visited 5 January 2009). 7 ‘Collectively, we feel a particular sense of responsibility for the consequences of these racist policies because their implementation required the active involvement of community welfare organizations. We unreservedly and wholeheartedly apologize to the individuals, families and communities who have suffered such pain and grief from these terrible acts of injustice’. Statement of Apology and Commitment to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People by the Australian Council of Social Services, November 1997. 8 The form of words Howard used was: ‘Personally, I feel deep sorrow for those of my fellow Australians who suffered injustices under the practices of

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9

10

11

12 13 14

15

16 17

18

19

Australian Memory and Apology past generations toward Indigenous people’. Opening Address to the reconciliation Convention, May 1997. Available online at www.austlii.edu.au/au/ special/rsjproject/rsjlibrary/car/arc/speeches/opening/howard.htm (last visited 5 January 2009). Comprehensive studies on the level of support for Howard’s position were not done, although one fairly small study conducted in Perth in 2001 found that only 27 per cent of residents supported a political apology (McGarty et al. 2002). On 26 August 1999, the Commonwealth Parliament did pass a motion expressing its ‘deep and sincere regret that Indigenous Australians suffered injustices under the practices of past generations, and for the hurt and trauma that many Indigenous people continue to feel as a consequence of those practices as part of a Motion of Reconciliation’ (CoA1). For example: ‘In some cases government policies evolved from the belief that the Aboriginal race would not survive and should be assimilated. In others, the conviction was that “half caste” children in particular should, for their own protection, be removed to government and church run institutions where conditions reflected the standards of the day. Others were placed with white families whose kindness motivated them to the belief that rescued children deserved a better life’ (CoA3). Speed’s thesis about the ‘new forms of resistance to the neo-liberal model and its particular configurations of power’ is elaborated in Speed (2007). Making the same point is Short (2008). ‘We […] do not attempt to calculate the relative merits for Indigenous people of, say, a symbolic gesture as opposed to more materially grounded ones […] Rather we reflect specifically upon the “psychic life” of the apology’ (Gooder and Jacobs 2000, 231–2). ‘The Australian apology […] has the power to form and reform what and who is considered to be legitimate within the reconstituting imaginary. It is an utterance […] which has immense potential as a redistributive force, both material and symbolic’ (ibid.). The Marxist/structural underpinning of the critique of ‘ideology’ is evident here (Povinelli 1998, 581–2). This critique is structurally similar to critical work on the use in truth commissions of witnesses to trauma. The act of giving testimony of traumatic events is understood not as a liberating process that breaks the chains of violence, but as a mimetic form of violence that positions the witness within existing (dominant) juridical and medical structures. See Feldman (2004, 163–202). ‘Relatedly, let us remember that the apology is as much an act of narcissistic will and desire as of humility and humanity’ (Gooder and Jacobs 2000, 244). On the religious background to political apologies, see Celermajer (2009).

Bibliography Albrechtsen, Janet (2008), ‘Glib Compassion Useless without Justice for All’, The Australian, 30 January.


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Amstutz, Mark R. (2005), The Healing of Nations: The Promise and Limits of Political Forgiveness (Lanham/MD: Rowman & Littlefield). Arendt, Hannah (1958), The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Arthur, Paige (2009), ‘How “Transitions” Reshaped Human Rights: A Conceptual History of Transitional Justice’, Human Rights Quarterly 31/2, 321–67. Attwood, Bain (2008), ‘Settling Histories, Unsettling Pasts: Reconciliation and Historical Justice in a Settler Society’, in: Manfred Berg and Bernd Schaefer (eds), Historical Justice in International Perspective: How Societies are Trying to Right the Wrongs of the Past (New York: Cambridge University Press), 217–38. Barkan, Elazar (2001), The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (Baltimore/London: John Hopkins University Press), ix–x, 38. Barkan, Elazar and Karn, Alexander (eds) (2006), Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Barta, Tony (2008), ‘Sorry, and Not Sorry, in Australia: How the Apology to the Stolen Generations Buried a History of Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research 10/2, 201–14. Behrendt, Larissa (2009), ‘Home: The Importance of Place to the Dispossessed’, Atlantic Quarterly 108/1, 84. Brooks, Roy L. (1999), When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice (New York: New York University Press). Brown, Michael F. (1996), ‘On Resisting Resistance’, American Anthropologist 98/4, 729–35. Brudhold, Thomas (2008), Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Amery and the Refusal to Forgive (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). CAR: Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation: www.austlii.edu.au/au/orgs/car (last visited 5 January 2009). Celermajer, Danielle (2009), Sins of the Nation and the Rituals of Apology (New York: Cambridge University Press). CoA1: Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 26 August 1999, 9165 (the Hon. John Howard, MP). CoA2: Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 13 February 2008, 167 (the Hon. Kevin Rudd, MP). CoA3: Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 13 February 2008, 174 (the Hon. Brendan Nelson, MP). Cooke, Dewi (2008), ‘And How Can You Mend a Broken Heart? A Family Journey’, The Age, 12 February. Coorey, Phillip (2008), ‘Building a Nation Together’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 February. Corntassel, Jeff and Holder, Cindy (2008), ‘Who’s Sorry Now? Government Apologies, Truth Commissions, and Indigenous Self-Determination in Australia, Canada, Guatemala, and Peru’, Human Rights Review 9, 465–89. Cunningham, Michael (1999), ‘Saying Sorry: The Politics of Apology’, Political Quarterly 70/3, 285–93. Daly, Erin and Sarkin, Jeremy (2006), Reconciliation in Divided Societies: Finding Common Ground (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Diebel, Linda (2008), ‘Harper “Sorry” for Native Residential Schools’, The Star [Toronto], 12 June. Dodson, Mick (2008), ‘Hands Across the Nation’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 February.

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Dodson, Patrick (2008), ‘The Courage to Apologise and to Forgive’, The Age, 14 February. Fejo-King, Christine (Autumn, 2008), ‘The Right Thing To Do: A Response to the Prime Minister’s Speech’, Newsletter of the Rural Women’s Network, 30–1. Feldman, Allen (2004), ‘Memory Theatres, Virtual Witnessing and the Trauma Aesthetic’, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 27/1, 163–202. Gibney, Mark and Roxstrom, Erik (2001), ‘The Status of State Apologies’, Human Rights Quarterly 23/4, 911–39. Gooder, Haydie and Jacobs, Jane (2000), ‘“On the Border of the Unsayable”: The Apology in Postcolonizing Australia’, Interventions 2/2, 229–47. Graham, Chris (2008), ‘The Big Read: A New Beginning’, National Indigenous Times, 21 February. Hale, Charles R. (2002), ‘Does Multiculturalism Menace? Governance, Cultural Rights and the Politics of Identity in Guatemala’, Journal of Latin American Studies 34, 485–524. Henderson, Gerard (2008), ‘Middle Ground May Be Hard to Find’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 January. Herald 1: ‘Backs Turned on Nelson’s Response’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 February 2008. Herald 2: ‘A Simple World with so much Meaning’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 February 2008. Hobsbawm, Eric (1994), Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph). HREOC 1997: www.hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/bth_report/index.html (last visited 5 January 2009). HREOC 2008: ‘Saying Sorry will let the Healing begin’, Media Release, 12 February 2008. Available at www.humanrights/gov/au/about/media/media_releases/2008/ 14_08.html (last visited 5 January 2009). Irvine, Jessica (2008), ‘Day for Healing: Aboriginal Leaders’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 February. Jopson, Debra (2008), ‘After 41 Years, Sorry will be the Sweetest Word’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 February. Karvelas, Patricia and Rintoul, Stuart (2008), ‘Wording Divides Indigenous Leaders’, The Australian, 13 February. Koch, Tony (2008), ‘Apology is the Right Thing to Do: Cathy’, The Australian, 9 February. La Caze, Marguerite (2006), ‘The Asymmetry between Apology and Forgiveness’, Contemporary Political Theory 5/4, 447–68. Langton, Marcia (2008), ‘Even the Hard Men Know, it Must be Said’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 February. Le Couteur, Amanda (2001), ‘On Saying “Sorry”: Repertoires of Apology to Australia’s Stolen Generations’, in Alec McHoul and Mark Rapley (eds), How to Analyse Talk in Institutional Settings: A Casebook of Methods (London: Continuum), 146–58. Lovett, Edward Alfred (2008), ‘An Apology will Not Wash Away the Suffering’, The Age, 8 February. McCarthy, Thomas (1992), ‘Doing the Right Thing in Cross-Cultural Representation’, Ethics 102/3, 635–49.


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McGarty C, Pedersen A, Leach CW, Mansell T, Waller J, Bliuc AM. (2002), Collective Guilt as a Predictor of Commitment to Apology (unpublished manuscript, Australian National University), reported in Aarti Iyer, Colin Wayne Leach and Anne Pederson, ‘Racial Wrongs and Restitutions: The Role of Guilt and Other Group-Based Emotions’, in Branscombe and Doosje, Collective Guilt, 269. McQuire, Amy (2008), ‘Blackcurrent: The Fight Continues’, National Indigenous Times, 10 December. Mellor, David, Bretherton, Di and Firth, Lucy (2007), ‘Aboriginal and NonAboriginal Australia: The Dilemma of Apologies, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation Peace and Conflict’, Journal of Peace Psychology 13/1, 1–36. Morton, John (1998), ‘Essentially Black, Essentially Australian, Essentially Opposed: Australian Anthropology and its Uses of Aboriginal Identity’, in Jürg Wassmann (ed.), Pacific Answers to Western Hegemony: Cultural Practices of Identity Construction (Oxford: Berg), 355–85. Narushima, Yuko (2008), ‘Sorry Speech was Magnificent’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 February. NIT 1: ‘Activists Laud Rudd’s Apology as Great Step Forward’, National Indigenous Times, 13 February 2008. NIT 2: ‘Compensation Won’t Cripple Prosperous Nation: Dodson’, National Indigenous Times, 13 February 2008. Nobles, Melissa (2008), The Politics of Official Apologies (New York: Cambridge University Press). Olick, Jeffrey K. (2007), The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York/London: Routledge). Patty, Anna (2008), ‘After 30 Years of Denial Come Tears of Relief’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 February. Povinelli, Elizabeth (1998), ‘The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship’, Critical Inquiry 24/2, 575–610. Povinelli, Elizabeth (2002), The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham: Duke University Press). Radio National: ‘Reflections on the Apology’, Saturday Extra, Radio National, 16 February 2008. Rolph-Trouillot, Michel (2000), ‘Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era’, Interventions 2/2, 171–86. Short, Damien (2008), Reconciliation and Colonial Power: Indigenous Rights in Australia (Aldershot: Ashgate). Speed, Shannon (2005), ‘Dangerous Discourses: Human Rights and Multiculturalism in Neoliberal Mexico’, PoLAR: Political & Legal Anthropology Review 28, 29–47. Speed, Shannon (2007), Rights in Rebellion: Indigenous Struggle and Human Rights in Chiapas (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Tavuchis, Nicholas (1991), Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Teitel, Ruti (2002), Transitional Justice (New York: Oxford University Press). Thompson, Janna (2000), ‘The Apology Paradox’, The Philosophical Quarterly 50/201, 470–5. Thompson, Janna (2002), Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Injustice (Cambridge: Polity). Torpey, John (ed.) (2002), Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices (Lanham/MD: Rowman & Littlefield).

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Torpey, John (2006), Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparation Politics (Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press). Volkan, Vamik D. (2003), ‘Traumatized Societies’ in Sverre Varvin and Vamik D. Volkan (eds), Violence or Dialogue? Psychoanalytic Insights into Terror and Terrorism (London: International Psychoanalytic Association), 217–36.

Part II Moral Claims and Universal Norms


3 The Past in the Present: Memories of State Violence in Contemporary Latin America Elizabeth Jelin

State violence has left deep scars in various societies in Latin America, and continuing debates in the public sphere attest to the fact that the past is still very much present. In this chapter I present two related arguments, one pertaining to the temporal dimension of public memory and the other to the spatial contexts. Firstly, the chapter shows that time is not linear in histories of political confrontation and violence, and of repression and suffering. The passage of time does not imply closure or a societal sense of having settled accounts with the past. Looking at a conflictual and painful past, and searching for its meaning, is a never-ending undertaking. It is also conflict-ridden and its representation is highly contested in each subsequent ‘present’. While political and social actors may attempt to attain closure, in the long run the outcome is usually failure. Secondly, when dealing with political processes, the usual units of analysis are nation states (or smaller communities or internal administrative units). Political processes linked to state repression and state terrorism are undoubtedly anchored in the nation state; however, they are not bound by it. Transnational and international actors have much to say about what goes on inside nation states. Conversely, national processes may have considerable impact on international trends, on institutional arrangements in other states and on interpretations and ideologies that frame the understanding of political processes at the local, national and international scales. In the following, I give an overview of the historical transformations of the struggles around the meaning of a conflictual political past. I focus specifically on the experience of the countries in the Southern Cone of Latin America – Uruguay, Chile, Brazil and, particularly, Argentina – in the aftermath of the dictatorships that pervaded the region during the 1970s and 1980s. The key question to be addressed refers to the ways in 61

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which social and political actors deal with, and try to make sense of, the past (while often remaining in the realm of non-sense). These processes take place on multiple levels and layers: from personal processes of healing and/or the maintenance of open wounds among survivors, through symbolic representations and cultural performances, to institutional practices such as trials, investigative commissions, economic reparations, monuments and territorial markers, and commemorations. If a recent past is marked by political conflict that involved harsh state repression, it may be followed by many attempts to find closure, to ‘solve’ and suture past wounds and ruptures, and to ‘come to terms’ with the past. In this process, different actors express their will to present one unified narrative of the past, trying to make their own interpretation the hegemonic, legitimate, ‘official’ or normal one, in the hope that it will become part of ‘common sense’, accepted by large parts of the population. However, struggles develop among conflicting and competing interpretations and memories of the past, and debates ensue on where these understandings and memories should be located in the democratization process (Jelin 2003). One further introductory note: we know that the past gains its meaning in its links to the present through the acts of remembering and forgetting. This implies that the meaning of the past is located in the present, which is a space where past experiences and the yet-to-be or not yet experienced future converge. The ‘futures past’, the ‘present pasts’, the ‘ever-present past’ – as the titles of important books on the subject bear witness (Koselleck 1985; Huyssen 2003; Connan and Rousso 1994) – refer to a present that has to simultaneously recapture and distance itself from the past. The meaning of that past has not yet been crystallized. New historical processes, new conjunctures and political scenarios cannot but produce a renewal of interpretive frames for understanding past experiences and constructing future expectations. The complexity of this field becomes apparent in the multiplicity of times and temporalities, the plurality of meaning and the constant transformation of actors and historical processes.

The history of memories in the Southern Cone In the early 1970s, state repression of youthful revolutionary activism and fierce political confrontations resulted in the cycle of dictatorships in many countries in Latin America. First Brazil, then Chile and Uruguay and finally Argentina joined the more traditional dictatorships, such as the Stroessner regime in Paraguay, which ruled from 1954 to 1989.

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In Brazil, the dictatorship started with a military coup in 1964, solidifying in 1968. Subsequently, a slow and almost unending transition process led to the appointment of the first civilian president in 1985, 21 years after the coup, and to the first direct presidential elections in 1989. During the 1970s, military forces also succeeded in overthrowing democratically installed governments in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Chile’s President Allende was a committed socialist, and progressive forces in the world (predominantly in Europe) viewed his government as an experiment in a ‘peaceful transition to socialism’. Allende’s death during the military takeover on 11 September 1973 was followed by 17 years of military dictatorship, until a negotiated transition led to elections and the instalment of President Awlyin in 1990. In Uruguay, the violent political confrontations of the early 1970s led to the suspension of civil liberties and constitutional guarantees in 1973, and to the establishment of a dictatorial state dominated by the military that lasted until 1985. In Argentina, a military coup on 24 March 1976, in the midst of high levels of violent political confrontation, displaced President Isabel Peron and installed a military government that stayed in power until December 1983. These are neighbouring countries with distinct and specific histories, different geographies and different social and political structures. Yet, all of them – and other countries in Latin America – experienced military coups and quite similar and overlapping dictatorial governments at the same time. The interconnectedness of the countries in the region is not recent. In spite of their specificities, the histories of these countries have been interrelated since colonial times (Halperin 1993). The establishment of nation states at the beginning of the nineteenth century did not sever these connections, and the histories and fates of the various countries have remained highly interdependent. This can partly be explained through the long history of highly porous borders. There are four points of interest with regard to the period of recent dictatorships with which we are concerned here. Firstly, there was continuous movement of political exiles across borders. Exiles actively participated in the organization of opposition movements for political change in their countries of origin, while keeping close and long-lasting contacts of alliance and solidarity with political forces in their host countries.1 Secondly, repression transcended national boundaries. The most striking example of the coordination of repression at a regional level is the so-called Operación Cóndor (Operation Condor), which involved the governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia. The unearthing of the documentation on Operación Cóndor began with the

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discovery of the Paraguayan secret police’s Archivos del terror (Archives of Terror) in 1992, and continued with new discoveries which were furthered, for example, by the process of declassification of US State Department documents. These written documents give witness to the international terror which many victims experienced ‘under their own skins’ (Boccia Paz et al. 2002; Dinges 2004). Thirdly, as a counterpart, there was a highly interconnected and integrated network of solidarity denouncing human rights violations, which continued its work after the political transitions. While the human rights network operates on a global scale and the human rights discourse is appropriated globally, both are actively regional (Sikkink 1996; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Lima 2002; 2003). Finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, the processes of transition in the different countries were also interconnected; there were constant dialogues and exchanges among political strategists, analysts and activists, and it was possible to learn a lot from experiences ‘across the border’. The processes were not autonomous; the different countries followed a shared and interdependent path, but each process was marked by unique features. One common trait is that, in all countries, the recent dictatorial past was not closed at the time of political transition; it was, and still is, a central component of the political scenarios, and will continue to be so in the future. Accounts with the past are not settled, in either institutional or symbolic terms. More than 30 years have passed since the military coups, and around 20 years have gone by since the transitions to constitutional governments. During these decades, meanings and interpretations of the past have been constructed and revamped. Even the temporal scope and limits of the ‘past’ that are being dealt with are constantly subject to reinterpretation.

Stages of memory In the period under discussion, memory was never static, but always contested and dynamic. The trajectories and periodization of memory debates differed within nation states and from country to country. Glossing over some of the complexities and contradictions of these debates, it is nevertheless possible to highlight some stages and turning points, in a very stylized and synthetic form.2 The military ‘saving the nation’ When they took power, the military presented themselves in an analogous way in the various countries: their declarations and slogans emphasized

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their ‘heroic’ role as defenders and the ultimate guarantors of the continuity of the nation. At the height of the Cold War, their action was guided by the basic ideology of the National Security Doctrine prevalent during the 1970s. This doctrine (which many Latin American military men learned in their ‘anti-subversive war’ training in the US-led School of the Americas) framed internal political conflicts in terms of ‘threats’ to the nation coming from ‘foreign’ elements to the social body crystallized in ‘subversion’, the ‘anti-patria’ or the infiltration of international communism. Thus, the military portrayed themselves as acting to ‘save’ the nation (Agüero and Hershberg 2005).3 Consequently, at the very moment of their political intervention, the armed forces interpreted the event and their involvement in terms of the longue dureé, referring to the foundational moments of the nation: their action was justified by the historical continuity of their role as eternal defenders of the ‘fatherland’.4 The event of the military coup, then, instituted its own meta-narrative, its own determination to be commemorated: the meaning and significance of the action, the desire for durability and the need to pass the legacy on to future generations, appeared to be rooted in the event itself (Nora 1996; Feld 2000). One could say that in key historical events and conjunctures time is compressed: the past and the present elaborate the script for future recollection. This is evident even in the very terms used to name the events; these names became arenas of political struggle. In Argentina, the period inaugurated by the military coup was called ‘Process of National Reorganization’, in Brazil it was ‘Revolution’, while in Chile it was hard to find a name or label for it, and Chileans are still struggling to find an appropriate name for the Pinochet era.5 Obviously, as the success of the military project was not assured, the foundational discourse was to be revisited and revised later, depending on the disputes and struggles that evolved over time.6 Controversies about meaning also arose at the time of the conflictive events themselves. However, these alternative meanings and interpretations could not be openly expressed – repressed, censored and forbidden, they were nurtured in private and in the family, in the ‘catacombs’ and in occasional public protest acts that were further repressed, silenced or concealed by the regime. Opposition groups and victims interpreted the present not as salvation, but as dictatorship and state terrorism. In the initial stages, and especially among the relatives of victims, there was considerable bewilderment and uncertainty, rather than a coherent understanding of what was going on. Channels of communication were closed; secrecy and concealment were the rule. Gradually, these voices began to find ways to bring their grievances into the public

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sphere. Expressive and performative practices, as signals of collective resistance, played a central role in this period: no woman can be punished simply for wearing black, or for going to the cemetery day after day, or for wearing a white headscarf. Social actors gathered in the human rights movement or in local popular protest offered alternative interpretations to that of the military. They denounced repression and highlighted the suffering endured. This meant that society acted as a repository for accounts which contested the versions put forward by the military; the scope and scale of these accounts depended on the vitality, persistence and insistence of these groups ( Jelin 1995, 2005; Keck and Sikkink 1998). The human rights paradigm in political transition Political transitions out of dictatorship in the region were neither easy, nor consensual or smooth. The human rights movement made demands that were not necessarily a priority for all political actors. In fact, diverging views coexisted among the political actors committed to political transition: aside from actors that promoted an open policy of condemnation for the repression of the recent past, there were also those who were ready to postpone issues related to past violence and state repression, claiming that political urgencies were in the future and not in the past. Others promoted oblivion, and there were even some who supported the military and how they had handled the political conflict, justifying state repression as exceptional. In such a setting, those who wanted to confront the past and punish the perpetrators were but one voice among many. Furthermore, the civil-military pacts that led to transition in several countries clearly limited the scope of actions that elected governments could take; in particular, there were many amnesty provisions that capped judicial proceedings for violations committed during dictatorship. Only in Argentina was the self-amnesty decreed by the military repealed by Congress, so that trials could be held (Acuña et al. 1995). In all cases, however, political struggles to settle accounts with the past expressed themselves through multiple demands: the search for ‘truth’, the quest for justice, the search for some meaning for the painful past. In the realm of subjectivity, in artistic expressions and in different areas of cultural and symbolic life, the voices that conveyed narratives of victimhood and suffering were complemented by other voices, including those that Steve Stern calls ‘memory as persecution and awakening’ (Stern 2004, 109). Struggles for memories and for making sense of the past turned into a renewed arena of social action in the region.

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In fact, the military coups in the Southern Cone in the mid-1970s brought about a significant change in the centrality of denunciations of human rights violations, both on a national and an international level. Networks of activists and organizations emerged with the explicit aim of protesting against repression and state terrorism (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 79–120). During this period, the framework of ‘human rights’ was incorporated into the struggle against dictatorship. Previously, domination or social and political conflict used to be interpreted in terms of class struggle or processes of national liberation. In that framework, incorporation of the notion of ‘violation to human rights’ was a truly paradigmatic revolution. This definition implies conceiving the human being as a bearer of inalienable rights. It also entails assigning a central responsibility to state institutions for respecting these rights. Even if these principles were included in the liberal constitutions adopted in all the countries of the region during the nineteenth century, their actual impact and relevance in everyday life was almost nonexistent, especially for the popular classes and subordinate sectors. This began to change in the 1970s, when social actors started to define current political struggles in terms of human rights. Soon, this definition framed anti-dictatorial demands and denunciations of state repression (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Sikkink 1996). It is interesting to note that political parties – institutions allegedly specialized in working within the political system – did not have a central role in this movement. Instead, the main role was played by a large network of victims’ relatives, members of religious communities, activists, international organizations, intellectuals and some politicians, mainly those who had been forced to abandon their countries as exiles. For instance, the international anti-dictatorial campaigns regarding Uruguay developed the language of human rights and produced a significant shift in the discourse of exiled political leaders, who gradually moved away from their political (revolutionary or reformist) rhetoric to a discourse based on the new language of human rights (Markarian 2005). In Brazil and Argentina, internal opposition and international denunciations were mostly led by new social movements with no previous visible presence in the public sphere, and these movements couched their demands in the language of human rights. The amnesty movement in Brazil in 1978 was organized and led by women, and women were also central to the human rights movement in Argentina ( Jelin 1995).7 The Argentine experience illustrates the ambiguities and ambivalences of transition, and the struggles and difficulties in the elaboration of a master narrative about the recent past. The logic stemming from

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the human rights discourse centred on the notion of the ‘victim’ of human rights violations committed by the military, and on interpreting the military dictatorship’s action as ‘state terrorism’. This interpretative frame contrasted with the military view that defined the conflict in terms of a ‘war’, perhaps with some ‘excesses’ that led to the expression ‘dirty war’ (used by the military and by many in the international community, but not by human rights activists inside the country). At the time of transition in 1983, ‘truth and justice’ were the banners of the movement. In terms of state policy, the demand for ‘truth’ led to the establishment of an investigative commission, the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP), an early antecedent of what would later become a common practice in many parts of the world, namely the ‘truth commissions’.8 As Kathryn Sikkink states: The terms truth commission or transitional justice, which we use so frequently today, were not yet part of the ordinary lexicon. Argentine groups and leaders were essentially improvising new tactics and institutional forms that later would be named truth commissions or processes of transitional justice. Today, large NGOs [non-governmental organizations] like the International Centre for Transitional Justice, set up in 2001, have websites along with manuals and software to share with transitional governments, activists, and scholars. Although volumes of academic writing now document the successes and failures of different transitional justice tactics, the first academic discussion of the category “truth commission” did not occur until 1994. But in 1983, when Argentina adopted its commission on disappearances, none of this existed. (Sikkink 2008, 5–6)9 The CONADEP in Argentina is widely viewed as the first of its kind and it is understood to have subsequently inspired similar commissions in Latin America (Hayner 2002, 33–4). This includes, among others, Chile, where the Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación was established in 1990. As in Argentina, the reports were presented to the Executive and to society at large.10 In addition to listing denunciations and describing the patterns of repression, the reports attempt to present an interpretation of the political conflict that led to dictatorship. In both cases, the basic reference is to the political polarization which existed prior to the military coups. Polarization is related to violent practices, and this violence is seen as the activity of unos pocos (a few ones), leading to the

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image that the bulk of society was entre dos fuegos (caught in a crossfire) between the military and the guerrilla. Thus, the ground was prepared for the image of ‘two demons’ that were let loose on a harmless society. While in Argentina this implied the call to prosecute the members of the military juntas and the leaders of the guerrilla movements who were mostly outside the country, in Chile the Commission’s report includes as victims both those who disappeared and were executed by the military dictatorship and the members of the armed forces and the police that were assassinated by the armed groups. In Uruguay and Brazil there were no official commissions or reports during the times of transition. The task of unveiling what had happened was carried out by societal organizations without any state sponsorship. Their reports placed more emphasis on the underlying economic and social crisis, as well as on the civil and political conditions leading to the military coups.11 Three of the reports (in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay) are called Nunca más/Nunca mais (meaning ‘never again’) and provide an insight into the cultural climate in which they were generated and to the meanings attached to these acts of remembrance. The idea that the experience should never be repeated became identified with isolating the ‘truth’ and with accumulating all possible information regarding the atrocities. And in order ‘not to repeat’, memory had to be kept alive. ‘Remember, so as not to repeat’ began to emerge as a message and as a cultural imperative (Jelin 1995). There is another issue that must be considered in the context of the political and cultural climate in which these reports were prepared. How should victims be characterized? In this initial stage of transition, and in consonance with the emerging human rights paradigm, the emphasis was on the figure of ‘the victim’ and on the horrors that victims were subjected to at the hands of the state. The definition of victims varied: the Argentine report only dealt with disappearances, the Chilean with disappearances and assassinations,12 and the Uruguayan and Brazilian definition also included torture and imprisonment. This emphasis on victimhood implied a simultaneous silencing of the political commitments of many of the victims. The reports generally ignored the fact that there were political groups struggling for what they understood as ‘a better world’ or a ‘new man’ (in the tradition of Ché Guevara). Instead, the reports (especially in Argentina) emphasized the humanitarian side, thus depoliticizing the conflict. Yet the ambiguity of the narrative of the past remained: state terrorism and violation of human rights? Social and political struggles with winners and losers? A ‘dirty’

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war with ‘excesses’? At that time, the prevalent framework was that of human rights violations and state terrorism; this was even more salient a year later in 1985 when the nine military men who had ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1982 were put on trial (Acuña et al. 1995). Within the new and evolving human rights framework, a depoliticized image of conflict prevails, leading in turn to the elaboration of memory policies in this key. In sum, the transitions involved the retreat of the military, causing their salvationist discourse to lose ground (perhaps with the partial exception of Chile). The military withdrew into their own institutional spaces, reaffirming their identities and their sense of justification. In the public sphere, the dominant interpretation of the past was the one which framed it in terms of ‘human rights violations’. Within this framework, however, there are different and even conflicting interpretations about the way the political nature of the conflict and political polarization before the coups are to be accounted for. The ‘humanitarian’ or ‘humanistic’ interpretations represent one end of the spectrum: here, the central role is that of the ‘victim’ (often with the added qualification of ‘innocent’), and interpretations tend to silence the conflict prior to the military coups. At the other end, there are images and discourses in which political identities and past conflicts are recognized and into the present.

A new generation, new questions Any observer of the Southern Cone in the early 1990s would have interpreted the political scenario as one of equilibrium; the dictatorial past was already surmounted, forgotten or relegated, and the wounds healed or healing. The strong push of neoliberalism and the economic opening up of the countries called for an image of normality, based on democratically elected governments and on some degree of certainty and reliability (the ‘juridical security’ that foreign investors were calling for). It seemed that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Cold War divisions, governments were leaning towards a strong notion of normality: more open, democratic societies committed to the task of building economic efficiency in a global world. There was little room for emotional remembrances of the past, which had to be silenced or even better, forgotten. Political actions accompanied such equilibrium: pardons granted by President Menem in Argentina; defeat of the plebiscite to repeal amnesty laws in Uruguay; a Chilean transition based on a pact with the military, with all the ‘authoritarian

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enclaves’ and ‘moorings’ that this involved; a modern and forwardlooking Brazil. In each of these countries, there was promise of a future in which the past was exactly that, a past that has already passed away; perhaps a painful past, but one that was already surpassed. Underneath this apparent calm and apathy, however, other things were happening that would transform the political and cultural scenarios in the years to come. In fact, the 1990s were full of events linked to ‘settling accounts with the past’. Aside from the insistent demands of the human rights movement, three developments are significant for an understanding of the dynamics of memory debates in that decade. Firstly, we can see the emergence of a new generation of memory activists connected to new demands. The HIJ@S organizations – the young children of the disappeared – that entered the stage of political debate in these years were particularly important here. The issues they raised and the forms in which they expressed their demands, most notably the ‘escraches’ (Argentina) or ‘funas’ (Chile), the public shaming of people held responsible for political crimes by alerting their neighbours, were innovative (Jelin and Sempol 2006). Secondly, new links developed between the human rights organizations and emerging new actors, broadening the field of demands linked to human rights abuses and violations. Thus, for instance, issues of sexual orientation were re-read in terms of human rights, and the unemployed and the homeless started to interpret their situation in terms of a violation of economic rights. In sum, a variety of actors began to enter the public sphere demanding justice, recognition and state action, and in so doing challenged the ‘normalcy’ that the governments were attempting to instil. Thirdly, and significantly, international judicial pressures mounted during these years. The detention of Pinochet in London in 1998 represents the most famous and highly publicized case (Roht-Arriaza 2005). Previous to this, however, French and Italian courts had begun investigating the responsibility of the Argentine military for the disappearance of citizens in these countries, while Spain had used its legislation to prosecute crimes against humanity committed in Argentina, and then in Chile.13 In sum, new spaces of public visibility were being created in which the present significance of the dictatorial past became apparent. A turning point in Argentina came in 1995 when the confessions (but not repentance) of a naval officer, Cap. Scilingo, were made public. He gave a firsthand account of the vuelos de la muerte (death flights), where victims were thrown alive but anesthetized into the River Plate from naval aircraft

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(Verbitsky 1995). In Chile, the turning point was 1998 when Pinochet gave up his role as Commander-in-Chief, became a for-life senator and was then detained in London. In Uruguay, social mobilization was reactivated and, in 2000, President Jorge Batlle gave in to international pressure linked to the case of the granddaughter of a famous Argentine poet who had been abducted and whose identity had been changed; Batlle acknowledged for the first time that there had been illegal repression in the country. Throughout these shifts, the state, in its quest to present a ‘normal’ country for the neoliberal structural reforms, attempted to place a cap the legacies of the dictatorial past. Faced with the demands of social movements, governments responded by attempting to find closure on the past through ‘reconciliation’ (in Chile), ‘peace’ (in Uruguay) and ‘silence’ (in Brazil). In the Argentine case, given the strength of social demands, state strategies involved individualized responses (such as economic reparations to victims and relatives), limiting the acceptance of international judicial demands and even suggesting building a ‘Monument to Reconciliation’ – an idea proposed by President Menem at the beginning of 1998, but which did not survive the immediate public protest.14 Some of these conflicts intensified in the twenty-first century and new developments emerged. The continuous and systematic action of the human rights social movement in each country, including their transnational networks, has led to a major shift in the very meaning of what ‘normality’ means. My hypothesis here is that the very notion of ‘normalization’ is shifting: it seems to be ‘normal’ for a country and a society to distance itself not from the past but from relativization, oblivion and indifference. In the new millennium, the hegemonic notion of ‘normality’ includes attempts to confront the past and to open up the hidden boxes of violence and repression. In fact, it has become clear that the strategies that governments developed during the 1990s were not successful; they neither brought about closure nor did they settle accounts with the past. Thus, Uruguay called for a Comisión para la Paz in 2000, its aim being to create peace among Uruguayans. The report issued by the Commission (in 2003) called for the past to be treated judicially and promoted new investigations and efforts to localize and recognize the buried bodies of victims.15 The electoral victory of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) in 2004 and the inauguration of President Tabaré Vázquez made it possible to open up new investigations so that the theme gained an important public presence. Although the intention may have been to promote a limited investigation and then a form of closure, the interaction between social forces

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and the state apparatus (as well as developments abroad, especially in Argentina) indicate that such closure will not be possible in the near future. New commissions and new reports, judicial indictments and the move to repeal the amnesty laws of the 1980s keep the past very much on the current political agenda. During the first years of the current century, the ‘truth trials’ in Argentina once again placed the country at the forefront of innovations in the way of dealing with the past. These trials evolved as an attempt to bypass amnesties, based on the recognized demand that even when punishment is not possible because of amnesty laws, relatives of victims and the society at large have a ‘right to truth’; that is, courts have a duty to investigate and communicate the fate of each and every victim. During this period, amnesty legislation that restricted judicial initiatives was repealed in Congress and, in 2005, this legislation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, leading to a proliferation of new indictments and trials (Sikkink 2008, 12-4). A further symbolic step involved a temporal shift in the very notion of ‘recent past’; this not only considers state repression and victimhood during dictatorship, but it also encompasses an increasing interest in the militant past of 1970s youth and their political ideals, even going so far as to include a governmental identification with those ideals (Jelin 2008). Marked by the official opening of once clandestine detention centres, the drive to build memorials and the multiplication of museums and archives, the government’s agenda offers no room for closure. In Chile, the most significant governmental initiative was perhaps the establishment of the Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura. This received around 37,000 denunciations of torture and political imprisonment endured during the Pinochet era. The Commission’s report was followed by a programme of reparations.16 Within the realm of what current legislation allows, indictments continue, including demands that involved Pinochet himself until his death. Demands to open detention centres to the public, to build a Museum of Memory and the like are marks of the time. Thus, President Michelle Bachelet’s victimization during the period of dictatorship has been very much in the public eye throughout the campaign and in the rituals of her inauguration in March 2006. She talks about a ‘re-encounter’ rather than a ‘reconciliation’, and shows her will to ‘suture wounds’ among the diverse sectors of Chilean society on the basis of information and ‘truth’ regarding each case of repression. Undoubtedly, there are some components of ‘ritualization’ and even of ‘routinization’ in all of these processes of confronting the past. There

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are attempts to domesticate or ‘pasteurize’ past struggles and confrontations which propose ‘tranquilizing’ memory policies in ways that parallel policies in other parts of the world – including the commodification and touristic exploitation of the past (Sturken 2007; Olick 2003). In fact, there are innumerable concrete ways in which the confrontations and interactions between societal actors and the state are taking place. Important at this point are not so much the concrete and specific forms that are being proposed and initiated, but rather the very fact of their presence and the societal activism surrounding them. Moreover, the recognition of conflicts, the variety of actors with different orientations and interests, and the plurality of voices in the public sphere should be taken as signs of a dynamic democratic incorporation of societal views and expression.

Localized histories and memories, and global frameworks Andreas Huyssen has shown that since the end of the Second World War, and especially since the 1990s, the world has been experiencing a process of ‘globalization of historical memory’ linked to the Holocaust. He claims that the ‘globalization of Holocaust discourse’ implies the use of ‘the Holocaust as a universal trope for historical trauma’. Thus, the Holocaust ‘loses its quality as index of the specific historical event and begins to function as metaphor for other traumatic histories and memories’ (Huyssen 2003, 13). The centrality of the figures of perpetrator and victim, of the cultural vehicles of memorialization, of some of the institutional arrangements to ‘settle accounts with the past’, of the quest for mechanisms that will ensure a future of ‘never again’, all of these mechanisms and processes can be traced genealogically to the way in which Western societies and groups attempted to work through the legacies of Nazi crimes. Even the concern for memory itself stems from this context. These interpretive frameworks were present in the processes that took place in South America during and after the 1970s. However, they did not travel without change and local reinterpretations. In turn, the processes which took place in the region made their way into global understandings and tropes for representing political violence, suffering and state repression. There is a double movement of interconnection between the local and the global here. National conditions are part of wider international, transnational and global social systems. International actors have a voice in local processes, and frameworks for comprehending and interpreting the world travel from one place to others. Thus, military interventions

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in South America were part of the Cold War. Conversely, the framing of state repression in terms of the human rights paradigm was a move whereby international and national actors converged in the global activism of societal actors, beyond states and international institutional actors. Since then, the global scene has seen a multiplication of NGOs and movements denouncing and promoting human rights all over the world. Thus, the human rights paradigm, institutional innovations (such as ‘truth commissions’ and trials) and symbols and forms of memorialization that evolved in South America expanded and have become useful models in other parts of the world.17 However, as this chapter has tried to show, although memory discourses appear to be global in one register, at their core they remain tied to the histories of specific nations and states. After periods of extreme political violence and repression, each particular nation has to struggle to create a democratic polity. In the process, each nation and each local community (at the sub-national level) has to find ways to face past violence and deal with its memories. Such processes are always local or national. As Huyssen claims, ‘the political site of memory practices is still national, not post-national or global’ (Huyssen 2003, 16).

Notes 1 To give just some examples, the political links between Southern Brazil and Argentina during the Vargas and Peron regimes are discussed in Chindemi (2000). The role of Paraguayan exiles in Argentina is highlighted by the public hearings that the Paraguayan Truth Commission held in the city of Posadas, Argentina (see http://www.verdadyjusticia-dp.gov.py/ – last accessed 18/5/2010). 2 The analysis presented here is modelled after Olick’s analysis of the ‘normalization’ policies in Germany since the Second World War (Olick 2003). 3 The ‘anti-subversive war’ training led by the US is only one part of the story. Since the late nineteenth century, the Argentine and Chilean armies followed the Prussian model of army formation. French officers with experience of repression in Algeria trained local army officers in torture and repressive techniques. A documentary film, Escadrons de la mort, l’école française (2005), by MarieDominique Robin, attests to that training. 4 The patriotic terminology is ambiguous in terms of gender. In Spanish, ‘patria’ is feminine while patriarchal in its root. 5 The military used other metaphors in their discourse. Clearly, organic views prevailed: there was an infection, a virus or a foreign growth which had to be extirpated through profound surgery. There was also a familistic discourse, seeing the nation as a big family and the military the protective father. Blame for what was happening to the ‘infected’ young was to be placed on mothers, who were not taking good care of their children (Jelin 2008).

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6 The military visions during dictatorship and the changes of meaning that the military gave to their governments are analysed in the papers included in Hershberg and Agüero (2005). 7 Stemming from this rethinking of violence in terms of human rights, the paradigm extended to other, more structural, forms of discrimination and violence: the rights of the native populations, the situation of women and so on (Stavenhagen 1996; Jelin 1993). 8 For the global path of the ‘truth commissions’, see Hayner (2002). 9 In that paper, Sikkink presents international data concerning the spread of Argentine ‘innovations’ in ways of dealing with past violence and state terrorism. The innovations that spread all over the world include the organization of the relatives of victims and their performative practices (stemming from the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and later on the organization of HIJ@S), investigative commissions, national and foreign trials, ‘truth trials’, forensic genetic techniques to identify exhumed bodies, repeal of amnesties, practices of commemoration and museums, and several other such policies. 10 Argentina: Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas, 1984. Nunca más. ‘Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas’. Buenos Aires: Ed. Univ. de Buenos Aires; Chile: Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación, 1991. ‘Informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación’. Santiago de Chile: Secretaría de Comunicación y Cultura, Ministerio Secretaría General de Gobierno. 11 Igreja Católica, Arquidiocese de São Paulo, 1985. Brazil: Nunca mais, with a preface by Paulo Evaristo Arns. Petrópolis: Vozes; Uruguay: Servicio Paz y Justicia, 1989. ‘Uruguay nunca más: informe sobre la violación a los derechos humanos (1972-85)’. Montevideo: SERPAJ. 12 Only in 2004 did the Chilean government act to establish a new commission – Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura – which received around 37,000 denunciations of detention and torture. 13 This European judicial activity had an important impact on the justice systems of Argentina and, to a lesser extent, Chile. Paradoxically, one of the mechanisms to stop the action of justice systems in other countries and international attention focused on repression within each country was to refuse extradition demands on the basis that the accused were being indicted in their own countries. 14 For developments during this decade, see Smulovitz (2008) and Sikkink (2008). 15 ‘Informe Final de la Comisión para la Paz’, 10 de abril de 2003: http://www. presidencia.gub.uy/noticias/archivo/2003/abril/Informe_final.doc – last accessed 18/5/2010. 16 In the foreword to the report, presented in 2004, President Lagos says, ‘the elaboration of this report is an unprecedented experience, since it re-constructs, 31 years after the events, a complete picture of the tremendous abjection that the country lived through, and attempts to create the conditions for reconstructing our collective memory. It represents an act of restoring the dignity of the victims and an attempt to heal the wounds of our national soul’ (Chile, Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura, 2004. ‘Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura’. Santiago: Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura).

Elizabeth Jelin 77 17 A whole new field of study (known as the field of ‘transitional justice’, as testified by the International Journal of Transitional Justice – see http://ijtj. oxfordjournals.org) and of international intervention has developed since the South American dictatorships of the 1970s and the transitions of the 1980s.

Bibliography Acuña, Carlos H., González Bombal, Inés, Jelin, Elizabeth, Landi, Oscar, Quevedo, Luis Alberto, Smulovitz, Catalina and Vacchieri, Adriana (1995), Juicio, castigos y memorias: derechos humanos y justicia en la política argentina (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión). Agüero, Felipe and Hershberg, Eric (2005), ‘Las fuerzas armadas y las memorias de la represión en el Cono Sur’, in: Eric Hershberg and Felipe Agüero (eds), Memorias militares sobre la represión en el Cono Sur: visiones en disputa en dictadura y democracia (Madrid and Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI de España Editores and Siglo XXI de Argentina Editores), 1–34. Boccia Paz, Alfredo, López, Miguel H., Pecci, Antonio V. and Giménez, María Gloria (2002), En los sótanos de los generales: Los documentos ocultos del Operativo Cóndor (Asunción: Expolibro). Chindemi, Julia (2000), ‘¿Ciudadanos o extranjeros? Espacio fronterizo y soberanía territorial en el corredor internacional de Río Grande del Sur’, in: Alejandro Grimson (ed.), Fronteras, naciones e identidades (Buenos Aires: CICCUS – La Crujía), 74–98. Connan, Eric and Rousso, Henry (1994), Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas (Paris: Fayard). Dinges, John (2004), The Condor years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York: The New Press). Feld, Claudia (2000), Entrevista con Henry Rousso: El duelo es imposible y necesario. Puentes 1/2. Halperin Donghi, Tulio (1993), The Contemporary History of Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press). Hayner, Priscilla (2002), Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions. 2nd edn (New York: Routledge [2001]). Hershberg, Eric and Agüero, Felipe (eds) (2005), Memorias militares sobre la represión en el Cono Sur: visiones en disputa en dictadura y democracia (Madrid and Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI de España Editores and Siglo XXI de Argentina Editores). Huyssen, Andreas (2003), Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Jelin, Elizabeth (1993), About Women, about Human Rights (Lima: Entre Mujeres. Diálogo Sur-Norte). Jelin, Elizabeth (1995), ‘La política de la memoria: El movimiento de derechos humanos y la construcción democrática en la Argentina’, in: Carlos Acuña et al. (eds), Juicio, castigos y memoria: Derechos humanos y justicia en la política argentina (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión), 101–46. Jelin, Elizabeth (2003), State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Jelin, Elizabeth (2005), ‘Los derechos humanos entre el estado y la sociedad’, in: Juan Suriano (ed.), Nueva Historia Argentina 10 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamerican), 507–57.

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Jelin, Elizabeth (2008), ‘Victims, Relatives, and Citizens in Argentina: Whose Voice is Legitimate Enough?’, in: Richard A. Wilson and Richard D. Brown (eds), Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 177–201. Jelin, Elizabeth and Sempol, Diego (eds) (2006), El pasado en el futuro: Los movimientos juveniles (Madrid and Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI de España Editores and Siglo XXI de Argentina Editores). Keck, Margaret and Sikkink, Kathryn (1998), Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Koselleck, Reinhart (1985), Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Times (Cambridge/MA: MIT Press). Lima, Samarone (2002), ‘Clamor: la colcha de retazos de la memoria’, in: Elizabeth Jelin and Ludmila da Silva Catela (eds), Los archivos de la represión: documentos, memoria y verdad (Madrid and Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno de España and Siglo Veintiuno de Argentina Editores), 115–35. Lima, Samarone (2003), Clamor. A vitória de uma conspiracao brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Objetiva). Markarian, Vania (2005), Left in Transformation: Uruguayan Exiles and the Latin American Human Rights Networks, 1967–1984 (New York: Routledge). Nora, Pierre (1996), ‘General Introduction: Between memory and history’, in: Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Vol 1 – Conflicts and Divisions (New York: Columbia University Press). Olick, Jeffrey (2003), ‘What Does it Mean to Normalize the Past? Official Memory in German Politics since 1989’, in: Jeffrey Olick (ed.), States of Memory. Continuities, Conflicts and Transformations in National Retrospection (Durham: Duke University Press), 259–88. Roht-Arriaza, Naomi (2005), The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Sikkink, Kathryn (1996), ‘The Emergence, Evolution and Effectiveness of the Latin American Human Rights Network’, in: Elizabeth Jelin and Eric Hershberg (eds), Constructing Democracy. Human Rights, Citizenship and Society in Latin America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), 59–84. Sikkink, Kathryn (2008), ‘From Pariah State to Global Protagonist: Argentina and the Struggle for International Human Rights’, Latin American Politics and Society 50/1, 1–29. Smulovitz, Catalina (2008), ‘In Search of the Snark: Accountability and Justice for Past Human Rights Violations in Argentina’. Paper prepared for the Project: ‘Comparing the Effectiveness of the Accountability Mechanisms in Eastern Europe and Latin America’ jointly organized by El Colegio de México and the United Nations University in association with Oxford University. Stavenhagen, Rodolfo (1996), ‘Indigenous Rights: Some Conceptual Problems’, in: Elizabeth Jelin and Eric Hershberg (eds), Constructing Democracy. Human Rights, Citizenship and Society in Latin America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), 141–59. Stern, Steve (2004), Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 (Durham and London: Duke University Press). Sturken, Marita (2007), Tourists of History. Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham: Duke University Press). Verbitsky, Horacio (1995), El vuelo (Buenos Aires: Planeta).

4 Vietnam, the New Left and the Holocaust: How the Cold War Changed Discourse on Genocide Berthold Molden

1968: A missing link in the global history of the politics of history The years 1945 and 1989 were crucial for the genesis of the social-scientific conceptualization of memory as we know it today. During these two periods of upheaval, the content and political meaning of ‘memory’ was shaped by specific social phenomena, particularly the experience of repression. In 1945, the victorious Allies began to understand the full extent of the Holocaust in the liberated concentration and extermination camps: the most systematic genocide in world history had been carried out in the very region that presented itself as the centre of civilization, progress and enlightenment. In the late 1940s, the first conclusions drawn from this experience, in the form of the statutes and judgements of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, became the basis for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention. Those agreements subsequently formed an ethical reference point for a new system of international relations. In the 1990s, the end of the Cold War introduced a global boom in activism within the field of the politics of history. Formerly communist Eastern Europe was the scene of a series of ‘lustrations’ and waves of reform that frequently went no further than superficial gestures of score settling. The same period saw the disappearance of the external threat that had compelled cooperation in Western Europe and inhibited certain internal demands and criticisms. First, Jewish victims’ groups demanded material restitution and compensation for the crimes of National Socialism. This initiative cleared the way for a series of historical commissions, research projects and compensation laws that subsequently also benefited

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non-Jewish forced labourers and other victims of National Socialist policies.1 This met with a new generation of investigators and social activists who, already since the early 1980s, had started to change public historical discourse in various European societies. Similarly in Latin America, since the 1980s, the ‘recuperation of memory’ has played a decisive role in the fight against repressive Cold War regimes or their operatives. There as well, the destruction of European Jewry became an established component of discourses on one’s own political history: a Guatemalan ‘holocausto Maya’ was soon evoked, beside ‘American Holocaust’ and ‘African American Holocaust’ in the US, and years after peace movements had warned of a ‘Nuclear Holocaust’; also today, cases without ethnic aspects continue to be incorporated into this category. While coming to terms with the Second World War and the Cold War are widely recognized as essential steps in the formation of a transnationally convertible historical/political discourse, 1968 has so far been neglected as a similarly key moment. Yet this is surprising, for that historical moment saw the fundamentally European and American memory of the crimes of National Socialism connecting with the problem of decolonization. Concerning the early 1960s and the French-Algerian war, this phenomenon has recently been analyzed by Michael Rothberg as a co-determinant process of ‘multi-directional memory’. (Rothberg 2009). Nevertheless, the role the transnational Vietnam debate played in the development of human rights and Holocaust discourse has undergone a remarkable elision by the most frequently cited experts in the field. So, yes, Peter Novick, Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider are right to stress the impact the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials had in the first half of the 1960s, which concerned the nascent widening of public interest in the history of the Shoa.2 And Elazar Barkan cites the decolonization process in Asia and Africa as an important factor in the development of historico-political rhetoric (Barkan 2000). But a contextualization of 1968 and of the Vietnam War is largely missing in the history of the emergence of a global public sphere of historical/political discourse. Raul Hilberg rarely mentioned it and Peter Novick only dedicates a footnote to the Holocaust analogies of Vietnam activists (Gilcher-Holtey 2005; Novick 2000, note 58). This absence is particularly remarkable because ‘1968’ can be understood as a link between the historical discourse of intellectual elites in the triangle US, Europe and (on a wider basis) Israel, as well as the common element among post-colonial, anti-imperialistic and civiland human-rights protest movements around the world. While 1968 has already been widely interpreted as a ‘transnational year of change’

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(Horn and Kenney 2004) and of global consolidation and acceleration of social change, it has not systematically been put in connection with the emergence of a ‘cosmopolitan memory’ (Levy and Sznaider 2006) and/or a ‘cosmopolitan morality’ (Levy and Sznaider 2004). This chapter advances the thesis that the Vietnam War created an increasingly comprehensive framework of reference within the discourse of revolutionary avant-gardes in the Tricontinental South, militants from decolonization movements and European and American students and civil rights activists. A common coordinate in this reference system was the memory of the Holocaust. It often served as a code for antiimperialistic and opposition discourse that showed little concern for the historical specificity of the Shoa and that repeatedly mutated into antiSemitism. On the other hand, however, the recourse to an analogy with Holocaust helped different groups of victims gain increased international attention. On the basis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1967 speech at a tribunal on US war crimes in Vietnam, I will examine exemplary elements of these analogies. The arguments in Sartre’s speech are not by any means the first of their kind, but because of their content and background they are particularly clearly formulated,3 and furthermore, they received wide international diffusion. I analyse them here in a double international context: within the overall discursive setting, as well as the global political situation to which the rhetorical structure was intended to respond.

The Holocaust references of the Russell Commission The Russell Commission, or Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, was created in 1966 at the initiative of the British philosopher, mathematician and political activist Bertrand Russell, employing the methods of American citizen tribunals to prove that war crimes had been committed in Vietnam. The tribunal met in May 1967 in Stockholm and in November 1967 in the Danish city of Roskilde. Led by Jean-Paul Sartre, its members included prominent and quite thoroughly leftist personalities like Vladimir Dedijer, Wolfgang Abendroth, Günther Anders, James Baldwin, Lelio Basso, Simone de Beauvoir, Lázaro Cárdenas, Stokely Carmichael, Isaac Deutscher, Haika Grossman, Gisele Halimi, Mahmud Ali Kasuri, Carl Oglesby and Peter Weiss. David Horowitz, Claude Lanzmann and Ralph Schoenmann were also involved. At the end of the second meeting the tribunal announced that, among other things, the US was guilty of genocide. The judgement cited the Hague Land Warfare Convention, the Nuremberg and Tokyo judgements, the General Declaration of Human Rights and the fourth Geneva Convention of 12 August 1949

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(Russell and Sartre 1969). On 1 December 1967, chairman Jean-Paul Sartre read a closing speech that summarized the political and historical bases of the decision. Referring to the creator of the concept of genocide, Raphael Lemkin, Sartre explained in his introduction, ‘Every case of genocide is a product of history and bears the stamp of the society which has given birth to it. The one we have before us for judgment is the act of the greatest capitalist power in the world today. It is as such that we must try to analyze it – in other words, as the simultaneous expression of the economic infrastructure of that power, its political objectives and the contradictions of its present situation’ (Duffet 1970, 615). Thus, we already find genocide (and in the end, also the Holocaust)4 assigned a meaning that was based on a specific late-1960s Marxist critique of capitalism. Building on the theses of the Frankfurt school and the earlier writings of Ernest Mandel, who was alone in dealing with the phenomenon of Auschwitz from within post-war Marxist theory (Traverso 1999/2), the Holocaust was treated as the criminal culmination of imperialism and capitalism. Therefore, it was not considered unique but rather a warning that something similar and worse could follow. In Sartre’s argumentation there were two elements intended to substantiate the factual claim of genocide in the case of Vietnam: on the one hand, the essence of capitalism and its deployment at maximal power in the form of the US; and on the other hand, the power struggle of the ideological blocks over the political development of every nation and society constituted in the wake of decolonization. Sartre thus sought to establish that capitalism was responsible for the phenomenon of ‘total war’, which does not merely seek to destroy hostile armies, but rather the total potential resistance of the opponent, beginning with war industry, but also including civil industry, infrastructure and even the civilian population. The ‘total’ nature of the war, however, also consists of the tendency for the conflict to expand into a ‘global conflagration’ – and it does so precisely because capitalist powers constantly struggle to widen their spheres of influence. In a third moment, Sartre turned his attention to the civil population of the aggressor: according to him, the very striving for expansion and domination common to capitalist-democratic systems of authority, when directed inward, turns into the emotional participation of entire societies in conflicts – entire populations come to view other populations as enemies worthy of extermination. In these three steps, the philosopher attributed the genocidal tendency of contemporary warfare to the very nature of high capitalism. Yet he made no mention of the propulsive

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force of ideology within political systems as a totalizing, and therefore potentially genocidal, element. However, ideology plays a crucial role in the second main part of Sartre’s argument, which situates the Vietnam War (and the historical/ political discourses surrounding it) within the process of decolonization. Sartre makes a distinction here regarding genocides that were committed in the context of the first wave of colonialism. With the exception of the destruction of the Indigenous peoples of North America, colonizers were concerned with the preservation of a working population that could be exploited. Yet, the vast extinction of the inhabitants of the Americas, as one of the most violent colonial occurrences, had already aroused the interest of the very man who coined the notion of genocide: Rafael Lemkin (MacDonnell and Moses 2005, 501–29). And, as Sartre could demonstrate through the relatively recent example of his own country in Algeria, this concern does not preclude racially and politically motivated mass murders. In France, the crimes of the Wehrmacht were a barometer for the actions of the French colonial power in the bloody war of independence against the Front de Libération Nationale in Algeria (1954–62), which thus became ‘the key event in the political socialization of many activists in student groups responsible for carrying out the May 1968 movement’ (Gilcher-Holtey 2005, 57). But the Algerian war was also quite well known to the US public, and it was associated over and over again with Vietnam. On 19 January 1963, for instance, The Nation wrote, ‘It is a dirty, cruel war. As dirty and cruel as the war waged by the French forces in Algeria, which so shocked the American conscience’. Sartre thereby raised the issue of the distinction, which was also widespread in public opinion after 1945, between racially motivated colonial massacres and the persecution of Jews: ‘The Nuremberg Tribunal was still fresh in people’s minds when the French massacred 45,000 Algerians at Setif, as an “example.” But this sort of thing was so commonplace that no one even thought to condemn the French government in the same terms as they did the Nazis’ (Duffet 1970, 615). Thus, Sartre established the analogy that lay at the foundation of the entire tribunal. Long before not only historical uniqueness, but also incommensurability had been attributed to the Holocaust, Sartre looked at the possibility that such a crime could be committed again. Thus, the Holocaust discourse of 1968 compared the perpetrators, not the victims. Genocide, in the sense of the 1948 convention, consisted of the destruction of cultural, economic and political structures. The total physical destruction of the population would have contradicted the interests of

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colonial powers and – according to Sartre – was only put into practice during the neocolonial wars of repression. Because the guerrilla tactics used in wars of decolonization were dependent on the broad support of the people, the entire population became potential enemies of the colonial power. Through its analysis, the tribunal thereby addressed a practice that would strongly influence the direction of the nominally anti-Communist counterinsurgency over the course of the following decades, particularly in Latin America and South East Asia. Mao coined the phrase that ‘a guerrilla moves among the people like a fish in the water’. The cynical counter-metaphor was to ‘drain the sea’ – a formulation that was to be as applicable in Latin America as in the former Indochina. This meant that in theatres of war, the civilian population (when it was not collectively murdered in massacres) was to be interned in supervised model villages and camps in order to rob the guerrillas of their support. In some cases – particularly in the Vietnam War – Sartre diagnosed the readiness of the neocolonial powers to respond to the ‘people’s war’, in the absence of domestic political protest, with immediate genocide: ‘total genocide emerges as the absolute basis of an antiguerrilla strategy’ (ibid., 617). Even before the Commission, Bertrand Russell’s campaign had been strongly influenced by the anti-colonial movement; in 1964, the Movement for Colonial Freedom, which was active in London, published Russell’s text War and Atrocity in Vietnam alongside an essay entitled Indo-China Today by the left-wing Labour delegate William Warbey (Russell and Warbey 1967). Sartre alluded to another issue that is highly relevant here, although it remained rather peripheral in his argumentation: the global component of the Cold War. General William Westmoreland is quoted for his statement that the Vietnam War was conducted ‘to show that guerrilla warfare does not pay’ (Duffet 1970, 618).5 Sartre asked for whom this demonstration was intended, and answered that it was a matter of economics – it was meant as a ‘warning’ for Latin America and secondarily the entire Third World. Sartre’s analysis was by no means unusual for its time,6 in part because historical ‘lessons’ from the military policy of intervention in Latin America had already been instrumental in justifying the US intervention in South East Asia, and vice versa. When Secretary of State John Foster Dulles set his sights on Vietnam in 1954 as the gateway to South East Asia, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson warned of an ‘utterly hopeless’ adventure (Rabe 1990, 176). That neither Eisenhower nor the Dulles brothers heeded Wilson’s warning was in no small part due to a successful foreign policy experience of recent years – the June 1954 intervention in Guatemala. Yet the overthrow of

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the reformist government under Jacobo Arbenz had been carried out by a reactionary Guatemalan colonel with CIA support, not US troops; the US Air Force had flown only a few limited attacks, which made the enterprise a cheap victory for Dulles. Thus, he explained to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 13 January 1955 the necessity ‘to put up a good stout effort’ in Vietnam because the situation in Guatemala had seemed just as hopeless, ‘but we kept a stout heart, kept our courage up, and then all of a sudden things began to get better, and that is a possibility in Vietnam’ (Herring 1990, 229f.). During the 1960s, the US began to provide military support for the counter-insurgency policies of Latin American regimes. Anti-guerilla strategists such as General William Yarborough and Public Safety Advisor John Longan travelled back and forth between South East Asia and Latin America as advisors and trainers in order to bring the respective experiences of each region to application in the other (Grandin 2006, 96ff.). The Suharto coup in Indonesia in 1965 and the new regime’s subsequent mixture of state terror and outward economic liberalism opened up an inverse transfer-vector as it gave important ‘inspiration’ for US-interventionism in Chile in 1973 (Easter 2005, 55–73). Furthermore, the experience of ethnically/religiously triggered mass murder during the Indonesian ‘transition period’ was instrumental in introducing the topic of genocide into left critique of anti-communist Cold War policies (Cribb 2001, 219–39). It would take some time before the Cold War warriors’ methods in Latin America changed from selective terror to mass murder, but it was probably inevitable from the outset because of the essentially racist structure of post-colonial society. As the historian Greg Grandin summarizes, ‘Genocide may not have been an option in 1966 when strategists gamed for war in Central America, but by the early 1980s it had become an acceptable solution’ (Grandin 2006, 110). Reciprocally, Latin American and African revolutionaries modelled their strategies on the example of Vietnam during the 1970s, while Che Guevara called for ‘lots of Vietnams’ in Latin America. The ideological aspect of the Vietnam War, along with other bloodbaths of the Cold War, was to some extent defined by the murder of civilian populations, which was intended to deprive the respective guerrilla groups of their operational and political support. The formula ‘better dead than Red’ therefore expressed the global commonality of the neocolonial and civil wars that began in the 1950s; at that time, socialism represented just as plausible an option for the post-colonial structure of society as did free-market economy – and was therefore a danger to the political interests of the US and its allies. References to the brutal practices of

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colonization – the choice between subjugation and assimilation versus destruction, or indeed the elimination of this choice according to the murderous slogan ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’ – were equally applicable. The intention of proving that the US was guilty of genocide corresponded to Russell’s strategy of presenting his citizen’s tribunal as a variant of the Nuremburg Tribunal. The analogy thus constructed between the crimes of National Socialism and the war crimes of the US Army in Vietnam would determine the procedures used by the tribunal, and greatly influence its public reception. This was a consciously drawn strategic comparison, and the members of the tribunal principally responsible for designing it were the philosopher Günther Anders, the writer Peter Weiss and the Yugoslav dissident Vladimir Dedijer, along with Russell himself and his assistant Ralph Schoenmann (Klinghoffer 2002, 114). Anders, who was Jewish and lived in Vienna, even demanded that the tribunal meet in Auschwitz and Krakow, and exclude Germany and Austria as meeting places in order to avoid providing Nazis there with revisionist arguments (ibid.). The comparison was a matter of dispute from the outset, because it met with criticism from Holocaust survivors as inappropriate (ibid.), a reservation that Simone de Beauvoir shared (ibid., 156). The tribunal itself, however, offered different objections, too. Isaac Deutscher wanted to base the tribunal on the right to self-determination, because Nuremberg stood for victor’s justice, while the Vietnam tribunal was composed of citizens of different countries in opposition to war crimes that were still being committed (ibid., 114). As a Marxist, Deutscher also referred to the disruption that had split the victors of 1945 into the two opposed camps of the Cold War. He distanced himself from the US and instead invoked Trotzky’s old demand of the peoples’ right of self-determination. After an intensive discussion, however, the Nuremberg strategy was generally accepted. Accordingly, witnesses were interrogated and documents were presented into evidence to show the facts concerning two primary charges: US aggression (war guilt) and genocide. The latter claim was substantiated by the high number of victims among the civilian population, the use of chemical weapons and napalm, the destruction of resources and obligatory resettlement in hamlets. These hamlets were repeatedly called ‘concentration camps’ (Duffet 1970, 620). Russell himself had always differentiated between the systematic destruction of the Jews by the Nazis and the US conduct of the war in Vietnam: ‘It is true that the Nazis systematically exterminated the Jews and the United Sates has not yet done anything comparable in Vietnam.

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With the exception of the extermination of the Jews, however, everything that the Germans did in Eastern Europe has been repeated by the United States in Vietnam on a scale which is larger and with an efficiency which is more terrible and complete’ (Russell 1967/2, 121). But this historical difference was blurred in the opinion rendered by the tribunal. This became clear when Peter Weiss, Holocaust-survivor and author of the play Vietnam Discourse (which debuted in Frankfurt in 1968), wrote concerning the American General Jacquard Rothschild:7 ‘If Rothschild, who belongs by name to those whom Hitler condemned to extermination, is now in a terrible reversal of history willing to inflict genocide upon another people, he is making himself the spokesperson for a tendency that is at present witnessing a rapid rise’ (Weiss 1967, 7). Weiss did not leave his audience in any doubt concerning the nature of this historical reversal, writing in connection to the use of chemical weapons by the US of the testing of ‘new means of comprehensive human extermination’: ‘New machines that more effectively diffuse gas are being offered by American producers. The operating instructions reflect the same inventive spirit which German manufacturers once dedicated to the construction of gas chambers and crematoriums’ (ibid.). On the authority of those who had suffered, an analogy was constructed – long before the thesis of the incommensurability of the Holocaust – which Sartre’s diagnosis also supported: ‘Now we can recognize in those dark and misled souls the truth of the Vietnam war: it meets all of Hitler’s specifications. Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews. The armed forces of the United States torture and kill men, women and children in Vietnam merely because they are Vietnamese’. (Duffet 1970, 624f.)

The diffusion of the Vietnam Holocaust analogy: On the way to a universal reference? I have tried to show that the Marxist criticism levelled by the Russell Commission against the US, which Sartre’s closing speech condensed into a legal plea, derived its interpretation of genocide from a specific analysis of capitalism and was framed in the ideological power relations of the Cold War. This argument was perfectly suited to the various selfstyled ‘leftist’ opposition cultures of the period. It reached the most politically active youth counter-cultures, the student and Civil Rights movements in Europe, the US and Mexico, the civilian and military

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opposition in the Cold War’s ‘hot spots’ and the political avant-gardes of marginalized Indigenous peoples in post-colonial contexts. In the space of this chapter, the diffusion of this discourse can only be suggested through a few examples. In discussing the diffusion of the argumentation outlined above, I certainly do not mean to imply that discursive recourse to the Holocaust, or to the sets of rules derived from it (such as the Convention on Genocide), are solely attributable to the Russell Commission. The discourse of the convention is being analysed here much more as a highly condensed example with immediate, strong and international public effect (Dedijer 1969; Dedijer et al. 1967; Duffet 1970; Eljach 1971; Gerassi 1968; Limqueco et al. 1971; Russell 1967/1; Russell and Sartre 1969; Sartre and ElkaïmSartre 1968/1; 1968/2). The results were very rapidly published in English, French, German, Spanish and Dutch; the books and articles that appeared on the subject in the US were particularly numerous. The US also witnessed the first direct imitations of the tribunal, beginning with the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation organized in 1971 by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and followed shortly thereafter by Congressional War Crimes Hearings concerning Vietnam. The Winter Soldier Investigation was opened by Second Lieutenant William Crandel, who explained, ‘We went to defend the Vietnamese people and our testimony will show that we are committing genocide against them. We went to fight for freedom and our testimony will show that we have turned Vietnam into a series of concentration camps’. The goal of the public hearings was clear: ‘We intend to indict those really responsible for My Lai, for Vietnam, for attempting genocide’ (Vietnam Veterans Against the War 1972, 1f.). This initiative was directly inspired by the Russell tribunal and the American-organized Citizen Commissions of Inquiry, which explains the predominant role the organizers gave to the crime of genocide. Russell had always hoped to be able to change the course of events by creating an outcry within American public opinion; in 1967, he published a text in New York that was advertized as ‘Russell’s appeal to the American conscience’ (Russell 1967/2, back cover). In 1970, the American prosecutor in Nuremberg, Telford Taylor, published a book entitled Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy; Taylor thus linked himself to the Russell tribunal (Taylor 1970). The analysis of racism played a crucial role in the reception of Vietnamgenocide discourse within the US and in post-colonial contexts. The question of racism resonated in the US with the Civil Rights movement, whose most radical faction was also involved in the Russell Commission through the participation of Stokely Carmichael. In a message to the

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second session of the tribunal, Carmichael explained the argument of the Black political movement against the Vietnam War: ‘In order to get rid of the Blacks, they [the US] send them to the most distant fronts in Vietnam. This makes it possible for them to commit genocide against two peoples at once without having to get their own hands dirty’. Therefore Blacks in the US had to fight to avoid being forced to ‘vegetate like Indians in concentration camps they call reservations’ (Russell and Sartre 1969, 237). At the same time, the ‘races’ were clearly associated with particular social classes, as young men from low-income social groups were twice as likely to be drafted as those from prosperous families (Kaiser 1988, 120). Precisely this domestic political issue also pulled many leftist intellectuals into the Vietnam debates, among them – for instance Students for a Democratic Society – numerous Jews who contributed their own Holocaust analogies (Kurlansky 2004, 99f.; Novick 2000, 326, note 58).8 In Europe, this discourse also had certain specific starting points, two of which bear mentioning here. While in France, for instance, the Vietnam mobilization remained rather weak, Sartre – at least since his 1961 preface to Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth – was a central figure in the decolonization debate. In West Germany, by contrast, the 1960s were characterized by ambivalence between high sensitivity to the Holocaust stemming from the concentration camp trials and an increasing desire to erase the past (Goschler 2007; Siegfried 2003). At the same time, the perception of the US in West German imaginaries oscillated between the image of the great ally and the reincarnation or rather collaborative continuation of Nazism’s evil spirit; this perception triggered strong anti-American feelings, and not only among the later Red Army Fraction – sentiments, as the brilliant Cold War scholar Bernd Greiner has rightly stressed, not free of fantasies of revenge (Greiner 2004). The protest movement – in particular the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund (SDS, the same abbreviation as that of Students for a Democratic Society) – quickly adopted the Sartrean discourse and published it in the April 1968 issue of the SDS magazine Neue Kritik, thus preceding the book editions published by Rohwohlt in 1968 and 1969 (Sartre 1968). In 1966, the SDS had already held a meeting in Frankfurt concerning Vietnam, with Herbert Marcuse as a main speaker. The German Marcuse, exiled in California, called for envisioning the example of Auschwitz as a reminder to prevent new crimes like those in Vietnam (Gilcher-Holtey 2005, 39). Meanwhile, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the memory of the Holocaust usually veered off into anti-fascist rhetoric, which in the view

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of the ruling regimes thereby made it innocuous. Broadly speaking, we observe a ‘lack of interest’ in Holocaust history in official historiographical and public-memory discourses of Communist Eastern Europe. If the persecution and attempted annihilation of European Jewry is mentioned, those aspects of local collaboration and of ‘national’ (Polish, Ukrainian, Belo-Russian, Baltic and other Soviet territories, Romanian, Croatian or Serbian) contributions to the Holocaust are mostly blinded out. For the 1960s, we may safely apply what Zvi Gitelman has said about Soviet historiography, that the Holocaust was ‘submerged in the story of fascist occupation, calling for no special examination’ (Gitelman 1990, 23–37).9 At times, Holocaust memory was also erased by new eruptions of state-organized anti-Semitism, such as in Poland in 1968 (Kosmola 2004, 509–40; Sauerland 2004, 141–74). In the Ukraine, both official discourse and legislation on historical memory link the Holocaust with the Holodomor, the mass famine caused by Stalin’s repressive politics in the late 1920s ( Jilge and Troebst 2006, 1–81; Podol’s’kyi 2008), but in the 1960s and 1970s there was little debate at all. Other Central European societies show similar patterns – with the exception of the German Democratic Republic, where Nazi heritage was attributed to West Germany only, while thousands of former National Socialists were silently incorporated into the new regime, not unlike in its Western counterpart.10 It is in this sense that German intellectual Klaus Theweleit understands the Berlin Wall as an ‘essentially joint East/West German co-production, necessary for both sides to split off what had been deeply repressed’ (Theweleit 1995, 22). Also, although the arguments of the Vietnam Tribunal may have been welcome among socialist foreign politicians as harsh critique against American Cold War politics, Bertrand Russell had always carefully avoided any uttering of sympathy towards post-Stalinist state Socialism. Hence, we find comparatively little echo of the Tribunal in Eastern Europe. In the post- or late-colonial societies of Africa, Asia and Latin America, the reception of the genocide discourse was strongly coupled with the context of political and cultural liberation movements. Between these movements and leftist circles in industrialized nations there was increasing intellectual contact, such as the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana (Young 2001, 204–216). For the wars of liberation in southern Africa during the 1960s and 1970s – for instance in Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Malawi and also the movement in South Africa – Vietnam functioned as a model for the guerrillas. In the case of the Portuguese colonies, the anti-fascist rhetoric played a particularly important role in rallying the support of the anti-colonialist public in Europe.

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The Russell Commission itself also weighed in on the conflict with the anti-Communist dictatorships of the Cold War. At its 1974 meeting in Rome and 1975 meeting in Brussels, the so-called second Russell Commission concerned itself with the repressive regimes of Latin America. Only the Brazilian government was charged with genocide in the Brussels Commission’s concluding statement of January 1975 (Literaberinto). But the chairman, the Italian politician and lawyer Lelio Basso, later institutionalized the initiative for the Tribunal Permanente de los Pueblos (the People’s Permanent Tribunal) which has been active since 1979 (Klinghoffer 2002, 149ff.). Accusations of genocide against governments, particularly in Latin America, were repeatedly brought before this ‘court’ from the 1980s onward (Falla 1984). The Guatemalan human rights activist Frank La Rue Levy summarized the historical/political meaning of the crime of genocide for the victims of the dictatorships: ‘Genocide is so to speak the crime of crimes, because genocide implies massacres, disappearances, torture, the murder of pregnant women, the problem of gender and the problem of racism and discrimination – which are fundamental for an understanding of Guatemala. We are of the opinion that genocide is therefore the symbolic case of the present transition’ (Molden 2007, 321). But the reference to genocide (and frequently, the Holocaust) was not only used in Guatemala or Brazil, where many victims belonged to ethnic groups. It also came to be generally accepted in cases concerning students, trade unionists or other politically defined victim groups. As examples, one can cite Argentina11 or Mexico, where in July 2007 a federal judge classified the massacre of over 300 students in Tlatelolco on 2 October 1968 as genocide. In his decision, the judge argued that the murdered demonstrators in question constituted a ‘national group’ because of their political orientation. This judgement is particularly important in light of current conflicts in Mexico, and clarifies the contemporary relevance of the politics of history. However, this development says very little about historical understanding of the Shoa in Mexico, which can still only be considered rudimentary (Stavans 2001). The first investigations into perceptions of the Holocaust in the so-called Third World have already been conducted (Miles 2004), but at present much empirical research remains to be done in this area.12 Finally, we are left with the question as to what degree the discourse deployed in Sartre’s text has been universalized. The provisional answer – I hope to be able to give a more valid one after intensive empirical research – turns out to be ambivalent. In the last section of his speech, Sartre talked about the global political meaning of the war crimes in

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Vietnam. He not only accused the US, in the sense mentioned above, of ‘consciously carrying out this admonitory war in order to use genocide as a challenge and a threat to all peoples of the world’ (Duffet 1970, 625), but also of plotting a world war in full awareness of the nature of ‘total war’ in the age of high capitalism. The all-encompassing claim of hegemony that Sartre diagnosed in the US therefore makes all human beings potential victims of the world power; certainly not in the sense of a final physical destruction of all human beings, but in the sense of different individual passages of the Convention on Genocide. Thus, the particular fate of European Jewry in the Holocaust had become the necessity for universal solidarity in the face of a genocide threatening all humankind. Absolute evil was not abstracted, however, but rather fastened concretely in the US: The Vietnamese fight for all men and the American forces against all. Neither figuratively nor abstractly. And not only because genocide would be a crime universally condemned by international law, but because little by little the whole human race is being subjected to this genocidal blackmail piled on top of atomic blackmail, that is, to absolute, total war. This crime, carried out every day before the eyes of the world, renders all who do not denounce it accomplices of those who commit it, so that we are being degraded today for our future enslavement. In this sense imperialist genocide can only become more complete. The group which the United States wants to intimidate and terrorize by way of the Vietnamese nation is the human group in its entirety. (ibid. 626) The universal value Sartre proposed here was, in the long run, the same one present in the 1948 conception of human rights. One decade later, as a result of the establishment of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1975, this universalism would also paradoxically develop into an important basis for justifying military interventions by the United Nations, as well as by the US and NATO. Immanuel Wallerstein pointed out that the most recent variant of a ‘European universalism’ had thereby developed out of the challenge of decolonization and the ‘world revolution of 1968’ (Wallerstein 2006, 26ff. and 54ff.). Nevertheless, the Vietnam discourse of the Left in the 1960s introduced this argumentation about the universality of genocide to a new segment of an emerging global politics of history, and local participants now connected themselves to this discourse according to their specific

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interests. The historical/political reference to the Holocaust in the discourse of transnational opposition movements played an important role in this evolution.

Notes I owe great thanks to Shawn Gorman for his congenial and knowledgeable translation of this text into English. 1 Recently, however, this widening focus led to a mnemonic polyphony that went far beyond the intentions of the participants at a January 2000 conference in Stockholm on establishing the Holocaust as the ethical basis of European memory. The victims of allied air raids and forced resettlements in Central and Eastern Europe demanded recognition and found unexpected supporters in intellectuals like Günther Grass, even as the German federal government continued to invite the remaining ‘ethnic Germans’ to resettle in Germany. As a result, the suitability of the Holocaust as the basis for a common identity remained in dispute, and not only because of the supposed impossibility of a ‘negative founding myth’. 2 As a particular explanation, they allude to the role of the Six-Day War; cf. Novick (2000) and Levy and Sznaider (2006). 3 It is important to note that Sartre has been said to have emitted the Holocaust in his work in general, cf. Traverso (1999/1, 26–41). 4 Admittedly, Sartre makes no use of the word ‘Holocaust’ despite the fact that, in the wake of the Eichmann trial, it had entered common use by that time. See Novick (2000, 133f.). 5 Paradoxically, however, and in an inverted form, the experience of the Second World War served to justify the US engagement in Vietnam even as critics compared its tactics to the Holocaust: Lyndon B. Johnson used a reference to the Munich Conference of 1938 to argue that only a resolute stance in Vietnam could prevent a Third World War. See Kaiser (1988, 17). 6 In a way, it can still be found, for example in Klein (2007) and Grandin (2006). 7 Rothschild had served as an officer in the 93rd Chemical Battalion during the Second World War and had subsequently risen to the rank of Brigadier General. 8 In the introduction to his much-debated book, Norman Finkelstein lets us glimpse into the Holocaust memory of a post-war liberal Jewish family: ‘My mother always compared. […] In the face of the sufferings of AfricanAmericans, Vietnamese or Palestinians, my mother’s credo always was: We are all holocaust victims’ (Finkelstein 2001, 7). 9 Quoted from abstract available at http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/ abstract/5/1/23 (last visited 30 December 2008). 10 For Holocaust-referential politics of history in the GDR, cf. Fox (2001) and Herf (1999). 11 See in particular the work of Daniel Feierstein, for example Feierstein (2005). 12 For the problematic of transnational Holocaust memory in post-colonial contexts, cf. Molden (2008, 31–56).

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Bibliography Barkan, Elazar (2000), The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press). Cribb, Robert (2001), ‘Genocide in Indonesia, 1965–1966’, Journal of Genocide Research 3, June, 219–39. Dedijer, Vladimir (1969), Tribunal Russell: Sessiones de Estocolmo y Roskilde (Madrid: Siglo XXI). Dedijer, Vladimir; Elkaïm-Sartre, Arlette and Russell, Catherine (eds) (1967), Tribunal Russel: Le Jugement de Stockholm. Extraits des débats de la 1re Session, 1966–1967 (Paris: Gallimard). Duffet, John (ed.) (1970), Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the International War Crimes Tribunal (Stockholm, Copenhagen) (New York: Simon and Schuster). Easter, David (2005), ‘Keep the Indonesian Pot Boiling: Western Covert Intervention in Indonesia, October 1965–March 1966’, Cold War History 5, 55–73. Eljach, Álvaro (1971), Vietnam, 1940–1970 (Barcelona: Seix Barral). Falla, Ricardo (1984), ‘Genocidio en Guatemala’, in: Tribunal Permanente De Los Pueblos. Sesión Guatemala (Madrid: Iepala), 177–237. Feierstein, Daniel (ed.) (2005), Genocidio: La administración de la muette en la modernidad (Caseros, Argentina: Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero). Finkelstein, Norman (2001), The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New York: Verso). Fox, Thomas (2001), Stated Memory. East Germany and the Holocaust (Rochester: Camden House). Gerassi, John (1968), North Vietnam: A Documentary (London: Allen & Unwin). Gilcher-Holtey, Ingrid (2005), Die 68er-Bewegung. Deutschland, Westeuropa, USA (München: C. H. Beck). Gitelman, Zvi (1990), ‘History, Memory and Politics: The Holocaust in the Soviet Union’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5/1, 23–37. Goschler, Constantin (2007), ‘Politische Moral und Moralpolitik. Die lange Dauer der “Wiedergutmachung” und das politische Bild des “Opfers”’, in: Habbo Knoch (ed.), Bürgersinn mit Weltgefühl. Politische Moral und solidarischer Protest in den Sechziger und Siebziger Jahren (Göttingen: Wallstein), 138–56. Grandin, Greg (2006), Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books). Greiner, Bernd (2004), ‘Saigon, Nurnberg and the West. German Images of America in the Late 1960s’, in: Alexander Stephan (ed.), Americanization and Anti-Americanism: The German Encounter With American Culture After 1945 (Oxford: Berghahn), 51–63. Herf, Jeffrey (1999), Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Herring, George (1990), ‘“A Good Stout Effort”: John Foster Dulles and the Indochina Crisis, 1954’, in: Richard H. Immerman (ed.), John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 213–34. Horn, Gerd-Rainer and Kenney, Padraic (eds) (2004), Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).

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Jilge, Wilfried and Troebst, Stephan (2006), Divided Historical Cultures? World War II and Historical Memory in Soviet and Post-Soviet Ukraine (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag) ( Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 54/1, special issue). Kaiser, Charles (1988), 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Klein, Naomi (2007), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Penguin). Klinghoffer, Arthur Jay (2002), International Citizen’s Tribunals: Mobilizing Public Opinion to Advance Human Rights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Kosmola, Beate (2004), ‘Polen. Lange Schatten der Erinnerung. Der Zweite Weltkrieg im kollektiven Gedächtnis’, in: Monika Flacke (ed.), Mythen der Nationen. 1945 – Arena der Erinnerungen. Katalog zur Ausstellung im Deutschen Historischen Museum Berlin (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern), Vol. II, 509–40. Kurlansky, Mark (2004), 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine). Levy, Daniel and Sznaider, Natan (2004), ‘The Institutionalization of Cosmopolitan Morality: The Holocaust and Human Rights’, Journal of Human Rights 3/2, 143–57. Levy, Daniel and Sznaider, Natan (2006), The Holocaust And Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). Limqueco, Peter, Weiss, Peter and Coates, Ken (eds) (1971), Prevent the Crime of Silence: Reports from the Sessions of the International War Crimes Tribunal Founded by Bertrand Russell (London, Stockholm, Roskilde) (London: Allen Lane). Literaberinto: http://www.literaberinto.com/cortazar/tribunalrussel.htm (last visited 17 January 2008). MacDonnell, Micheal A. and Moses, A. Dirk (2005), ‘Raphael Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas’, Journal of Genocide Research 7/4, 501–29. Miles, William (2004), ‘Third World Views of the Holocaust’, Journal of Genocide Research 6/3 special on the symposium ‘Third World Views of the Holocaust’, Bridges: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science 10/3–4 (2003). Molden, Berthold (2007), Geschichtspolitik und Demokratisierung in Guatemala. Historiographie, Nachkriegsjustiz und Entschädigung 1996–2005 (Vienna: LIT). Molden, Berthold (2008), ‘Mnemohegemonics. Geschichtspolitik und Erinnerungskultur im Ringen um Hegemonie’, in: Berthold Molden and David Mayer (eds), Vielstimmige Vergangenheiten: Geschichtspolitik in Lateinamerika (Vienna: LIT), 31–56. Novick, Peter (2000), The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (London: Bloomsbury). Podol’s’kyi, Anatolij (2008), ‘A Reluctant Look Back. Jews and the Holocaust in Ukraine’: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-11-28-podolskyi-en.html (last visited 27 December 2008). Rabe, Stephen (1990), ‘Dulles, Latin America, and Cold War Anticommunism’, in: Richard H. Immerman (ed.), John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 159–88. Rothberg, Michael (2009), Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Russell, Bertrand (1967/1), Nuremberg pour le Vietnam! trans. Guillaume Carle, Cahiers Libres (Paris: Maspero). Russell, Bertrand (1967/2), War Crimes in Vietnam (London: Allen & Unwin).

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Russell, Bertrand and Sartre, Jean-Paul (eds) (1969), Das Vietnam-Tribunal oder Amerika vor Gericht (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag). Russell, Bertrand and Warbey, William (1967), Vietnam and Laos (London: Movement for Colonial Freedom). Sartre, Jean-Paul (1968), ‘Entwurf einer Erklärung über den Begriff Völkermord: Rede bei der Sitzung des Russell-Tribunals in Roskilde (Dänemark)’, Neue Kritik 9/47, 69–85. Sartre, Jean-Paul and Elkaïm-Sartre, Arlette (eds) (1968/1), On Genocide. And a Summary of the Evidence and the Judgments of the International War Crimes Tribunal by Arlette El Kaïm-Sartre (Boston: Beacon Press). Sartre, Jean-Paul and Elkaïm-Sartre, Arlette (eds) (1968/2), Tribunal Russell II: Le Jugement Final (Paris: Gallimard). Sauerland, Karol (2004), Polen und Juden. Jedwabne und die Folgen (Berlin: Philo.). Siegfried, Detlef (2003), ‘Zwischen Aufarbeitung und Schlußstrich. Der Umgang mit der NS-Vergangenheit in den beiden deutschen Staaten 1958 bis 1969’, in: Axel Schildt, Detlef Siegfried and Karl Christian Lammers (eds), Dynamische Zeiten. Die 60er Jahre in den beiden deutschen Gesellschaften (Hamburg: Christians), 77–113. Stavans, Ilan (2001), ‘The Impact of the Holocaust in Latin America’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 May. Taylor, Telford (1970), Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (Chicago: Quadrangle Books). Theweleit, Klaus (1995), ‘Die Mauer als nationales Massensymbol der Deutschen’, in: Klaus Theweleit (ed.), Das Land, das Ausland heißt. Essays, Reden, Interviews zu Politik und Kunst (München: DTV), 11–39. Traverso, Enzo (1999/1), ‘The Blindness of the Intellectuals: Historicising Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew’, in: Enzo Traverso (ed.), Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz (London/Sterling: Pluto), 26–41. Traverso, Enzo (1999/2), ‘On the Edge of Understanding: From the Frankfurt School to Ernest Mandel’, in: Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz (London/Sterling: Pluto), 42–62. Vietnam Veterans Against the War (1972), The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes (Boston: Beacon Press). Wallerstein, Immanuel (2006), European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (New York: New Press). Weiss, Peter (1967), Vietnam! (Berlin: Voltaire Verlag). Young, Robert J. C. (2001), Postcolonialism. An Historical Introduction (Malden: Blackwell).

5 The Holocaust – a Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory Community Aleida Assmann

Introduction The Holocaust is the name for a complex of events, actions and experiences that had a global impact historically and an emphatically transnational character. Due to its radical anti-human ideology, geographic scope and bureaucratic ‘perfection’, today it stands out as the paradigmatic genocide in world consciousness. From its very beginning, the social exclusion, contraction and extermination of European Jews was associated with spatial movements. Acts such as expulsion, flight and migration into exile, as well as deportation, the concentration of victims in transit camps and their transfer to sites of exploitation and extinction, implied crossings of many national borders. The Nazi administration was also eager to ‘outsource’ their crimes and to hide them in far-off places. The many languages in the concentration camps, as Primo Levi noted, rendered these places into a ‘perpetual Babel’ (Levi 1996, 38); people from many nations were drawn into the lethal orbit of the Holocaust, which was planned and organized by the Germans and enforced and supported by many other countries. Given the transnational nature of the crime, one that not only pulled together and concentrated millions of victims in the bureaucratic machinery of death, but also unleashed a centrifugal effect of scattering the families of victims across five continents, it is to be expected that this mega-event should find its resonance in transnational memory. After the end of the Second World War, however, the opposite took place: the memory of the Holocaust was fragmented and dispersed. The embodied memory was confined to various groups of survivors and privatized within the families of the victims. It took two decades before the event was identified by name and a discourse evolved on the unprecedented magnitude of the trauma and crime. The event that had been 97

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covered up by the history of the Second World War resurfaced and after two more decades was given a place in a widening moral consciousness. In this process, terms like ‘victim’, ‘survivor’ and ‘witness’ came to designate an acknowledged moral status. Starting from the 1990s, efforts were made to transform the transitory embodied or communicative memory into a long-term cultural memory based on monuments and museums. These activities, which started on a national level in Israel (Yad Vashem, 1953/2005), the US (Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, 1993) and Germany (Holocaust memorial in Berlin, 1999/2005), were interconnected in various ways. In its mnemohistory the Holocaust, comments Enzo Traverso, has had a unique career from almost total repression to global obsession: the twentieth century, at least in the West, has retrospectively been termed the century of Auschwitz. ‘Yesterday forgotten or almost ignored as a non-event, the genocide of the Jews today covers up almost all other memories in public space’ (Traverso 2009, 33–4). In this development, the year 2000 marks the starting point of a new era. In retrospect, we may say today that with the beginning of the new millennium the Holocaust went global. It is the purpose of this chapter to study this latest stage in the transformation of Holocaust memory in detail, investigating the pragmatics of actors and activists, the institutional arenas and infrastructure of the process. In doing so, it will focus on the changing format, quality and status of this memory and attempt to provide some conceptual clarifications within a more theoretical framework.

History and memory ‘Collective traumas have no geographical or cultural limitations’ (Alexander 2002, 27). This statement by Jeffrey Alexander has particular meaning when applied to the Holocaust. In general estimation, the Holocaust is a collective trauma of universal scope and global extension (Brumlick 2004). What today has become a consensus within Western culture had no support in the first three decades after 1945. In order to better understand this dramatic shift, we have to look more closely into the mnemohistory of the Holocaust. How did the Holocaust come to hold its unique rank not only in national and European but also global consciousness? Some of the questions to be asked here are: Through which actions and steps has the Holocaust been constructed and established as a universally recognized collective trauma? What is the difference between the Holocaust as an historical memory, a transnational memory, a universal symbol, a global icon? What are the limits to the extensions of this memory?

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My first question is a simple but important one: Can there be such a thing as a global or universal memory? It could be argued that the juxtaposition of the two words ‘universal’ and ‘memory’ is a contradictio in adjecto. For all we know, memories are tied to identities, they support the self-image of a group and are thus necessarily of a particular and distinctive nature. Collective memories necessarily have their limits and boundaries; to dissolve these boundaries is to dissolve the identity together with the memory. This point was made earlier by Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s when he investigated the dynamics of social memory. To highlight the specific qualities of collective memory, he introduced historiography as a negative foil (Halbwachs 1992). Halbwachs described histor(iograph)y as the inclusive memory of humanity, from which he set off collective memories that are embodied by specific groups and therefore always partial and particular. Sixty years after Halbwachs, the French historian Pierre Nora has reinforced the same dichotomy: Memory and history, far from being synonymous, are thus in many respects opposed. … Memory wells up from groups it welds together, which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs observed, that there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple yet specific; collective and plural yet individual. By contrast, history belongs to everyone and to no one and therefore has a universal vocation. (Nora 1996, 3) Given the premise that history is universal and memory particular, what can be the meaning of a ‘global’ or ‘universal memory’? Globalization is usually defined as the extension of human action and communication across geographical, economic, political or cultural borders. This process of extension is not only an intentional and directional one, but also one of emergence and spill-over via the channels of mass media and the Internet. In which way can the terms history and memory, universalization and globalization be reconciled?

The Holocaust as a European historical memory As an historic event, the Holocaust began in Nazi Germany with the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 and was carried into almost all regions of Europe by the SS and the German occupation army. Europe is today littered with the sites of the unprecedented genocide of European Jews that abruptly crushed and extinguished Jewish life and culture.

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For this reason, Dan Diner has rightly claimed that the murder of six million European Jews is the paradigmatic European memory, providing the different member states of the EU with the bond of a shared history and an ethical commitment for the future to remember and confront this dark episode in their history and to respect human dignity and protect human rights. Diner wrote: ‘Primarily, Auschwitz contaminates the memory of Jews and Germans. But also other European memories have been affected by the orbit of this event’ (Diner 2007, 39). For this reason, he argued, the Holocaust is the paradigmatic ‘lieu de mémoire’ of Europe and any cultural construction of European identity has to start from this point. When we think of the Holocaust as a ‘historical memory’, we presuppose some experiential link between the memory and the event. There are four groups that have a claim to such a historical memory: – Israel as the nation of the victims and diasporic Jewish communities in many parts of the world – Germany as the nation of the perpetrators – European nations linked to the historical sites of the genocide – The allies as the nations of the rescuers In Europe, the historical site of the German genocide of the Jews, Holocaust memory has a different quality and resonance than it has for instance in the US, where it is far removed from its local contexts. In Europe, this memory is anything but abstract and removed, but rather deeply entrenched in local and national history. While the Second World War had global extensions through the entering of countries like the US and Japan, the Holocaust had a clearly European extension. The memory of the Holocaust is embedded in the history of the Second World War, which all the nations of Europe experienced but which each nation experienced differently. In Europe, therefore, a unified transnational memory runs up against a variety of national memory constructions, constellations and collisions (Flacke 2004). Ignoring these historical levels of memory or painting them with too broad a brush means running the risk of ending up with a rather abstract memory construct. Volkhard Knigge, for instance, director of the Weimar and Buchenwald memorial sites, warned against the standardization of historical narratives and the ‘naïve importation of concepts, such as that of “Holocaust Education”’ (Knigge and Frei 2002, Afterword). Reinhart Koselleck feared that within the growing memory community of the Holocaust, the Germans would

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lose an essential part of their history together with their sense of national responsibility: ‘By no means may we hide behind victim groups, specifically the Jews, as if by doing so we were entitled to a Holocaust memorial as other nations on the globe’ (Koselleck 2002, 28). In a similar vein, Wolf Kaiser, director of the House of the Wannsee conference, has emphasized that an adequate confrontation and responsible dealing with the Holocaust must spring from the individual countries themselves: ‘To impose a unified model from the outside will be ineffective and can even be counter-productive. The aim must be to integrate the history of the holocaust into the respective national historical narrative’ (Kaiser 2007, 351). Historians and pedagogues therefore argue that instead of imposing in Europe a unified transnational memory of the Holocaust, what is needed is a constellation of different self-critical national memories reflecting the multi-perspectival quality of the Holocaust as an exemplary case of entangled history. In spite of such reflections that argue for historical diversity and a national framing of Holocaust memory, international measures have been taken to transcend the national level by reshaping and standardizing this memory in terms of a common historical reference. In the next section, we will retrace some of the steps along which a unified transnational memory of the Holocaust has been constructed.

The Holocaust as a transnational memory – the network of the ITF An important date in the creation of a long-term memory of the Holocaust is 7 May 1998. On this day, in Stockholm, Prime Minister Göran Persson invited the US president and the British prime minister to a ‘Meeting on the Holocaust’ attended by diplomats and historians of the Holocaust who were engaged in the restitution process. The following year, ‘The International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research’ (ITF) was founded in Washington, with the further participation of Germany and Israel. It was the aim of the Swedish prime minister to transform his national memorial activities into a transnational policy. Yehuda Bauer was involved in the project as an expert advisor. Together with prominent experts, he created a governmental network of action to develop a programme for Holocaust education in various countries and to root its lessons in the respective societies. In 1999, Stuart Eizenstat, another ITF expert, commented on the extraordinary character of the event: ‘For the first time, heads of

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government agreed to cooperate directly with other countries, through diplomatic and other channels, to strengthen Holocaust education efforts on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond’ (Kroh 2008, 107). To further coordinate these activities, Persson asked the countries to introduce a common Holocaust memorial day. On 27 January 2000, the ITF was reconfigured in Stockholm on a new and larger scale. On this occasion, Persson invited representatives of 16 nations (among them 13 present and future members of the European Union) to a Stockholm forum to discuss and define a common framework for commemorating and teaching the Holocaust. In the first year of the new millennium and 55 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, there was agreement that the murder of six million European Jews should become a common memory and, in turn, that this memory should inform the values of European civil society and protect the rights of minorities. The last article of the Stockholm Declaration states: It is appropriate that this, the first major international conference of the new millennium, declares its commitment to plant the seeds of a better future amidst the soil of a bitter past. We empathize with the victims’ suffering and draw inspiration from their struggle. Our commitment must be to remember the victims who perished, respect the survivors still with us, and reaffirm humanity’s common aspiration for mutual understanding and justice. (Taskforce) The enlarged ITF had a twofold aim: 1. To carry the memory of the Holocaust across the threshold of the new millennium and to transform it into a long-term cultural memory at the moment when the communicative memory of survivor-witnesses was fading away. 2. To carry the memory of the Holocaust across European borders by creating a supranational memory community with an extended infrastructure of social institutions, finances and cooperative networks. What had started in Stockholm and Washington was brought back to Europe. On 27 January 2005, the European Parliament in Brussels declared the day of the liberation of Auschwitz as a European day of commemoration, and passed a resolution against anti-Semitism in Europe (Eurlex). With this declaration, participation in the Holocaust community of

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memory became part of the entry ticket into the EU. Today, the ITF is an non-governmental organization (NGO) that comprises 27 states. Although most of its member states are located within the geographic area of Europe, it also transcends Europe, as it includes the states of Israel, the US and Argentina. It may become even more trans-European in the future. In January 2005, Kofi Annan celebrated for the first time a Holocaust remembrance day in the United Nations. According to the ITF’s statutes, membership in this transnational memory community is open to all countries of the United Nations.1 One of the effects of this growing transnational community is its de-territorialization. Due to its impact in the mass media and on education, some Americans now think of the Holocaust as ‘the worst event in American history’.2 The American Country Report presented to the ITF stated that the Holocaust is taught in the US ‘as part of US history’.3 In this perspective, European history is largely shaped by American perspective and standards. Such an ‘Americanization’ of the Holocaust tends to disregard the local sites and contexts, rendering the events more and more abstract. In Europe, the scene of the crime, this memory does not depend solely on documents and relics preserved in museums and archives and commemorated in monuments, but is anchored in cities, landscapes, villages, local institutions, firms and families. Within the ITF’s general project to create an inclusive memory community with shared social values, standardized educational tools and a common political agenda, much of the local specificity of the memory is elided. However desirable a shared memory may be, in Europe, the historical memory of variegated European experiences and perspectives is in danger of being covered over by a unified and locally disconnected memory. Public discourses and media representations of course do not automatically transform a personal and social memory into a long-term national and supranational memory. It also takes political decisions, bureaucratic institutions, organizational networks and appropriate funding (Leggewie and Meyer 2005). Towards the end of the twentieth century, in a growing number of countries the individually embodied memory of Holocaust survivors had been socially acknowledged and culturally supported by media representations, scientific research, monuments, museums, memorial sites and commemoration dates. Around 2000, a new chapter in the mnemohistory of the Holocaust started with the initiative of the ITF, which created an infrastructure for a supranational memory community with an extended network, standard education and coordinated political agenda.

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The structure of this supranational memory may be illustrated by some of the questions listed in the reports of the member states: Nr. 6: How many hours are allocated to teaching and learning about the Holocaust in schools? Nr. 9: Has your country instituted a national Holocaust Memorial Day? If so, in which ways is this day marked and commemorated? Nr. 10: Has your country established a national Holocaust memorial and/or museum? Nr. 12: What are the three major textbooks used in teaching the Holocaust in your country? How many pages do your school textbooks allocate to the Holocaust? While questions like numbers 6 or 12 focus on school textbooks and the aspect of learning within the system of education, questions like numbers 9 and 10 focus on more ritualistic aspects of commemoration pertaining to the state. In the wake of the EU Resolution on Remembrance of the Holocaust, Anti-Semitism and Racism, many European countries adopted 27 January as a European commemoration day. (It was first introduced in Germany in 1996, followed by Denmark in 2003 and Luxembourg in 2007.) The new unifying date, however, has not totally replaced different national commemorative practices: France, for instance, observes various dates, including 16 and 17 July to commemorate the ‘Vélodrome d’Hiver raffle’ and honouring of the ‘Brave among the Nation’. While European memory is more and more coordinated around 27 January, Israel and the large Jewish communities in the US continue to observe Yom ha Shoah in May on the 27th day of Nissan as Holocaust Remembrance Day. The last question in the list addresses possible problems encountered in the Holocaust pedagogy: Nr. 15: What are the three major obstacles to teaching and learning about the Holocaust in your country? Besides more contingent problems such as lack of time for teaching and lack of expertise of teachers, three issues are mentioned: The problem of complexity or the difficulty to combine an emotional with the cognitive approach: Holocaust education leaves the students morally outraged at Nazism, but they are unable to explain Hitler. Condemning Auschwitz is not enough to understand Auschwitz. (Holocaust Education Report, Switzerland). The multicultural problem: In the multicultural classroom, into which students bring more and more of their different family backgrounds and

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their religious and cultural socializations, European history is less and less accepted as a common heritage. ‘A growing part of Muslim students (especially in the suburbs) rejects classes specifically on the Jews and the Holocaust’ (Fechler et al. 2000). The gap between past and present: For students, new genocides, terrorism and other current events compete with the Holocaust, leading to ‘Holocaust fatigue’. In opening up the memory of the Holocaust to the present, students and teachers may be confronted with conflicts in assessing the present situation in the Middle East in the light of this past. In the late 1990s, the memory of the Holocaust returned with pressing urgency. It was a period of heated debates about the material history of the Holocaust revolving around stolen gold, stolen works of art, Swiss banks, forced labour and legal claims to restitution. More than half-acentury after the Holocaust, it was the last possibility for the survivors to file their claims for material restitution and compensation. While these practices were part of a last-minute crusade for justice, bringing back very specific historical memories concerning individual names and cases, important steps were taken at the same time to transform the transitory memory of the witnesses into a lasting memory. While Vergangenheitsbewältigung (confronting, coming to terms with the past) – based on historians’ commissions and media debates in countries such as France (Vichy), Switzerland (banks and borders) and Poland (Jedwabne) – ushered in a new wave of historical recollection in many European countries between 1995 and 2005, and in so doing corrected the all too smooth contours of national myths, institutional steps were taken simultaneously to overwrite these individual historical memories with a unified transnational effort towards Vergangenheitsbewahrung (a securing, sacralizing and perpetuating of the past). It has been speculated that this politics of memory involves a specific management of thematization and de-thematization in which these two developments countered and partly neutralized each other. To engage actively in the memory community of the Holocaust raises the moral profile of a nation in an international context, but it also allows the nation to evade awkward themes concerning its own past: genocide of the native population, slavery and nuclear warfare in the US, collaboration with the Nazis or the colonial history in various European countries (Kroh 2008, 106–7; Zuroff 2002 and Zürn 2002, 134–215).

The Holocaust as a universal norm Dan Diner, who introduced the influential concept of Zivilisationsbruch (rupture of civilization) into historical discourse and has reflected on

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the epistemological status of the Holocaust, has described it as both a universal and particular event: ‘This universal crime was perpetrated against humanity in the medium of the extinction of a particular group, namely the Jews’ (Diner 2007, 37). In their book on globalization and the Holocaust, which appeared in the year of the Stockholm conference, the sociologists Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider take a different perspective. They argue for the universality of the Holocaust not in terms of epistemology but in terms of media dissemination. For them, the Holocaust is unique in providing a universal, global and cosmopolitan memory (they use all three of these adjectives) (Levy and Sznaider 2001). Their study is based on iconic mediatized memories of the Holocaust that have spilled over national boundaries and found a worldwide resonance, such as the diary of Anne Frank, the Eichmann trial or the American TV series Holocaust. Their focus is on television, cinema and popular culture as powerful agents of globalization, carrying the message of the Holocaust into all corners of the world. As sociologists, the authors place Holocaust memory in the context of the era of ‘Second Modernity’. According to Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, second modernity is an evolution from first modernity. While the era of first modernity was defined by nations, second modernity is defined by a global society (Weltgesellschaft) which sets individuals free from the ‘container of the nation state’ to move and choose freely between countries and loyalties. According to Levy and Sznaider, the memory of the Holocaust can provide this global society with an appropriate world ethos: ‘In a world of perplexed and displaced humanity in search of moral clarity in the midst of insecurities, the holocaust offers a stable norm and a torch’ (Levy and Sznaider 2001, 34). After memory has left the national containers and become de-territorialized with the help of mass media, the cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust can guarantee human rights and offer a moral foundation for future humanity. They argue that the negative memory of Jewish suffering and brutal extinction of life and culture can serve as a moral norm that provides the necessary cohesion for the global society of the future. Despite their different theoretical assumptions, Levy and Sznaider follow Diner’s argument that the Holocaust is particular and universal. They describe it as the paradigmatic collective trauma that can be embraced by other victim groups who are able ‘to recognize their own suffering in the fate of Jewish victims’ (Levy and Sznaider 2001, 56). Their hope was that a cosmopolitan Holocaust memory could act as ‘the model of national self-criticism, spreading human rights as the legitimizing principle of global society and helping to affirm difference’

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(Levy and Sznaider 2001, 232). The authors’ study presents a rather optimistic view of media as the motor of both globalization and universalization, ushering in a new world ethos.4 Their book appeared at the threshold of the new millennium. Shortly afterwards, another millennial event cast a dark shadow over their cosmopolitan vision of a unified global future: 11 September 2001. Not long after, Jeffrey Alexander published an essay on the social construction of Holocaust memory in the light of moral universals (Alexander 2002/2004). In 2000, the Declaration of Stockholm had announced: ‘The unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning’ (Holocaustforum). What has frequently been affirmed and repeated in the form of official declarations, Alexander has made the special focus and object of his study. His methodology is that of a radical social constructivist. His concept of ‘cultural trauma’ distinguishes between historical and psychological trauma on the one hand and ‘cultural trauma’ on the other. He even discards the ontic level of the historical and psychological trauma as altogether irrelevant, privileging exclusively the cultural construction process of the trauma that gives it the shape of a social and political reality.5 Alexander analyses with admirable precision the cultural construction of universals on various levels. Nor does he overlook the fact that while the memory of the Holocaust is becoming more and more central in Western consciousness, we must not oversee and miscalculate the limits of this extension. He is aware that there are countries in which other historical experiences form a common reference and other traumas cast their long shadows on the memory of succeeding generations. The memory of the Holocaust, writes Alexander, is for instance ‘much more pronounced in Western Europe and North America than in Latin America’. And he continues: In Hindu, Buddhist, Confusion [sic], Islamic, African, and still Communist regions and regimes, reference to the ‘holocaust’, when made at all, is by literary and intellectual elites with markedly atypical levels of participation in the global discourse dominated by the United States and Western Europe. Of course, non-Western regions and nations have their own identity-defining trauma dramas. What is unclear is the degree to which the cultural work that constructs these traumas, and responds to them, reaches beyond issues of national identity and sovereignty to the universalizing, supra-national ethical imperatives increasingly associated with the ‘lessons of post-Holocaust morality’ in the West. (Alexander 2004, 261)

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Alexander identifies various national and cultural borders where the extension of Holocaust memory meets with obstacles. Among them are first and foremost ‘communist regions and regimes’. We may add that it is indeed striking that Russia is not a member of the memory community of the ITF, being one of the prime historical agents and the heroic liberator of Auschwitz. Paradoxically, the new European commemoration day which focuses on the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army has no place in Russian memory. The Russians continue to celebrate 9 May as the victorious ending of their ‘great patriotic war’. They commemorate the honour of Russian soldiers and the nation’s suffering, but they do not include in this memory the suffering and mass murder of European Jewry and thus remain outside the growing memory community. There are other countries that lie outside the historic constellation of the Holocaust. China and Japan are preoccupied with their own memories of defeat and victimhood; India and Pakistan commemorate the partition; the descendants of African tribes who were deported into colonial slavery commemorate the Middle Passage; and former colonial powers, such as Australia or Canada, commemorate the extinction of their Indigenous populations. These countries are the inheritors of their own historic traumas and burdens. This corroborates Halbwachs’ view that collective memory is by definition particular and limited, because it is based on experience and cannot be stretched beyond certain bounds to become all-inclusive. When comparing non-Western historic traumas, Alexander discovers a difference in quality. He argues that none of the other traumas has been sufficiently culturally elaborated to transcend its national context and to express a universal lesson for the rest of the world. For him, the Holocaust, which has been transformed into a universal lesson, is the only trauma with a capacity for globalization.6 And he goes on to ask the following question: ‘Can countries or civilizations that do not acknowledge the Holocaust develop universalistic political moralities? Obviously, non-Western nations cannot “remember” the Holocaust, but, in the context of cultural globalization, they certainly have become gradually aware of its symbolic meaning and social significance’ (Alexander 2004, 262). Alexander here affirms the uniqueness and sacredness of the Holocaust as a touchstone of universal moral maturity. Nations that do not embrace the Holocaust are proving that they cannot reach this higher level. This notion of universalist morality seems to apply Kohlberg’s schema of psychological moral progress to whole cultures. Alexander’s use of the Holocaust as a yardstick for moral ranking is also

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reminiscent of Karl Jaspers’ theory of the axial age (see Chapter 6 by Jan Assmann in this volume). Jaspers applied this term to a historical period around 500 BC in which he discovered within various cultures an independent and synchronous breakthrough to a higher moral and cognitive level, aspiring towards transcendence and individualism. Without referring to Jaspers’ terminology, Alexander constructs the Holocaust as a second ‘axial age’ in which it becomes manifest that some nations and cultures have leapt forward while others have remained stagnant on a lower level of morality.7 The universal norm of human rights itself has a particular cultural history; it dates back to Western enlightenment philosophers such as Locke and Kant. The new universal norm of ‘crime against humanity’ also has a particular history. It was created in 1945 as a direct consequence of the experience of the Holocaust. The question is whether non-Western nations have to enter the realm of universalist morals through the needle’s eye of the Holocaust or whether there are multiple trajectories that can lead to the same level of moral standards?

The Holocaust as a global icon ‘History breaks down into images, not stories’ (Benjamin 1999, 67). This phrase from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project is appropriate for introducing the last manifestation of Holocaust memory as a global icon. In this form, the global icon clearly differs from the ‘historical memory’ and the ‘moral norm’; it is an ultimate reduction and condensation of the memory that, in spite of its fragmentation, nevertheless retains something of its affective quality for which it is used and re-mediated in ever-new contexts. The icon expresses the truth about the Holocaust in its most abridged and condensed form. Reduction can imply a process of evacuation and trivialization of historical meaning but it can also stand for condensation and imply an intensification of the image, charging it with extraordinary gravitas. Such an icon is an image that presents the event in its ‘essence’. While global icons travel freely across national and cultural borders independent from the warrant of institutional infrastructure and formal membership, they are by no means self-evident images but symbolic constructs that are fraught with the weight of cultural elaboration. The cultural construction of a symbol involves various steps and phases. De-contextualization The Holocaust as a symbol emerged in the discourses of the 1980s in which the historic events were increasingly de-contextualized from its historical embeddedness and re-framed in new metaphysical and

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universal discourses. What had been treated as a footnote to the Second World War after 1945 now became a globally historical event, a rupture of civilization, the marker of a new epoch in the history of humanity, a ‘sacred-evil’ ‘of such enormity and horror that it had to be radically set apart from the world and all of its other traumatizing events’. The aim or effect of these discourses was to place this event out of reach, to render it inexplicable and mysterious (Alexander 2004, 222). Symbolic extension In its symbolic reconstruction, the Holocaust came to represent inhumanity in general and became a moral norm for human action. The ample use of ‘holocaust as metaphor’ confirms its status as a universal moral norm (Bayer 2008). The symbol of radical evil, as Alexander has emphasized, cannot be easily contained; it ‘overflows with badness’. Evil ‘becomes labile and liquid; it drips and seeps, ruining everything it touches. Under the sign of the tragic narrative, the Holocaust became engorged, and its seepage polluted everything with which it came into contact’ (Alexander 2004, 243). As a consequence of this narrative and its polluting effect, German guilt, for instance, could no longer be narrowly confined to individual perpetrators; it spilled over to taint and stigmatize the whole nation.8 Emotional identification Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, the nonJewish populations of European and Western countries that were confronted with the Holocaust have moved from distance and indifference to empathy and emotional identification. This was largely enhanced through media presentations and the staging of exhibitions in museums. Through the translation of the events into the format of a personal story of historical figures such as Anne Frank or fictional characters such as the Weiss family in the TV series Holocaust, attention could be focused, imagination animated and empathy kindled. Identification, the basic form of contact developed in the dramatization of stories in films, television shows and video testimonies, is today also applied in the choreography of museum exhibits. These no longer appeal solely to the cognitive function of the visitors but place more and more emphasis on the possibility to re-experience historical events from within. Analogy The Holocaust is used as a rhetorical trope in political debates to legitimize action and to argue for the intervention/non-intervention into

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other genocides and other cases of immoral action. In Germany, the master trope of ‘Auschwitz’ has been invoked as a moral standard (or moral club) to argue both for and against intervention into wars. Analogizing is often highly problematic as more often than not it is used indiscriminately to create equations between two highly unequal events, such as, for instance, the killing of Jews and abortion practices. Analogies are also used in a competitive (and even sometimes spiteful) spirit to diminish the importance of the Holocaust and to elevate the importance of one’s own trauma. German author and historian Jörg Friedrich, writing on the area bombings of Dresden, described the cellars of the houses as ‘gas chambers’ and the pilots of the air raids as ‘Einsatzgruppen’ (Friedrich 2002). Model In the global media age where attention has become the currency of a new economy, the prestigious symbol of the Holocaust is used as a universal lever to draw attention to other marginalized collective memories. Today, it is increasingly invoked as a model to articulate, analyse and legitimate other traumatic memories around the globe. The reference to the Holocaust need not necessarily be invoked in a spirit of competitive victimhood, but rather with the aim to establish a claim for moral authority, recognition and restitution for historical traumas that have as yet received no or little attention. The African-American writer Toni Morrison, for instance, dedicated her book Beloved to the ‘Sixty Million and more’. In this case, the reference is used not to diminish the importance of the Holocaust, but to alert the attention of Americans to their domestic history and pave the way for the recognition of the less acknowledged trauma of slavery (Morrison 1987). Speaking of cultural elaboration and media iconization, there is a huge difference between traumas, which, like the Holocaust, have met with maximum attention, while others have been passed over and are forgotten. They have neither constructed compelling, publicly available narratives of collective suffering nor found carrier groups ‘with the resources, authority, or interpretive competence to powerfully disseminate these trauma claims’ (Alexander 2002, 27). They have, in other words, not entered the ‘trauma process’ which Jeffrey Alexander describes in admirable detail as a process of social and cultural construction. Only a small part of historical traumas have become recognized as such and are publicly acknowledged. The Nanking massacre and rape perpetrated by the Japanese on their Chinese neighbours, for instance, has been termed ‘the forgotten Holocaust of World War II’ (Alexander 2002, 26). Other‚

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‘forgotten holocausts’ of World War II are the genocide of the gypsies and the victims of euthanasia.

Conclusion The quality and extension of the memory of the Holocaust will differ greatly, depending on whether it is framed as a historical trauma, as part of a political agenda, as a cosmopolitan reference, a universal norm or a global icon. In relation to the respective status of this memory, the commemorating community will be smaller or larger; limited or open. As an historical trauma, this memory is anchored in historic events that bind together perpetrators and victims, resistors and collaborators, bystanders and rescuers. Its memory community is made up of the historical agents, victims and bystanders that were involved in the event along with those who suffered from its aftermath and who carry specific responsibility for the crimes and their consequences. Europe is a memorial landscape documenting the interconnected geography of Nazi violence. The historical memory of the Holocaust is inseparably embedded within the history and memory of the Second World War. For many of its historic sites is true what was publicly claimed for the so-called ‘Topography of Terror’, an archaeological site relating to the bureaucracy and torture practices of Nazi perpetrators in Berlin, which was defined officially as ‘not only a place of Berlin, nor only of German, but rather of European history. Such a place should not be handled simply in the context of the tasks of local politics, but rather must have the rank of an international institution.’9 The historical memory anchored in these sites of perpetration, however, does not travel beyond these geographic and experiential borders; it primarily concerns and is limited to the countries and persons that in one way or another were affected by, linked to and involved in the event. The International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research network has given the memory of the Holocaust the format of a standardized transnational memory with a specific political agenda. In this form, it not only becomes accessible to nations that have no share in its history, but it also has the effect of homogenizing the memory of those countries that were actually involved. In spite of its self-description as an NGO, the full package of ITF membership conditions entails practical commitments at national level, including top-down regulations for Holocaust school education, museums and commemoration days. This memory is extended across borders via formalized admission criteria and obligations enforcing the institutionalization of the Holocaust

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within national cultures. At present, the ITF faces two problems: one is a growing rift between the official memorial agenda and unofficial (be they vernacular or counter-) versions of history that remain outside this focus. Critics have argued for an irreducible plurality of historical perspectives and warned that these differences must not be covered up by a unified ‘Americanization’ of the Holocaust.10 The other problem concerns the ‘hegemonic effect’ inscribed into the political agenda and ‘legitimation profile’ of this transnational memory community (Tobler 2002, 271). Olick emphasizes that ‘it is not just new constellations of interests that produce new images of the past, but new images of the past that allow new power positions’ (Olick 1998, 550). Although this memory has transcended the level of nations and even that of the EU, it is not necessarily on its way towards becoming an all-encompassing global memory.11 From the outside, the reference to the Holocaust is often perceived as a hegemonic instrument to export Western values and to expand the range of Western influence. The Western claim to a universal definition of history either meets with indifference or leads to a war of symbols in which political claims and cultural values clash in the global arena. One of these symbolic counteractions was Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s anti-Holocaust conference on 11/12 December 2006 in Tehran, to which he invited representatives of 30 countries. His aim was to build a counter-alliance of (mainly Arab) countries to defile Western values, defy political claims and aggressively mark the limits of the memory community of the Holocaust. Not only in the form of a transnational political alliance but even more radically in the shape of a universal norm, the memory of the Holocaust is able to spill over the range of those countries that are historically anchored in this event. In this form of cultural elaboration, the memory transcends the quality of an historic experience and acquires that of a secular norm. This norm is based on a moral lesson, which is distilled from the Holocaust; it implies heightened vigilance against renewed impulses of anti-Semitism together with the protection of human dignity and the enforcing of human rights for endangered minorities. Through its link to universal human rights, the memory community of the trauma of the Holocaust can be globally extended. The question remains, however, whether this universal norm can only be accessed via the exemplary history of the Holocaust or whether other historic traumas can also serve to back these moral commitments and values. If the universal symbol is disconnected from its historical content, it turns into a global icon that travels easily without impediments along the informal channels of global communication. In the format of canonical

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images, this de-contextualized historical reference is circulated, cited, indirectly invoked and understood all over the world. The carriers of global icons are not the teaching institutions but the mass media. Films, print media, television and the Internet are powerful channels for the multiplication, dissemination and communication of these images. In clear distinction from the historical memory and the universal norm of the Holocaust, this circulation has an informal quality and takes place largely outside organized institutions and state-controlled channels of communication.12 The reference to the Holocaust in the shape of a global icon and cultural symbol is easily disseminated around the world and used for all kinds of purposes. In this function, it has become a means to promote one’s own political aims and values. ‘As the process of universalization of the holocaust has emptied the symbol of its particular historical meaning, it can be used to legitimate anything including its opposite’ (Marchart et al. 2003, 332). As a universal reference and a global icon, it is understood in countries all over the world. Through representations such as images, films, books, events and discourses, the Holocaust has spread to become a universal symbol with a global resonance. Through the career of its worldwide acknowledgement and its status as a supertrauma of maximum prestige, the Holocaust has also become the paradigm against which other historic traumas are framed. Representations of the Holocaust in museums and monuments have become a model and source for the representation of other historical traumas. References to the Holocaust are increasingly being used to call attention to other traumas and atrocities. In this metaphoric extension, the Holocaust has become a free-floating signifier that is readily associated with all kinds of manifestations of moral evil, and which today can invariably be applied to any pain, destruction, trauma or disaster (such as in ‘bombing holocaust’, ‘nuclear holocaust’ and so on). On this level, the Holocaust has indeed gone global. This does not mean, however, that this de-contextualized and de-territorialized reference is invoked as a moral norm to enforce human rights. More often than not, it is used to legitimate one’s own actions and to support one’s own claims for moral authority, recognition and restitution.

Notes 1 The procedure for membership is described in the institution’s statutes. 2 Oral information by Anson Rabinbach. See also Flanzbaum (1999) and Novick (1999).

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3 ‘Given the belief in a standard-based education that now prevails in the United States, the Holocaust is taught as part of U.S. history. Again, education in the United States is a state-not federal-responsibility. Hence, in some schools the Holocaust may be covered in courses on world history or world cultures’ (Holocaust Education Report, United States). 4 The authors hoped that the link of solidarity created by a shared memory of the Holocaust can bring even Israelis and Palestinians closer together, because both can affirm their own suffering by recognizing that of the other (Levy and Sznaider 2001, 231). Uhl criticizes their depoliticized view of memory construction and their concept of universalization which leads to emptying out the event of its historical content. For her, universalization, semantic vacuity and relativization enter into a problematic constellation (Marchart et al. 2003, 332). 5 A caricature version of this constructivist methodology is condensed in the statement: ‘I can make a cultural trauma out of anything’ (Oral comment by Ron Eyerman). 6 Alexander discusses the universalist reconfiguration of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as human tragedies within a narrative of ‘what could happen after America lost control over the Holocaust story’ (Alexander 2004, 239). He thereby signals that the elaboration of ‘cultural trauma dramas’, as he calls them, takes place within a competitive field of struggle for moral prestige. 7 Alexander indeed once refers to Jaspers’ concept when he emphasizes that the construction of the category of absolute evil ‘has been an essential feature of all human societies, but especially important’ in axial age civilizations (Alexander 2004, 202). 8 This presents an interesting shift from the earlier concept of ‘collective guilt’ as embraced or rejected by the Germans on the one hand and, on the other, the deeply anchored stigmatization of the Germans as a nation of perpetrators in popular culture that intentionally blurs the difference between historical events and the contemporary situation. Alexander discusses this phenomenon under the heading ‘enlarging the circle of perpetrators’. 9 Official document of the state assembly in Berlin 2004, cited by Jordan (2006, 50). 10 ‘The history of the 20th century takes on a different colour, depending on whether it is seen from a Western, Eastern or postcolonial perspective. The historical memories differ accordingly. Considering this plurality of memories it would be illusory if not highly problematic to impose a universalist approach’ (Traverso 2009, 38). 11 Sociologists of a mediatized transnational public sphere speak of different media arenas and reciprocal – we may add, polemical – structures of resonance in a transnational space of mutual observation. 12 In polemicizing within the intellectual framework of ‘second modernity’ against the ‘container of the nation state’, Levy and Sznaider (2001) overlook the important function of mediation and infrastucture supplied by the state in the establishment of moral universals. The negative concept of the nation state is understandable from the point of view of 12 years of German history, but it is obviously too narrow a view to equate, as is often done, the concept of the nation with an aggressive and exclusionary ethnic state.

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Bibliography Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2002), ‘On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The “Holocaust” from Mass Murder to Trauma Drama’, European Journal of Social Theory, 5 (1): 5–86. Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2004), ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in: Jeffrey Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press), 196–263. Bayer, Gerd (2008), ‘Der Holocaust als Metapher in postmodernen und postkolonialen Romanen’, in: Gerd Bayer and Rudolf Freiburg (eds), Holocaust und Literatur (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann), 267–90. Benjamin, Walter (1999), Arcades Project (transl. by Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin) (Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press). Brumlick, Micha (2004), Aus Katastrophen lernen? Grundlagen zeitgeschichtlicher Bildung in menschenrechtlicher Absicht (München: Philo). Diner, Dan (2007), Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse. Über Geltung und Wirkung des Holocaust, Toldot 7 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Eurlex: http://eurlex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri⫽OJ:C:2005:253E: 0037:0039:DE:PDF (last visited 27 May 2009). Fechler, B., Kößler, G. and Liebertz-Gross, T. (eds) (2000), ‘Erziehung nach Auschwitz’ in der multikulturellen Gesellschaft. Pädagogische und soziologische Annäherungen (Weinheim: Belz). Flacke, Monika (ed.) (2004), Mythen der Nationen. 1945 – Arena der Erinnerungen. Exhibition catalogue (Mainz: Deutsches Historisches Museum). Flanzbaum, Hilene (ed.) (1999), The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Friedrich, Jörg (2002), Der Brand, Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (Munich: Propyläen Verlag). Halbwachs, Maurice (1992), On Collective Memory (ed. and transl. by Lewis A. Coser) (Chicago: University Press). Holocaustforum: http://www.holocaustforum.gov.se/pdfandforms/deklarat.pdf (last visited 27 May 2009). Jordan, Jennifer A. (2006), Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Kaiser, Wolf (2007), ‘Eine Europäische Didaktik des Holocaust? Möglichkeiten und ˙ Grenzen der Übertragung Pädagogischer Konzepte’, in:Zydzi oraz ich sa˛ siedzi na Pomorzu Zachodnim w XIX i XX wieku (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo DiG), 345–53. Knigge, Volkhard and Frei, Norbert (2002), Verbrechen erinnern: Die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord (München: Beck). Koselleck, Reinhart (2002), ‘Formen und Traditionen des negativen Gedächtnisses’, in: Volkhard Knigge and Norbert Frei (eds), Verbrechen erinnern: Die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord (München: Beck), 21–32. Kroh, Jens (2008), Transnationale Erinnerung: Der Holocaust im Fokus geschichtspolitischer Initiativen (Frankfurt: Campus). Leggewie, Claus and Meyer, Erik (2005), ‘Ein Ort, an den man gerne geht’. Das Holocaust-Mahnmal und die deutsche Geschichtspolitik nach 1989 (München/Wien: Hanser). Levi, Primo (1996), Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Touchstone).

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Levy, Daniel and Sznaider, Nathan (2001), Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Marchart, Oliver; Öhner, Vrääth and Uhl, Heidemarie (2003), ‘Holocaust revisited – Lesarten eines Medienereignisses zwischen globaler Erinnerungskultur und nationaler Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, in: Moshe Zuckermann (ed.), Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte Medien – Politik – Geschichte (Göttingen: Wallstein), 307–34. Morrison, Toni (1987), Beloved (New York: Knopf). Nora, Pierre (1996), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, Chichester, West Surrey: Columbia University Press). Novick, Peter (1999), The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). Olick, Jeffrey (1998), ‘What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?’, Social Science History 22/4, 547–70. Taskforce: http://taskforce.ushmm.org/about/index.php?content⫽stockholm (last visited 27 May 2009). Tobler, Stefan (2002), ‘Zur Emergenz transnationaler Öffentlichkeiten: Konfliktinduzierter Kampf um Definitionsmacht und transnationale Kommunikationsverdichtungen im Politikprozess “Internationale Steuerpolitik im EU- und OECD-Raum”’, in: Kurt Imhof, Otfried Jarren and Roger Blum (eds), Integration und Medien (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag), 260–84. Traverso, Enzo (2009), ‘Vom kritischen Gebrauch der Erinnerung’, in: Thomas Flierl and Elfriede Müller (eds), Vom kritischen Gebrauch der Erinnerung (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag), 27–46. Zürn, Michael (2002), ‘Zu den Merkmalen postnationaler Politik’, in: Markus Jachten-Fuchs and Michèle Knodt (eds), Regieren in internationalen Institutionen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag), 134–215. Zuroff, Efraim (2002), ‘Sweden’s Refusal to Prosecute Nazi War Criminals 1986– 2002’, Jewish Political Studies Review 14/3–4.


Part III Global Memories and Transnational Identities


6 Globalization, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory Jan Assmann

I would like to start this text with a definition of concepts. Without any claim to a general theory and simply for the restricted purposes of this chapter, I propose to distinguish between globalization and universalism. Under the term globalization, I understand a process of general dissemination (of merchandise, technologies, news, political influence, religious ideas) across political and cultural boundaries and of the ensuing integration of various, previously isolated zones into one system of interconnections and interdependencies, where all nations, empires, tribes and states cohere in some way or other through political, economic or cultural relations. Under universalism, on the other hand, I understand the rise of theories, ideas or beliefs with a claim to universal validity. This development is generally associated with Jaspers’ concept of Achsenzeit (axial age).1 Jaspers and his many predecessors and successors held that these universalist theories arose simultaneously around 500 BCE in various parts of the world, from China in the Far East to Southern Italy in the West. I propose to retain the concept of ‘axiality’, while stripping it of its temporal associations, especially of its links with one particular time period. Spread and contagion lie in the very nature of universalist ideas, and thus it is a small wonder that the spread of some ideas may provoke a general and even epoch-making turn in larger parts of the world. This, however, happened at various moments in human history, in different regions and also in different spheres of intellectual or spiritual life. Universalism, therefore, suggests an intellectual and spiritual phenomenon, globalization; on the other hand, a political, economic and civilizational process (implying material rather than spiritual culture).2 The two typical universalisms of Western antiquity are monotheism, both in its inclusive (All Gods are One) and exclusive, Biblical form (No other gods!) 121

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on the one hand, and Greek science and philosophy on the other, both implying an emphatic concept of Truth with a claim for universal validity. The two typical forms of political globalization of the Ancient World are internationalism and imperialism. With regard to memory, for obvious reasons I shall limit myself to cultural memory. Memory theory distinguishes between personal and collective memory; within collective memory, we differentiate between three major aspects which we propose to designate as communicative, cultural and political (A. Assmann 2006, 210–24). Communicative memory is a matter of socialization and communication, like consciousness in general and the acquisition of language; cultural memory is an externalization and objectivation of memory, which is individual and communicative, and evident in symbols such as texts, images, rituals, landmarks and other ‘lieux de mémoire’; political memory finally shares its externalized, symbolical character with cultural memory, but is a top-down institution which depends on the political organization that institutes it, whereas cultural memory grows over centuries as an interaction between uncontrolled, self-organizing bottom-up accretion and controlled topdown institutions more or less independent of any particular political organization. In all its aspects, human memory is related to time and identity. Each form of memory has its specific time-range. In the case of individual memory, this is equivalent to the time-range of an individual consciousness; communicative memory is typically limited to the time span of three interacting generations or 80–100 years; political memory lasts as long as the correspondent political institution, which may be as short as 12 years as in the case of Nazi Germany, or over 200 years as in the case of the French Republic or the US. The typical time-range of cultural memory is 3,000 years, going back, in the West, to Homer and the Biblical authors and, in the East, to the Rgveda, the Buddha and other cultural foundations.3 We may define human memory as the specific capacity of human beings to bring about a synthesis of time and identity in the form of what may be called ‘diachronic identity’. This process of ‘chrono-synthesis’, by which time is worked into the fabric of identity, is a specifically human faculty because it involves autonoesis; that is, the capacity of recognizing oneself in the past and projecting oneself into the future (Tulving 2002). The distinction of different forms of memory looks like a structure but it works more as a dynamics, creating tension and transition between the various poles. There is also much overlapping. This holds true especially with respect to the relationship between memory and identity.

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We must certainly avoid falling victim to what Amartya Sen has described as the ‘identity illusion’ (Sen 2006). Individuals possess different identities according to the various groups, communities, belief-systems, political systems and so on to which they belong; their communicative and cultural, that is collective memories are equally multifarious. On all levels, memory is an open system. However, it is not completely open and diffuse; there are always frames that relate memory to specific horizons of time and identity on an individual, a generational, a political and a cultural level. If this relationship is absent, then we are dealing with knowledge rather than memory. Memory is knowledge with an identity-index,4 it is knowledge about oneself; that is, one’s own diachronic identity, be it as an individual or as a member of a family, a generation, a community, a nation or a cultural and religious tradition. From all of these rather abstract definitions and deliberations, we may derive the insight that memory and globalization work in opposite directions. Memory functions in the direction of identity which, in all of its fuzziness, always implies a notion of difference. Globalization, on the other hand, works in the direction of diffusion, blurring all boundaries and bridging all differences. Since something like global identity cannot exist, the concept of global memory is a paradoxical notion. As an Egyptologist, I am particularly interested in the historical dimension of this opposition and the tensions that it may have created in the past. Moves towards globalization should have presented severe challenges for the organization of cultural memory. If this is correct, it should, therefore, be interesting to study if and how in the past specific societies reacted to tendencies of globalization by reorganizing their cultural memories. In the following, I would like to briefly and preliminarily outline this dynamics with regard to antiquity. In the Ancient World, globalization starts with the emergence of, and the contact between, the super-powers of the Late Bronze Age in the second half of the second millennium BCE (Artzi 1969; 1984). The change in cultural and political outlook, orientation or mentality from previous stages to this new stage of incipient globalization can be most clearly observed with respect to Ancient Egypt. During the Old and Middle Kingdoms, that is, from 3000 until 1500 BCE, the Egyptians quite simply identified their world with the world in general. Egypt is seen as a cosmos, a sphere of order, surrounded by a zone of chaos, inhabited by nomadic tribes that it is important to hold at bay but not to conquer and integrate. The symbolic expression of this attitude is the same as in classical China: a great wall ‘built to fence off the nomads’ (Koch 1973, 224; 1990). The extra-Egyptian world only appears as part of god’s creation

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with the beginning of the New Kingdom. At this point, the Egyptians have learned the lesson that their environment is not only formed by nomadic tribes but by empires pretty much like their own: the Hittite empire, the empire of Mitanni, the Baylonian and later also the Assyrian empires, the city states of Syria-Palestine, the Minoan and Mycenean states and colonies, and the Nubian state of Kerma that has developed in their south. Dealing with these states and empires was no longer a matter of exclusion and negation, but of warfare and diplomacy. Egypt had entered the ‘age of internationalism’, a political network which was coextensive with the world as it was known to and conceived of by its members. This change in political and mental orientation was accompanied by a rise of the first universalist concepts, such as, above all, the idea of a creator who created the whole world in its differentiated variety – including the multiplicity of languages and skin colours – whom the Egyptians identified with the sun. In a hymn which may very well date back to the seventeenth dynasty (around 1600 BCE), thus to the very incipient stages if internationalism, we read: Hail, Re, lord of justice, whose chapel is hidden, lord of the gods; Khepry in his boat, at whose command the gods emerge; Atum, creator of human beings who differentiates them and makes them live who distinguishes people by the colour of their skin (Pap. Cairo 58038) In the middle of the thirteenth century, this development culminated in a veritable religious revolution, the instauration of a purely and exclusively monotheistic religion by King Akhenaten which, however, only lasted for 20 years at most. Amarna, the capital of Akhenaten, was also the site of a most sensational finding: the state archive with the correspondence between the Egyptian court and the other courts of the Ancient World (Moran 1992). Similar archives have been found in Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Syria/Palestine. The language and writing of this correspondence was Babylonian and cuneiform. The Egyptian scribes had to learn Babylonian and the corresponding writing techniques, clay tablets and cuneiform, in order to enable their government to enter the network of internationalism. Babylonian was the lingua franca of the Late Bronze Age, as Aramaic was for the Persian Empire, Greek for the empires of Hellenism and Late

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Antiquity, and English is for today’s internationalism. Such a lingua franca is the most important implement of globalization. The system of Bronze Age internationalism was characterized by plurality. The states and empires involved strove not towards hegemony, but towards security and control of the commercial routes. Security and control was reached by either subjugation or alliance. Alliance – the formation of treaties – proved the most important instrument of internationalism. Forming an alliance required mutual recognition of the deities which served as patrons. The treaties which these empires formed with each other and with their vassals had to be sealed by solemn oaths invoking the gods of both parties. The list of these gods conventionally closes the treaty (Canfora et al. 1990). They had to be equal in their function and rank. Intercultural theology became a concern of international law (J. Assmann 1996). Translating gods appears to be a technique for overcoming cultural and political boundaries. Herodotus’ description of ancient Egypt illustrates the general principle: peoples, cultures and political systems may be as different as, for example, ancient Egypt, which is represented as the inversion of Greek normality. But when it comes to religion, it is possible to show that even the most exotic and extravagant peoples have a religion and they worship some definite and identifiable gods; thus, a common ground appears on which to build a treaty or other forms of contact and cooperation. The names, iconographies and rites – that is, the cultures – differ, but the gods are the same. The end of the Bronze Age – corresponding to the end of the second millennium BCE – marks the end of internationalism and the advent of imperialism. The main instrument of globalization was now seen in conquest and political unification. The Assyrians started the list of empires of the new, imperialistic type. They were followed by the Babylonians, the Persians, Alexander the Great and his successors and the Roman Empire. This is the advent of what Eric Voegelin dubbed ‘the Ecumenic Age’ (Voegelin 1984). In my opinion, however, it appears more correct to include the Late Bronze Age in this concept and to distinguish within it the two phases of internationalism and imperialism. Let us now turn to the repercussions which these changes had for the organization of cultural memory. In Babylonia, the change is most conspicuous. I am thinking here of the development known as the ‘Kassite canonization’ of the Babylonian literary heritage which started in the seventeenth century and which achieved the status of a ‘classical’ tradition (Arnold 2004, 69ff.). A new scribal elite emerged in these centuries to which later generations of scribes in the first millennium BCE tried to

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trace back their pedigrees. The Kassite canonization meant a far-reaching reorganization of Baylonian cultural memory. The various oral and literary traditions were brought into line with standard versions and they were explicitly defended against any further alterations. The entire culture now acquired a strongly past-oriented attitude. These retro-oriented tendencies were intensified enormously during the transition from internationalism to imperialism in the Neo-Assyrian Empire of the ninth through seventh centuries. The canonization, philological cultivation and interpretation of the literary heritage continued, Assurbanipal’s palace library at Niniveh was the first comprehensive national library of the Ancient World and Assurbanipal himself boasted of his philological competence, for example of being able to read inscriptions from ‘before the flood’ (Maul 2001, 119). Above all, however, Assyrian culture became marked by an extreme archaism. The time of the Sargonid kings, in the twentythird and twenty-second centuries BCE, was promoted to the rank of a normative past, a Golden Age, the model of everything important and valuable, and Mesopotamian society turned into a ‘digging society’ which tried to attain the canonized models of material and textual culture wherever possible (Jonker 1995). This archaizing and antiquarian outlook also gave rise to works of historiography. The past began to matter enormously for the Mesopotamian mind. These observations can be generally applied to the Ancient World. Several centuries after the end of the Bronze Age, we can observe in various parts the rise of literary attempts to elevate Bronze Age traditions to the status of a ‘normative past’: the Homeric Epic in Greece, the Exodus traditions in Israel, the Gilgamesh Epic in Mesopotamia and the canonization of ‘The Book of the Dead’ in Egypt. The question is, however, whether this reorganization of cultural memory and this general reorientation towards the past should be seen as an accompaniment to, or rather as a reaction against imperial globalization. There is an unmistakable spirit of competition and cultural pride at work that presupposes the idea of a global cultural market where it is important to obtain first place. Therefore, I view this reorganization of memory as an epiphenomenon rather than as a counter-phenomenon of globalization. In Egypt, we can observe pretty much the same cultural changes, although these occur some centuries later. The canonization of the literary heritage and the conception of the ‘classics’ occurred under the Ramesside kings in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries (J. Assmann 1985/1; 1985/2), and archaism, the imitation of ancient models, began in the most conspicuous manner in the eighth through sixth centuries (J. Assmann 1996,

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Chapter 5). If it is plausible to connect the Ramesside canonization with a similar concept of cultural pride, it is absolutely inevitable that the pronounced archaism of the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth dynasty should be interpreted in terms of an anxiety of forgetting, reacting against the destructions wrought upon the Egyptian culture by four Assyrian conquests, which must have been experienced as a catastrophe or even as a kind of trauma. Here, the reorientation towards the past may very well be interpreted as a first counter-movement against imperial globalization. However, the Assyrian conquests consisted in sheer destruction and pillorying without any aspirations to cultural and civilizational generalization. They were not accompanied by any universalist ideas. This situation only changed with the Greeks. The Hellenization of the Ancient World actually started long before Hellenism proper; it began in the West with the dispersion of Greek colonies all over the Mediterranean, from Northern Spain to Naucratis in Egypt, and in the East by very intense ties with the Persian Empire. Greeks were everywhere; they worked as artists and craftsmen at Persepolis, at the Persian court, and they travelled as intellectuals all over the Ancient World (Hartog 1996). Hellenization meant above all the diffusion of civilizational achievements such as the gymnasion, educational programmes and democratic institutions, and of universalist concepts such as science, mathematics, logic, metaphysics and enlightenment. This combination of political unification and intellectual universalism is the hallmark of what Eric Voegelin called ‘The Ecumenic Age’. Hellenization had two faces. On the one hand, it referred to the diffusion of Greek language, ideas and customs all over the Ancient World; on the other hand, it appeared to be more of a construction of a ‘common culture’, suggesting a similar change in Greece as in the other cultures. Flavius Josephus did not speak of ‘Greek’ but of ‘common culture’, ho koinos bios, as the goal of Jewish assimilation or reform in the Hellenistic age. In antiquity, imperialism never implied assimilation; that is, the imposition of the laws and manners of the dominant civilization onto the subjugated societies. The principle of imperialism had always been to rule the dependent countries according to their own laws and rules. For this purpose, however, the traditional customs had to be codified, given the status of laws and enforced by the local and imperial authorities. Customs had to acquire legal status in order to become instruments of rule.5 This was the policy of the Persians in Egypt and Judaea which was continued by the Greek and Roman rulers and which only changed with the adoption of Christianity as state-religion. Problems arose when these local rules precluded the observation of loyalty rules such as bowing

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before the statue of the emperor. Bowing before a statue does not mean assimilation; it is only a gesture of loyalty. Assimilation, therefore, was never a political issue but only a cultural option. Refusing the required gesture of loyalty, however, was interpreted as an act of rebellion, leading, perhaps already under the Seleucid King Antiochus IV Epiphanes, for the first time in history, to bloody persecution (Hengel 1988, 532ff.). In this situation, the most important of these customs, such as circumcision, abstaining from pork and keeping the Shabbat, acquired what is called ‘a status confessionis’; that is, they required risking severe punishment and even death rather than ceding. This situation, which had no parallel in other parts of the Ancient World, led to a separation of culture and religion. A new boundary was erected, unheard of in former times. You may assimilate into Hellenic or ‘common’ culture, but it is impossible to assimilate into Jewish religion. This new concept of religion can only be entered through conversion, and even conversion is only open to those who belong to the ‘seed of Abraham’. The opposite of conversion is apostasy, an equally new concept. This new concept of religion meant a redefinition of identity as well as of memory. In spite of its insistence on ethnic definition (‘Abraham’), Judaism nevertheless became (along with Buddhism) the model for all later world religions whose principle is their trans-ethnic and transnational character. World religions are book religions, and the Jews are the paradigmatic ‘people of the book’ (Halbertal 1997). The Jewish canon is a clear case of a reaction and opposition to the pressures of globalization when the hegemonic regime viewed the observance of these particular laws as an act of rebellion. The years of persecution, when, according to the somewhat biased account in 1 Maccabees, ancient imperialism turned into a kind of nationalism (‘one nation, one culture’), showing its genocidal or rather, to use Pierre Clastres’ term, ‘ethnocidal’ face (Clastres 1977, 9)6 for the first time, were also the years when the Book of Daniel was composed (165 BCE). This biblical book uses two visions to design a concept of world history as a sequence of four world-empires, starting with the Babylonians, followed by the Medes, the Persians, and the Empire of Alexander as it became divided among his successors. Later, when the references to the events under Antiochus Epiphanes were no longer understood, the Fourth Empire became identified with the Romans, and since Daniel predicted the end of the world after the demise of the Fourth Empire, there was a strong interest in extending the Roman Empire as long as possible. This led the strange construction of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation to last until 1806 (A. Assmann 1999; K. Koch 1997; Delgado et al. 2003). Even if the representation of the events of 165 BCE

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in 1 Maccabees is highly dubious in that the alleged persecution of the Jewish religion contradicts all principles of political reason as practised at that time (Weitzman 2004), it is highly significant that the Jewish concepts of apocalypticism and of martyrdom emerge in the same historical situation in the context of Greek imperialism and coincide in the books of Daniel and Maccabees. There was, however, also another form of reaction to Hellenism which is exemplified, in the Jewish case, by the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The Septuagint is equally typical of cultural trends in the Ancient World that react to globalism as is the Hebrew canon. Greek language served two very different, perhaps even oppositional functions. On the one hand, its enormous eloquence and attractivity meant that it represented a highly seductive power of assimilation; that is, of cultural forgetting. Greek was not only a lingua franca, but it was also the vehicle of universal ideas and a superior lifestyle. On the other hand, however, Greek was exactly this: a lingua franca; that is, a medium rather than a message (Bowersock 1990). It provided a common language in which local traditions and religions could be expressed in a voice that was much more eloquent, flexible and articulate than their own. It allowed local traditions to become internationally visible. During more or less the same time as the composition of the Septuagint, the Chaldaean Berossos wrote his Babyloniaka, the Egyptian Manetho his Aigyptiaka and the Phoenician Philo of Byblos his Phoenician History. All of these codifications of cultural and historical traditions pursue the same dual goal: to rescue local traditions that were deemed endangered from oblivion, and to make them visible on the international stage of Graeco-Oriental literature. The boom of this literature continued well into Late Antiquity with Flavius Josephus, Horapollon, Nonnos and many others. The culture of Late Antiquity owed at least as much to Indigenous influences as to the Greek heritage, and the Greek universe of language, thought, mythology and imagery became less an alternative or even an antithesis to local traditions than a new way of giving voice to them. Hellenism, in other words, not only provided a common language, it also helped to discover a common world and a ‘cosmopolitan’ consciousness. It required or offered double membership: firstly to a native and secondly to a general culture. It did not mean the dissolution and loss of the one in favour of the other. The general culture – ho koinos bios – feeds on local cultures. The ‘ecumenic age’, therefore, confronts us with two options which are neatly opposed to each other. We may call them ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘syncretism’. The fundamentalist option operates by codifying and

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canonizing a sanctified tradition. Mary Douglas has referred to this option as one of ‘enclave cultures’ (Douglas 1993). The ecumenic age was prolific in producing cultural enclaves that could also be characterized as ‘textual communities’, because they typically used a canon of highly normative literature as their ‘fundament’ (Stock 1983). The codification of memory served as a fortification of identity which had to be kept ‘pure’. Instead of fundamentalism, we could also speak of purism or even Puritanism. In spite of, and perhaps even in opposition to, the flourishing Graeco-Egyptian syncretism, we even encounter fundamentalist tendencies in Egypt. If we follow Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the middle of the fifth century, Egyptian culture had already taken a fundamentalist turn under Persian rule: ‘They keep the ancestral laws and add none other. […] They avoid the use of Greek customs, and generally speaking the customs of all other men’.7 The temples became enclaves of ancient Egyptian religion. Here, rituals were performed according to age-old scripts in the classical language that had by now become a dead language, a kind of clerical Latin; the temples were decorated to become containers of ancient ritual knowledge, inscribed from floor to ceiling, along walls, columns and doorways; and whole libraries were cut into stone to ensure the preservation, presence and efficiency of the ancient rituals beyond the imminent demise of Egyptian culture. It was an attempt to rescue not only the textual but even the ritual tradition from oblivion, and to ensure an identity based on ritual rather than textual continuity by means of transcodification into stone ( J. Assmann 1992). The option of syncretism, on the other hand, may be best illustrated by the Graeco-Egyptian goddess Isis, who tended to identify with and to absorb virtually all of the other goddesses, not only of Egypt but of all known countries and religions in the Ancient World. The eleventh and last book of the Metamorphoses by Apuleius of Madaurus, written in the time of Marcus Aurelius, opens with a beautiful and highly significant scene that gives a vivid impression of the syncretistic tendencies of the Graeco-Egyptian Isis religion. Lucius, a young man, who has been transformed into an ass after carelessly dabbling in magic, awakens on the shore of the Mediterranean as the full moon rises from the sea. Books 1 to 10 had told of his trials and misfortunes, and Apuleius’ Latin text seems to closely follow his Greek original. But the tone changes in the eleventh book, moving from the colourful and sometimes burlesque style of a picaresque novel into what A.D. Nock characterized as ‘the high-water mark of the piety which grew out of the mystery religions’

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(Nock 1933, 138). A new chapter is opened and a new hope rises with the moon which is addressed by Lucius as follows: O Queen of Heaven – whether thou art Ceres, the primal and bountiful mother of crops […]; or whether thou art heavenly Venus who […] art worshiped in the shrine of Paphos; or the sister of Phoebus who […] art now adored in the temples of Ephesus; or whether as Proserpina […] thou art propitiated with differing rites – whoever thou art […], by whatever name (nomine) or ceremony (ritu) or face (facie) thou art rightly called, help me now in the depth of my trouble. (Griffiths 1975, 70f., 114ff.) Lucius addresses a nameless power which he feels immanent in and revealed by using four names that come to his mind: Ceres (Demeter), Venus (Aphrodite), Diana (Artemis) and Proserpina (Persephone). The goddess answers him in a dream, presenting herself in a similar way: Lo, I am with you, Lucius, moved by your prayers, I who am the mother of the universe, the mistress of all the elements, the first offspring of time, the highest of deities, the queen of the dead, foremost of heavenly beings, the single form that fuses all gods and goddesses; I who order by my will the starry heights of heaven, the health giving breezes of the sea, and the awful silences of those in the underworld: my single godhead is adored by the whole world in varied forms, in differing rites and with many diverse names. Thus the Phrygians […] call me Pessinuntia […]; the Athenians […] call me Cecropeian Minerva; the Cyprians […] call me Paphian Venus, the […] Cretans Dictynna, the […] Sicilians Ortygian Proserpine; to the Eleusinians I am Ceres […], to others Juno, to others Bellona and Hecate and Rhamnusia. But the Ethiopians […] together with the Africans and the Egyptians who excel by having the original doctrine honor me with my distinctive rites and give me my true name of Queen Isis. The goddess presents herself as a truly global deity who ‘fuses all gods and goddesses’. All divine names are hers. Aside from all of these infinite names, she also has a ‘true name’ (verum nomen) which only remained in use among the nations with the most ancient and authentic traditions: the Egyptians and their southern neighbours (her temple at Philae is situated on the southern frontier of Egypt, thus belonging both to Egypt and

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to Nubia or ‘Ethiopia’. The existence of a ‘true’ name, however, does not turn the other names into ‘false’ ones. There is no antagonism between the Egyptian worship of Isis based on the ‘true name’ and the worship of the same goddess by various nations using their conventional names for her. All worship one and the same deity and it is this natural or cosmic identity beyond all cultural differences that counts. The tradition of invoking Isis using the names under which she is worshipped in the various nations of the Earth was widespread in the context of the Greco-Roman Isis-religion. There are several Isis-texts from Egypt that address the goddess in this way. The earliest is a hymn which Isidorus of Narmuthis had engraved on pillars in the temple of Thermuthis at Medinet Madi (first century BCE).8 All mortals who live on the boundless earth, Thracians, Greeks and Barbarians, Express your fair name, a name greatly honored among all, (But) each speaks in his own language, in his own land. The Syrians call You: Astarte, Artemis, Nanaia, The Lycian tribes call you: Leto, the lady. The Thracians also name you as Mother of the gods, And the Greeks (call you) Hera of the Great Throne, Aphrodite, Hestia the goodly, Rhea and Demeter. But the Egyptians call thee Thiouis9 (because they know) That you, being one, are all other goddesses invoked by the races of men.10 Another text is provided by a papyrus from Oxyrhynchos. It contains a long hymn to Isis starting with a very long, though badly fragmented, list of names and places (Grenfell and Hunt 1915; van Groningen 1921; Nock 1933, 150ff.). There we read: at Aphroditopolis one-[…], in the house of Hephaestus […] chmuenis; who at […]ophis art called Bubastis, […]; at Letopolis Magna one, […]; at Aphroditopolis in the Prosopite nome fleet-commanding, manyshaped Aphrodite; at the Delta giver of favors … at Nithine in the Gynaecopolite nome, Aphrodite; at Paphremis, Isis, queen, Hestia, mistress of every country; … in the Saite nome, Victorious Athena, …; in Sais, Hera, queen, full grown; in Iseum, Isis; in Sebennytos, intelligence, ruler, Hera, holy; in Hermupolis, Aphrodite, queen, holy; … in Apis, Sophia; in Leuke Akte, Aphrodite, Mouchis, Eseremphis; at Cynopolis in the Busirite nome, Praxidike; at Busiris, Good Fortune (Tyche agathe); … at Tanis, gracious in form, Hera […] etc.

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After a long list correlating Egyptian towns with names of Isis, the text continues by naming places outside Egypt, such as Arabia, where she is ‘great goddess’; she is ‘Leto’ in Lycia; ‘sage, freedom’ in Myra; ‘dispeller of attack, discoverer’ in Cnidus; ‘Isis’ in Cyrene; ‘Dictynnis’ in Crete; ‘Themis’ in Chalcedon; ‘warlike’ in Rome; ‘of threefold nature’ in the Cyclades; ‘young’ on Patmos; ‘hallowed, divine, gentle’ in Paphos; ‘marching’ on Chios; ‘observer’ in Salamis; ‘all-bounteous’ on Cyprus and so forth. It also includes foreign names: ‘Atargatis’ in Bamyce, ‘Maia’ among the Indians and ‘Astarte’ in Sidon. The list is closed by a striking formula: ‘the beautiful essence of all the gods’ (theôn hapánton tò kalòn zôon). The imperialism and internationalism of globalization in antiquity finds its most explicit expression in the Graeco-Egyptian Isis religion. Both fundamentalism and syncretism react to the assimilatory trend of globalization by a kind of rearmament of cultural memory. The dialectic dynamics of globalization not only provoke waves of forgetting, they also initiate a boom of memory. Memory, to return to my point of departure, is a matter of identity and difference, and thus it is the opposite of globalization. Both forms of memory, however, imply an element if not of globalization, then of universalism: the fundamentalist option in the form of world religion, the syncretistic option in the form of world literature. Aside from the Golden Ass or Metamorphoses of Apuleius, there is a wealth of novellas and romances that are related to the world of the mysteries of Isis, and there are other religious movements that were equally prolific in literary text production. However, the type of religion that won the day and which we have come to classify as ‘world religion’ was the one that represents the character of a ‘textual community’ in that it implies the formation of a sacred canon: Judaism and the Tanakh, Christianity and the Christian Bible, Islam and the Koran, Buddhism and the Pali-Canon, Jainism and the Jaina-Canon, Sikh religion and the Adi Granth, Daoism, Confucianism and so on with their respective canons down to the Mormons and the Book of Mormon. There is not one world religion that does not base itself on a canon of holy writ. This strong alliance between religions of this new type and the formation of canons and commentaries illustrates once again the connection between memory and identity. The canon replaces the traditional frames of cultural memory such as ethnos, homeland, polity and ritual. The transition from the ethnically and culturally determined religions of the Ancient World to the new type of transcultural and transnational world religion meant a totally new construction of identity and a complete reorganization of cultural memory.11 The canon, in a way, functioned as a new transethnical homeland and as

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a new transcultural formation and education. The canon became the defining generator or principle of identity; in itself, however, it is a special, sanctified form of cultural memory. World religions combine the two opposite tendencies: the centripetal tendency of memory and the centrifugal tendency of universalism. In their memory aspect, they erect boundaries by basing themselves on strong concepts of revealed truth; in their universalist aspect they aspire – as ‘world’ religions – to global recognition and observance.

Notes 1 For the most recent assessment of the axial age debate, see Arnason et al. (2005). 2 This distinction between globalization and universalism corresponds grosso modo to Garth Fowden’s distinction between ‘political universalism, which is shorthand for “political, military, and economic universalism” and cultural universalism, which stands for “cultural and especially religious universalism”, religions being understood to be a constituent part of the wider concept of culture’, see Fowden (1993, 6f.). 3 In a short poem in his West-Östlicher Divan, Goethe defines the time range of 3,000 years as the norm of cultural memory: ‘Wer nicht von 3000 Jahren/ Sich weiss Rechenschaft zu geben/Bleib im Leben unerfahren/Mag von Tag zu Tage leben’. 4 This identity index, which turns historical knowledge into a form of memory, is admirably expressed in Goethe’s phrase ‘sich weiss Rechenschaft zu geben’ (to give oneself an account of); Huizinga’s famous definition of history as ‘the intellectual form in which a society gives itself account of its past’ uses the same phrase, approaching history through memory, see Huyzinga (1936, 9). 5 Hans G. Kippenberg defines this procedure as a general principle of imperialistic politics: ‘Wenn Kolonisatoren aus den von ihnen eroberten Territorien ein Imperium machen wollen, dann müssen sie sich zu Beschützern oder geradezu zu Erfindern der Traditionen der unterworfenen Ethnien machen’ (If colonists want to turn the conquered territories into an empire, they have to protect or even to invent the traditions of the peoples subdued; Kippenberg (1986, 51) with reference to Grevemeyer (1981, 16–46; Leclerc 1973). See also Frei and Koch (1984) and Kratz (1991, 161ff., 225ff.). 6 By ‘ethnocide’, Clastres understands the destruction of cultural identity, by ‘genocide’ the physical annihilation of a nation, class or race. I owe this reference to Aleida Assmann. 7 Herodotus 2.29 and 91. See Bowersock (1990, 55f.) and Fowden (1986, 15). 8 In that ancient cult place of the Egyptian goddess of harvest, Renenutet or (Th)Ermutis, King Ptolemy Soter II built a temple to Isis-Thermutis. 9 Thiouis ⫽ eg. t3 wct Copt. tioui ‘the one’, see Vogliano (1936, 34). Cf. Hebrew æchad as a divine name, see Gordon (1970). 10 Vanderlip (1972, 18f.), Bernand (1969, 632ff.), Totti (1985), Dunand (1973) and Drijvers (1962).

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11 This even applies to Judaism which has kept its ethnical definition (‘the seed of Abraham’) up to the present day. The extension of the designation of ‘Israel’ to the southern kingdom of Judah represented a first step in the direction of transnational generalization, and it is probably only in reaction to Christianity that Judaism did not further pursue this line.

Bibliography Arnason, Johan P., Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. and Wittrock, Björn (eds) (2005), Axial Civilizations and World History. Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 4 (Leiden/Cologne: Brill). Arnold, Bill T. (2004), Who Were the Babylonians? (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature – Archaeology and Biblical Studies 10). Artzi, Peter (1969), ‘The Birth of the Middle East’, in: Proceedings of the 5th World Congress of Jewish Studies ( Jerusalem: Magnes), 120–4. Artzi, Peter (1984), ‘Ideas and Practices of International Co-existence in the 3rd mill. BCE’, in: Bar Ilan Studies in History 2, 25–39. Assmann, Aleida (1999), Zeit und Tradition. Kulturelle Strategien der Dauer (Köln/ Wien: Böhlau). Assmann, Aleida (2006), ‘Memory, Individual and Collective’, in: Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 210–24. Assmann, Jan (1985/1), ‘Gibt es eine Klassik in der ägyptischen Literaturgeschichte?’, in: XXII. Deutscher Orientalistentag, Suppl. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 35–52. Assmann, Jan (1985/2), ‘Die Entdeckung der Vergangenheit. Innovation und Restauration in der ägyptischen Literaturgeschichte’, in: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Ulla Link-Heer (eds), Epochenschwellen und Epochenstrukturen im Diskurs der Literatur- und Sprachhistorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp ), 484–99; reprinted in: Jan Assmann, Stein und Zeit. Mensch und Gesellschaft im Alten Ägypten (München: W. Fink), 303–13. Assmann, Jan (1992), ‘Der Tempel der ägyptischen Spätzeit als Kanonisierung kultureller Identität’, in: Jürgen Osing and E. Kolding Nielsen (eds), The Heritage of Ancient Egypt, Studies in Honor of Erik Iversen, The Carsten Niebuhr Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Studies 13 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press), 9–25. Assmann, Jan (1996), Ägypten: Eine Sinngeschichte (München: Hanser); pocket book edition (1999), (Frankfort: Fischer); Engl. trans. Andrew Jenkins (2003), The Mind of Egypt. History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (Cambridge/ MA: Harvard University Press). Assmann, Jan (1996), ‘Translating Gods. Religion as a Factor of Cultural (In)Translatability’, in: Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (eds), Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 25–36. Bernand, Etienne (1969), Inscriptions métriques de l’Égypte gréco-romaine (Paris: Belles Lettres), no. 175. Bowersock, Glenn W. (1990), Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Canfora, Luciano, Liverani, Marco and Zaccagnini, Carlo (eds) (1990), I Trattati nel Mondo Antico: Forma, Ideologia, Funzione (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider). Clastres, Pierre (1977), Archéologie de la violence: La guerre dans les sociétés primitives (Paris: l’Aube); Engl. trans. Jeanine Herrman (1994), Archaeology of Violence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Delgado, Mariano, Koch, Klaus and Marsch, Edgar (eds) (2003), Europa, Tausendjähriges Reich und Neue Welt: Zwei Jahrtausende Geschichte und Utopie in der Rezeption des Danielbuches (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer). Douglas, Mary (1993), ‘In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 158 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). Drijvers, Hendrik J.W.M. (1962), ‘De hymnen van Medinet Madi en de hellenistische Isisreligie’, Vox Theologica 32, 139–50. Dunand, Françoise (1973), ‘Le syncrétisme isiaque à la fin de l’époque hellénistique’, in: Françoise Dunand and Pierre Levêque (eds), Les syncrétismes dans les religions grecque et romaine, Colloque de Strasbourg, Bibliothèque des Centres d’Études supérieures spécialisés (Paris: PUF), 79–93. Fowden, Garth (1986), The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Fowden, Garth (1993), Empire and Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Frei, Peter and Koch, Klaus (1984), Reichsidee und Reichsorganisation im Perserreich, OBO 55 (Fribourg: Fribourg University Press). Gordon, Cyrus H. (1970), ‘His name is “One”’, JNES 29, 198–9. Grenfell, Bernard P. and Hunt, Arthur S. (1915), The Oxyrhynchus Papyri XI (London: Eg. Expl. Soc.), 196–202. Grevemeyer, Jan Heeren (ed.) (1981), Traditionale Gesellschaften und europäischer Kolonialismus (Frankfurt: Syndikat). Griffiths, John Gwyn (1975), Apuleius of Madauros: The Isis-Book (Metamorphoses, Book XI) Etudes Préliminaires des Religions Orientales 39 (Leiden: Brill). Halbertal, Moshe (1997), People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press). Hartog, François (1996), Mémoire d’Ulysse. Récits sur la frontière en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Gallimard). Hengel, Martin (1988), Judentum und Hellenismus. Studien ihrer Begegnung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Situation Palästinas bis zur Mitte des 2.Jh. v. Chr. (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck). Huyzinga, Johan (1936), ‘A Definition of History’, in: Herbert James Paton and Raymond Klibanski (eds), History and Philosophy. Essays presented to E. Cassirer (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1–10. Jonker, Gerdien (1995), The Topography of Remembrance: The Dead, Tradition and Collective Memory in Mesopotamia (Leiden/New York/Cologne: Brill). Kippenberg, Hans Gerhard (1986), ‘Die jüdischen Überlieferungen als patrioi nomoi’, in: Richard Faber and Renate Schlesier (eds) (1986), Die Restauration der Götter: Antike Religion und Neo-Paganismus (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann), 45–60. Koch, Klaus (1997), Europa, Rom und der Kaiser vor dem Hintergrund von zwei Jahrtausenden Rezeption des Buches Daniel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht).

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Koch, Roland (1990), ‘Die Erzählung des Sinuhe’, Bibliotheca Aegyptiaca 17 (Brussels: Fondation Reine Elisabeth). Kratz, Reinhard G. (1991), Translatio imperii. Untersuchungen zu den aramäischen Daniel-Erzählungen und ihrem theologie-geschichtlichen Umfeld. Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament 63 (Neukirchen/Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag). Leclerc, Gérard (1973), Anthropologie und Kolonialismus (München: Hanser); French original (1972) Anthropologie et colonialisme: essai sur l’histoire de l’africanisme (Paris: Fayard). Lichtheim, Miriam (1973), Ancient Egyptian Literature I, The Old and Middle Kingdoms (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley University Press). Maul, Stefan (2001), ‘Altertum in Mesopotamien’, in: Dieter Kuhn and Helga Stahl (eds), Die Gegenwart des Altertums. Formen und Funktionen des Altertumsbezugs in den Hochkulturen der Alten Welt (Heidelberg: Ed. Forum), 117–24. Moran, William (1992), The Amarna Letters (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press). Nock, Arthur D. (1933), Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Pap. Cairo 58038, in: Maria Michela Luiselli (ed.), Der Amunshymnus des P. Boulaq 17 (P. Kairo CG 58038), Wiesbaden 2004 (Kleine ägyptische Texte 14), 11f., 60–5. Sen, Amartya (2006), Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W. W. Norton). Stock, Brian (1983), ‘Textual Communities’, in: Brian Stock (ed.), The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 88–240. Totti, Maria (1985), Ausgewählte Texte der Isis-Serapis-Religion. Subsidia Epigrapha XII (Hildesheim/New York: G. Olms). Tulving, Endel (2002), ‘Episodic Memory: From Mind to Brain’, Annual Review of Psychology, 1–25. Vanderlip, Vera F. (1972), The Four Greek Hymns of Isidorus and the Cult of Isis: American Studies in Papyrology XII (Toronto: A.M. Hakkert). van Groningen, Bernhard Abraham (1921), De papyro Oxyrhynchita 1380 (Diss. U Groningen) Voegelin, Eric (1984), Order and History IV: The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press). Vogliano, Achille (1936), Primo Rapporto degli scavi condotti dalla Missione archeologica d’ Egitto della R. universita di Milano nella zona di Madinet Madi (Milano: Ed. Cisalpino). Weitzman, Steven (2004), ‘Plotting Antiochus’s Persecution’, Journal of Biblical Literature 123/2, 219–34.

7 Victimhood Nationalism in Contested Memories: National Mourning and Global Accountability Jie-Hyun Lim

In the past the Jews were envied because of their money, qualifications, positions … today they are envied because of the crematoria in which they were burned. —Witold Kula

The turn towards victimhood in transnational memory The most frequent misunderstanding of nationalism is that nationalism is national. Nationalism is one of the most peculiar transnational phenomena in that nationalist imagination can be fed only in transnational space. Victimhood nationalism is no exception since victims without perpetrators are unthinkable, and vice versa. The collective dichotomy of victimizers and victims in national terms articulates the transnationality of nationalism. Once inserted into the collective dichotomy of victimizers and victims, however, victimhood becomes hereditary, in order to consolidate the national collective that binds generations together. The seemingly political production, consumption and distribution of ‘hereditary victimhood’ appears to be national rather than transnational.1 This does not mean, however, that trajectories of victimhood memory are bound within national borders. Rather, contested memories of victimhood cannot be understood outside a global frame of reference. Memories of victimhood have become more contested with the emergence of ‘new transnational memory communities that appeal to regional connections and shared pasts’ in terms by the editors of this book. In recent years, a shift can be observed in the construction of collective memories, from heroic martyrdom to innocent victimhood. The phenomenon itself is a good indication of how the advent of the global 138

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public sphere has influenced the topography of collective memories. Assuming that the global public sphere tends to be more sympathetic to innocent victims, nations are increasingly engaged in ‘a distasteful competition over who suffered most’ (Polonsky and Michlic 2004, 9). The sublimation of victimhood on a global scale that we have witnessed for some years does not necessarily result in a global accountability for human tragedy such as genocide. On the contrary, the trajectories of contested memories of victimhood are very often tainted by the nationalist appropriation of global accountability. Hereditary victimhood has been transformed into historical culture, be it on the level of consciousness or of sub-consciousness, and it has fed a specific form of nationalism that rests on the memory of collective suffering. The epistemological binary of collective guilt and innocence has facilitated the turn towards victimhood in collective memories. In the categorical thinking of collective guilt, ‘people supposedly are guilty of, or feel guilty about, things done in their name but not by them’ (Arendt 1994, 278). Along with collective guilt, collective innocence contributes to building a strong solidarity among self-proclaimed victims. The strong ties inside victimhood communities appear to be the most salient aspect of post-war Vergangenheitsbewältigung (mastering the past). I would like to suggest the term ‘victimhood nationalism’ as a working hypothesis to explain the competing national memories for the position of collective victims in the memory wars (Lim 2007/1; 2007/2). ‘Victimhood nationalism’ is complete when victimhood becomes hereditary in the national historical imagination. On an analytical level, postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung cannot be properly grasped without a reflection on the interplay of collective guilt and victimhood nationalism on the transnational scene. A transnational history of ‘coming to terms with past’ would show that victimhood nationalism has been a major obstacle to any historical reconciliation effort. What is most stunning in victimhood nationalism is the magical metamorphosis of the individual victimizer into the collective victim. It is through this process that individual perpetrators can be exonerated from their own criminal acts. One can find a vivid example in the Laudanski ´ brothers’ successive self-exonerations. As the only living persons convicted for the genocide in Jedwabne, they defined themselves as ‘victims of fascism, of capitalism, of the Sanacja regime’ in the era of People’s Poland. After the ‘Fall’, capitalism and the Sanacja regime were replaced by socialism and People’s Poland in the Laudanski ´ brothers’ memories. Perpetrators changed, but their position as victims remained the same: ‘[L]ike the whole nation we suffered under the Germans,

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the Soviets, and the People’s Republic of Poland’ (Bikont 2004, 294). Individual victimizers became collective victims by hiding themselves behind the memory wall of national victimhood. What underlies this metamorphosis is the obsession with collective innocence and victimhood in the Polish setting.2 Victimhood nationalism has the sacralization of memories as its epistemological mainstay, particularly when sacralized memories effectively block the sceptical and critical gaze of outsiders upon ‘our own unique past’. Perhaps a certain degree of sacralization of memories is inevitable for individuals, which makes our own past something unique, incommensurable with others’ experiences. On the national level, the collective memory comes into being through communication, education, commemoration, rituals and ceremonies among the masses. A memory evoked in such a way tends to become fixed in the form of a stereotype and installs itself in the place of raw memories (Levi 1989, 24). By nature, such a collective memory cannot be sacralized; rather it is an arena of political contestation. In reality, however, memories have been sacralized especially in discourses of victimhood nationalism. By not allowing outsiders any chance to understand ‘our own unique past’, sacralized memories keep a monopoly on understanding the past. In this unique past, nationalists can find a mental enclave where they can enjoy a morally comfortable position, very often disregarding the fact that these heirs of historical victimhood have become today’s perpetrators. The colloquial thesis of ‘you foreigners can never ever understand our own tragic national past’ defends victimhood nationalism against historical scrutiny. Once exposed to the light of comparative analysis, however, sacralized memories are open to communication with others – such that seemingly solid victimhood nationalism melts away into the air. Along with the task of de-sacralizing national memories, analysing the transnationality of victimhood nationalism demands a multilayered histoire croisée approach to comprehend the entangled pasts of the victimized and victimizers. For instance, victimhood nationalisms among the victimized in Poland, Israel and Korea should be examined with a focus on the interplay of perpetrators and victims, collective guilt and innocence. Without Nazi Germany and colonial Japan, victimhood nationalisms in these three countries are unimaginable. The entangled pasts of the victimized and victimizers are more complicated than is often assumed. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not difficult to find tropes of victimhood nationalism within nations such as Germany and Japan, which in turn strengthens victimhood nationalism among victimized nations. Indeed, victimhood nationalism has been nourished on the

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‘antagonistic complicity of nationalisms’ in East Asia and perhaps in Europe (Lim 2006; 2008, 205–22). One should recognize the asymmetry between victims in the victimized/colonized nation and victims in the victimizing/colonizing nations, but the vicious circle of victimhood nationalisms should not be excused by the asymmetry of their historical positions. That asymmetry manifests itself in a distinction between the overcontextualization and the de-contextualization of the past. Victimhood nationalism in underprivileged nations tends to over-contextualize the past, which provides them with a morally comfortable position as historical victims; while victimhood nationalism among the hegemonic nations is inclined to de-contextualize its historical victimhood in order to ignore its past crimes and sins. If over-contextualization negates the coexistence of perpetrators and victims, and perhaps bystanders within the same nation, de-contextualization conceals the past of perpetrators who fell into the role of victims under certain circumstances, such as in the case of war atrocities. In stark contrast with the tendency of overcontextualization found in the Polish debates on Jedwabne, Israeli memories of the Holocaust and Korean discourses of the comfort women, what dominates German expellees’ memory of the defeat of Germany in the Second World War and Japanese discourse on the atomic bomb is the inclination to de-contextualize. But I do not mean to recreate a binary of victimizing and victimized nation. By drawing on examples from Korea, Japan, Poland, Israel and Germany, I want to highlight the transnational history of victimhood nationalism. Arguably, a multi-layered histoire croisée analysis would reveal blurred complexities of historical reality: a plurality of individual and collective relations among the victimizers and victims, victimizers’ perception of the collective self as victims, individual victims victimized by the victimhood in abstract, and the floating division into victimizers and victims.

Hereditary victimhood: Korea, Israel and Poland In January 2007, Yoko Kawashima Watkins’ autobiographical novella So Far from the Bamboo Grove propelled the Korean mass media and intellectual circles into vociferous turmoil (Watkins 2005). Major newspapers in Korea covered this novella for more than a month. This Bildungsroman tells how the narrator, an 11-year-old Japanese girl, and her family were faced with threats on their lives, hunger and fear of sexual assault on their way home to Japan from Nanam, a northern Korean town, upon

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Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. Based on her own experiences and memories, this story describes vividly the ordeal Japanese expellees had to go through. No less than three million Japanese expellees from Manchuria and northern Korea are said to have encountered a similar fate on their way back home – an East Asian version of the East European ‘wype˛dzenie-Vertreibung’. Post-war Japan produced a wealth of such stories and these narratives form a distinct genre called hikiagemono, to which Yoko Kawashima Watkins’ memoir adheres. So Far from the Bamboo Grove was not the first piece of Japanese hikiage literature translated into Korean. Another hikiage story by Fujiwara Dei (1949) was translated into Korean during the Korean Civil War in 1951 and became one of the 50 bestselling books in Korea post 1945, perhaps because it had great appeal for Koreans who were suffering from the civil war at the time (Yoon 2007, 197–8). Translated into Korean in 2005, Yoko Kawashima Watkins’ novella enjoyed a positive, though overall lukewarm response from the Korean mass media. Media reviews of the book were neither enthusiastic nor critical. On 13 May 2005, Yonhap News reviewed it as ‘an autobiographical novella that describes the story of Japanese expellees upon Japan’s defeat’. Chosun-Ilbo published a book review on 6 May 2005 that expressed the view: ‘Leaving aside the nationality [of the author], it can be evaluated as a Bildungsroman that calmly describes how the war can be an ordeal for a whole family’. The inference from those book reviews is that So Far from the Bamboo Grove seems not to have made a deep impression on literary journalists. Neither was it a marketing success. Fewer than 3,000 copies were sold in a year-and-a-half, and it seemed that Yoko Watkins’ book was doomed to be forgotten by Korean readers. But suddenly, on 18 January 2007, the novella was caught in the crossfire of four major Korean newspapers and one news agency, producing a series of verbal attacks. The social pressure was so enormous that the Korean publisher Munhakdongne, having tried in vain to defend the book, had to make a quick decision to withdraw all copies from book stores. It is almost impossible not to detect some sort of orchestration in this simultaneous fusillade by the major Korean press. It does not seem coincidental that the Korean consul in Boston sent a letter of protest to the Massachusetts state department of education on 16 January 2007. The difference in local time between Boston and Seoul implies that there was no time lag between the Korean consul’s protest in Boston and mass media coverage of So Far from the Bamboo Grove in Seoul. According to a report in the Boston Globe, the main point of protest was that Yoko Kawashima Watkins’ novella describes Koreans as evil perpetrators, while

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the Japanese are innocent victims (Boston Globe 2007). The Korean consul expressed her deep concern that young American schoolchildren would be misled in believing a distorted and faked view of the past in East Asia if they read So Far from the Bamboo Grove. An archaeological excavation of this weird uproar reveals an organization called PAAHE (Parents for an Accurate Asian History Education) behind the scene which initiated this ‘tsunami’ of long-distance nationalism. This group consists of KoreanAmericans in the New York City and Great Boston area, many of whom are well-educated medical doctors and lawyers (Chosun). It was these Korean-Americans in PAAHE who took the initiative in the trans-Pacific criticism of So Far from the Bamboo Grove. They were furious that Yoko Kawashima Watkins, who was widely read in schools, portrays Koreans as evil perpetrators and Japanese as innocent victims to American students who are otherwise largely ignorant of East Asian history. Their criticism is framed in positivistic terms: the PAAHE is seeking an ‘accurate Asian history’ whose clear-cut contours do not allow complexity and ambiguity; typically, terms such as ‘distortion of truth’, ‘fabrication of facts’ and ‘historical lies’ are used. It was because of the PAAHE initiative that the Korean press turned its gaze to So Far from the Bamboo Grove in January 2007. As this phenomenon crossed the Pacific to Korea, the accusation snowballed. Yoko Kawashima Watkins was suspected of being the daughter of a Japanese war criminal, presumably an officer of Unit 731 which was infamous for its bio-warfare experiments. In time, she was branded as such without any concrete evidence for the accusation. Despite PAAHE’s obsession with accurate history, their suspicion that Watkins is a Japanese war criminal’s daughter has yet to be proven. But the suspicion itself was enough to convey the impression that Yoko could not be an innocent victim. It is clear that this positivistic criticism is based on a partial reading of historical reality and a marginalization of the suffering of the Japanese expellees from Manchuria and the Korean peninsula in the summer of 1945. What upset PAAHE members most was the reversed order of victims and victimizers. In the schematic dichotomy of collective guilt and innocence, the Japanese as an absolute category becomes a uniform mass of victimizers. The bitter experience of the Japanese expellees as individuals cannot exist under the abstract category of the Japanese as perpetrators. The schematic dichotomy of collective guilt and innocence in terms of the nation, deeply rooted among Korean-Americans, seems to reinforce an ethnocentric self-identity among them.3 What is at issue is the Korean-Americans’ parental concern for their kids. It is insinuated that their kids are subject to the bullying of American schoolmates just

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because they are ethnic descendants of the Koreans who, as depicted in the So Far from the Bamboo Grove, are terrible victimizers. Perhaps American intellectuals’ ignorance of the historical suffering of people in East Asia, in contrast to their concern with Jewish suffering, has complicated matters (Yoneyama 2007). PAAHE’s criticism might have targeted the Eurocentrism which dominates American perceptions of historical suffering. Instead, however, PAAHE’s perspective stuck to the schematic dichotomy of Japanese victimizers and Korean victims. That way of reasoning, part and parcel of the paradigm of collective guilt, shows the extent to which they remain caught in the hegemonic ethnic nationalism of Korea, while Korea itself has come to be a multinational and multicultural country long after their emigration. The role of ethnocentrism in the emigrants’ long-distance nationalism is clearly stronger than its role in nationalism in Korea. This farcical tumult gives a vivid example of how victimhood nationalism is nourished by long-distance nationalism and vice versa. Indeed, victimhood comes more sharply into relief on the transnational level than it does on the national level. What is more, the transnationality of victimhood nationalism regarding Watkins’ story is also witnessed on another level, namely in the frequent emphases on the historical parallelism between Jews and Koreans as victims. One review of So Far from the Bamboo Grove by a Korean-American on Amazon.com reads: ‘It is completely distorting the truth about the Japanese WW2 aggressions and atrocities. It makes as if atrocities were committed by the victims rather than the aggressor … If Anne Frank were a German and she were still alive to this day and if she wrote about the mindless rapes committed by Jewish resistance fighters and Jewish American soldiers after WW2 and no mention was made about the Holocaust during WW2. Wouldn’t you think that is a DISTORTION of history?’ Another review on the same site reads similarly: ‘This book is akin to an escape narrative of an SS officer’s family running away from Birkenau Auschwitz concentration camp while the heroine daughter of the Nazi officer is running away from cruel and dangerous Jews freed from concentration camps and Poles. Such a narrative is morally irresponsible and disgusting material to force upon innocent children’ (Amazon). These reviews can be read as a criticism of the de-contextualization of colonial history in the novella of Yoko Kawashima Watkins. Indeed, the de-contextualization of Japanese colonial history in the novella is in stark contrast with Günter Grass’s novella Im Krebsgang (In Crabwalk). Deconstructing the naive dichotomy of victimizers and victims in absolute terms, Grass’s balanced contextualization of the tragedy of

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the German cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff does not necessarily endorse the over-contextualization of Korean colonial history to negate any suffering of the ordinary Japanese on the grounds that she/he belongs to the Japanese nation. If de-contextualization of colonial history was Yoko Watkins’s narrative strategy, over-contextualization is the counternarrative of victimhood nationalism in Korea. One more interesting point in these reviews on Amazon.com is the deployment of the historical parallelism between Jews and Koreans. On the surface it seems to be a narrative tactic to convince American readers that the victims are not Japanese but Koreans. In this it is not new. The historical parallelism between Jews and Koreans was rampant in the Korean nationalist discourse throughout the 1960s and 1970s. However, it was focused not on victimhood but on heroism. In the era of development dictatorship under Park Chung Hee, Israeli Zionism became a role model for Koreans. Israel’s impressive victory in the Six Day War of 1967, supposedly unexpected, was hailed as a victory for the patriotism of young Israelis. Newspapers were filled with extraordinary stories of American Jews who volunteered for Israel’s army at the cost of their comfortable lives, including newly wedded young men who went to the frontline after cancelling their honeymoons. They were seen as selfsacrificing heroes rather than passive victims. In Korea, leaders of the ‘New Village Movement’ and ‘industrial warriors’ were trained regularly at a collective farm called ‘Ganaan’. Park Chung Hee’s regime tried to justify the self-mobilization system of mass dictatorship in South Korea by modelling it on that of Israel. It was not a matter of passive subjects but of heroic historical agents who could meet the demands of a selfmobilizing mass dictatorship. Even a cursory look at post-colonial Korean historiography reveals that heroism goes hand in hand with victimhood in the nationalist discourse. Contrary to common belief, it is not victimhood but heroism that has been dominant in post-war Jewish public memory since its inception. Werner Weinberg, whose classification drifted from a liberated prisoner to a displaced person to a survivor, writes that a survivor appeared to others and himself as ‘a museum piece, a fossil, a freak, a ghost’ (Weinberg 1985, 152). After his visit to the displaced persons camps in Germany in the fall of 1945, David Shaltiel, Ben Gurion’s personal envoy to Western Europe, said bluntly: ‘Those who survived did so because they were egoistical and cared primarily about themselves’ (quoted in Zertal 1998, 217). The slanderous belief of the ‘survival of the worst’, although it faded with time, was widespread among worldwide Jewry immediately after the war. Victims were victimized once again by their compatriots.

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Referred to as ‘factor’ or as ‘human resource’, Holocaust survivors were subject to objectification and instrumentalization in the Zionist discourse. It was Yishuv heroes who were immortalized in the Zionist literature of Exodus, while Jewish refugees bore the burden of the clandestine immigration campaign on their shoulders (ibid., 221). Zionist Palestine’s discourse on Diaspora Jews was suffused with the rhetoric of pity and Zionist patronizing. A love sermon to the coming Jewish refugees, ‘My Sister on the Beach’ by Yitzhak Sadeh, the first commander of the legendary Palmach, tells a story of ‘male power […] in the strong, rooted, and brave Israeli Zionism facing a defeated, despairing Diaspora longing to die’ (ibid., 263). What prevailed in this dichotomy of Hebrew heroism in Eretz Israel versus Jewish humiliation in exile was ‘a sexist reconstruction of history’ to feminize the survivors (Pappe 1995, 72).4 Survivors remained passive objects deprived of agency. Masculine war heroes were the approved ideals of American Jewry, too. Towards the end of the Second World War, John Slawson, chief executive of the American Jewish Committee, said explicitly that ‘[Jewish organizations] should avoid representing the Jew as weak, victimized, and suffering […] There needs to be an elimination or at least a reduction of horror stories of victimized Jewry […] War hero stories are excellent’ (quoted in Novick 2001, 121). Belonging to the race of victors instead of victims was a cultural code shared widely by American Jewry. Compared to today’s exceptionalist uniqueness discourse on the Holocaust, it is a striking contrast that leaders of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) were critical of an ADL film strip ‘The Anatomy of Nazism’ for its too narrow focus on Jewish suffering (ibid., 116). The hero cult in the aftermath of the Second World War was dominant. The Cold War inclined American Jewry towards relative indifference to the Holocaust. Under the pressure of the Cold War, it was more urgent for Jewish organizations in the US to combat the Jew-Communist equation. In so far as policymakers in Washington were concerned, with Germany seen only as a bulwark against Bolshevism, American Jews were encouraged to hold a realistic rather than a punitive and recriminatory attitude towards West Germany. The emphasis was put on Soviet anti-Semitism instead of the Holocaust. The Slánský trial was deemed to dissociate Jews from Communism in the American public mind (ibid., 91, 98, 116, 121). The realistic attitude of American Jewry was not far from Ben Gurion’s calculation that Israel needed to keep a close relationship with France and Germany in order to join the ‘Western’ camp. As long as ‘historiographical triumphalism’ (Diner 1995, 153) dominated the historical discourse in Israel, the Holocaust was not a popular

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theme for discussion. When the Holocaust was discussed, it was structured by the dualism of focusing on the activist response of the ghetto fighters and of questioning the role of Jewish leadership in the ghettos. It was only in 1959 that the observation of Holocaust Remembrance Day became mandatory in Israel. Even then, Holocaust commemoration maintained a focus on heroic fighters in the Ghetto Uprisings and official references were made to the commemoration of ‘the Holocaust and the Ghetto Uprisings’, ‘the Holocaust and Heroism’ or ‘Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance’. While the ghetto fighters were addressed as ‘Zionist’ or ‘Hebrew youth’, the other Holocaust victims were referred to as ‘Jews’. Israeli youth often accused the Jewish victims’ behaviour as ‘going like sheep to the slaughter’ (Zerubavel 1994, 80–1). In historiographical heroism, the Masada fighters as ancient Hebrew warriors of national liberation were glorified as the counter-model in opposition to Holocaust victims (Diner 1995, 74–8). Michel Warschawski remembers Israel of the 1960s, where weakness was considered a flaw, and a ‘savonette’ (little soap) was the designated term for a person who was not tough enough (Warschawski 2005, 153–4). The Eichmann trial marked a victimhood turn in the collective memory of the Holocaust. With the trial, ‘a process of identification with the suffering of victims and survivors’ occurred among Israelis (Segev 2000, 361). Awakened by the riot of Sephardic Jews in 1959, immigrants mostly from Morocco, Israeli leaders badly needed a patriotic national catharsis for national unity. When the hegemony of the Ashkenazic establishment was threatened, the Eichmann trial was used to educate these Oriental Jews who did not really know what happened to Askenazi Jews in the Holocaust. It was the Six Day War of 1967 that geared up victimhood nationalism. A young soldier’s recollection of the war indicates that ‘people believed we would be exterminated if we lost the war. We got this idea – or inherited it – from the concentration camp. It’s a concrete idea for anyone who has grown up in Israel […] Genocide – it’s a real possibility’ (quoted ibid., 389).5 It is not a surprise that in a survey in 1992 close to 80 per cent of teachers’ college students identified Israeli identity with ‘Holocaust survivors’ (Segev 2000, 516). Thus, victimhood became hereditary. But it would be naïve to say that victimhood nationalism erased Yishuv heroism and victor’s nationalism. Victimhood nationalism linked the righteousness of little David, an eternal victim of all the Goliaths of human history, to a sense of omnipotence and invincibility. These factors were thus integrated into a vision of a ‘Yishuvist and Shoah-centric narrative’. In this self-contradictory narrative, victimhood nationalism did

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not necessarily mean to pay homage to concrete victims. What is at issue is not the agony and anguish of concrete victims but the idea of abstract victimhood. The victimhood cult went together with the biographical forgetting of Holocaust victims who were mostly assimilationists in pre-war Europe. The Holocaust, a catastrophe for the assimilationists, seemingly justified the Zionists’ desire for an independent state for Jews. And the defeat of assimilationism seemed to endorse an ethnocentric perception of nation and history in Israel (Diner 1995, 155–7). Holocaust exceptionalism reinforces the ethnocentric nationalism of these righteous victims. To Ben Gurion, the Holocaust was ‘a unique episode that has no equal […] has no parallel in human history’. So, universalizing the Holocaust would be equal to plundering ‘moral capital’ that Jews accumulated. Menahem Begin responded to the international criticism of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon with Holocaust discourse: ‘After the Holocaust, the international community had lost its right to demand that Israel answer for its actions’ (Novick 2001, 156; Segev 2000, 399–400). Beyond any doubt, the Holocaust is in many crucial aspects an unparalleled or singular event. But this does not mean it is unique and cannot be subject to comparative analysis.6 Victimhood nationalism cannot stand alone. Just as victimhood nationalism has been nourished by the ‘antagonistic complicity of nationalisms’ in East Asia, anti-Semitism has fed victimhood nationalism in Israel. It is evidenced by what Golda Meir said at the beginning of the 1970s: ‘[T]oo much anti-Semitism is not good because it leads to genocide; no anti-Semitism at all is also not good because then there would be no immigration (to Israel). What we need is a moderate anti-Semitism’ (quoted in Warschawski 2005, 154). The Jewish stereotype of Polish anti-Semitism that ‘Poles sucked anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk’ ˙ evokes the Polish stereotype of ‘Zydokomuna’ (Judeo-communism), which justifies Polish anti-Semitism. The Polish self-image of the ‘crucified nation’ as the eternal victim of neighbours to the east and west cannot accept the image of themselves as bystanders, let alone victimizers. This is shown by the Laudanski ´ brothers, victimizers of their Jewish neighbours in Jedwabne, who define themselves as victims by sharing the collective memory of victimhood in Poland. Indeed, in a poll held in early April 2001, 48 per cent of those surveyed did not believe that Poles should apologize to the Jewish nation for the crime of Jedwabne, while 30 per cent stood for the apology. Eighty per cent did not feel any moral responsibility for Jedwabne, while only 13 per cent felt such a responsibility; 34 per cent believed that the Germans were solely responsible for the crime; 14 per cent that Germans

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and Poles were jointly responsible; and 7 per cent that Poles were solely responsible. Public opinion did not change much even after the publication of the report of the IPN (Instytut Pamie˛ci Narodowej) which included evidence of the Polish role in the Jedwabne massacre (Polonsky and Michalic 2004, 39; Gross 2002, 120). Jan Gross evaluates mildly the dominating debate in Poland on Jedwabne; he speaks of ‘an outpouring of thoughtful and searching articles about the need to rewrite Poland’s twentieth-century history; about facing up to the larger consequences of anti-Semitism that gave rise also to complicity with Nazi crimes against Jewish neighbors; about the responsibility for misdeeds so difficult to contemplate in a community that was itself victimized by outside oppressors’ (Gross 2002, 123). But one cannot fail to detect the Poles’ perplexity at finding themselves not victims but victimizers. Undeniably, Poland was one of the most devastated countries during the Second World War II. Poland lost more than five million inhabitants including three million Polish Jews, which amounts to more than 20 per cent of the total population. It was the elites who suffered most. Less than half of Polish lawyers survived the war. Poland lost two-fifths of its medical doctors and one-third of its university professors and Roman Catholic clergy. It would be unfair to bring an accusation of genocide against the Poles, who were themselves victims. As Rabbi Byron L. Sherwin declared: ‘[T]he tendency among Jews to stereotype Poles as the perpetrators of the Holocaust not only distorts but obscures the enormous suffering of Poles during the Nazi occupation’ (quoted in Zimmerman 2003, 9). It would be much worse to shift the overwhelming responsibility for the genocide away from the Nazis by emphasizing the secondary responsibility and complicity of Poles. But this criticism of the Jewish stereotype of anti-Semitism in Poland does not automatically justify the Polish obsession with innocence and thus victimhood nationalism in Poland, which believes Auschwitz was a place primarily of Polish martyrdom. The ‘anti-Semitism without Jews’ in today’s Poland, though not dominant, should not be ignored either.7 Czesław Miłosz’s insight that ‘the Party descends directly from the fascist Right’ adumbrates the public memory of the Holocaust in People’s Poland (quoted Gross 2006, 243). The Polish People’s Party shared the Polish nationalists’ dream of an ethnically pure state, and it was the nationalist vision that has dominated the official Party historiography. In a way, the socialist ideal of the ethical and political unity of society reinforced the primordialist concept of the nation, a way of seeing the nation as an organic community and even as a family community (Lim 2001, 373–80). It is no wonder that the Second World War has been remembered as a

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matter between Poles and Germans, with the Jews marginalized in the Polish public memory (Engelking-Boni 2003, 48). In the era of Stalinism, the memory of the Holocaust was repressed and marginalized since it did not fit into the Soviet narratives of the antifascist front of the working class and of the Great Patriotic War.8 Citing Michael Steinlauf, ‘In the essential communist narrative, the Holocaust became an object lesson in the horrors of the last stage of monopoly capitalism […] The site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau became a monument to internationalism and commemorated the resistance and martyrdom of “Poles and other nationalities”, among whom, alphabetically and therefore “democrati˙ cally”, Zydzi (Jews) came last’ (Steinlauf 2003, 264). With the rise of the national communist faction, the genocide of Polish Jews was integrated into an integral part of the ethnic Polish tragedy. The widely held historical opinion that ‘six million Poles died during the war’ promoted the victimhood fantasy that Poles had suffered the most. Jews were integrated into the Polish nation only in the politics of numbering victims of Polish citizenship. The Holocaust had been interpreted as a German-Jewish conspiracy against Poles to minimize Polish wartime martyrdom and suffering. The Moczar-led ‘Partisans’ launched an attack on Wielka Encyklopedia Powszechna (WEP) in 1967. The division of ‘concentration camp (obozy koncentracyjne)’ and ‘extermination camp (obozy zagłady)’ in the WEP was criticized as a bias against Polish martyrdom in favour of the suffering of the Jews. The Jewish editor went into exile in Sweden, an event that was followed by the anti-Zionist campaign in 1968. In the public memory fabricated by the Party, it was the Poles who were sentenced to annihilation by the Nazis while the Jews were relocated. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was seen as ‘a specific kind of fighting of the Polish underground’ (ibid., 265–6). Witold Kula, a prominent Polish economic historian, remarked sarcastically of Polish victimhood nationalism: ‘In the past the Jews were envied because of their money, qualifications, positions […] today they are envied because of the crematoria in which they were burned’ (quoted in Polonsky and Michlic 2004, 9). It was the essay ‘biedni polacy patrza˛ na getto (Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto)’ by Jan Błonski ´ in 1987 that brought the repressed memory of the Holocaust to life in the public memory. Błonski’s ´ seminal essay initiated the argument not about culpability for what they did, but of sins for what they did not (Błonski ´ 1996). It upgraded the Polish discussion on the Holocaust beyond legal positivism to ontological ethics. The debate revealed a deep trauma in those Poles who felt the guilt of

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being helpless witnesses to atrocity. Błonski’s ´ awakening essay was then followed by Jan Gross’s book Neighbors (2002). In the words of Hanna S´wida-Ziemba, what Jedwabne taught her was that ‘only a thin layer of ice separates innocent prejudices from crime’ (S´wida-Ziemba 2004, 103). Despite Gross’s calm appreciation of the Polish response to his book, reluctance to admit guilt is rampant among Poles. To Cardinal Józef Glemp, the Primate of Poland, Gross’s book was written on a commission from someone. In his opinion, Jews were disliked for ‘their pro-Bolshevik attitude and odd folk customs’.9 And the Jedwabne mayor was unable to persuade the townspeople to name the local school after Antonina Wyrzykowska, who rescued seven Jews during the massacre. Stanisław Stefanek, the bishop of Łomz˙a, spoke of an organized campaign to extract money from the Poles. The collective memory of apologetic victimhood had no room to accommodate such a drastic transmorphosis from innocent victim to ‘Homo Jedvabnecus’. Paradoxically enough, Poland suffered the consequences of not having had a Quisling-like collaborationist puppet regime during the Nazi occupation. If it had, anti-Semitism would have perceived as a part of a compromised collaborationism (Gross 2006, 130). But a clean Poland as the fighting nation did not make room for a guilty consciousness of the Holocaust, and anti-Semitism remained a requisite of patriotism. That complexity is rooted in ‘a singularly Polish paradox’ in terms of Adam Michnik, where a person could be an antiSemite, a hero of the resistance and a saviour of Jews, since the Polish nationalistic and anti-Semitic right did not collaborate with the Nazis (Michnik 2004, 435). When the news of the Kielce pogrom spread in 1946, Polish workers were unwilling to condemn publicly its perpetrators and opposed an anti-pogrom resolution. The Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) had difficulty in making anti-pogrom propaganda appealing, and workers perceived the PPR as ‘Jewish’ in their opposition to the workers’ sentiments (ibid., 120–2). Victimhood nationalism as such frames the coming to terms with the past as an either/or question: victims or victimizers. Certain Poles’ fury against Jan Błonski ´ and Jan Gross are resonant with some Jews’ anger against Hannah Arendt in that they erase the comfortable dichotomy of purely innocent victims and totally evil victimizers by stressing complexity and ambiguity. Indeed, historical fantasy is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for the principle of nationality. To put this fantasy world of ‘hereditary victimhood’ under historical scrutiny remained, remains and will remain blasphemy to some.

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Apologetic victimhood: Japan and Germany Ernest Renan’s insight that ‘shared suffering unites people more than common joy, and mourning is better than victory for the national memory’ (Renan 2002, 81) is not confined only to victims. Victimizers suffer too when they lose wars. The most paradoxical facet of coming to terms with the past might be that victimhood emotion among victimizers in Japan and Germany seemed to be stronger than among victims in China, Poland and Israel immediately after Second World War defeat. While these victims of wars of aggression, massacres and genocide were celebrating victory and liberation, the Japanese and Germans were mourning defeat and suffering. Paradoxically, victimizers had a more urgent need to explore the experience of being victimized, as if the transgressions of victims exonerate the crimes of victimizers. For instance, Japanese atrocities committed against the POWs of the Western Allies were thought to be counterbalanced by the suffering and massive death of Japanese POWs in the Siberian gulags. The innocent killing of German civilians by Allied bombings and the sufferings of German expellees from the East have been emphasized in the same vein. But the victimhood is unequal and asymmetrical between Germans, Jews and Poles, and between Japanese, Chinese and Koreans. That explains why victimhood nationalism in Japan and Germany is more complicated, sophisticated and even shameless. Compared to Germany, Japan as ‘the only nation ever to have been atom-bombed’ (yuiitsu no hibakukoku) could enjoy a privileged position in the competition for victimhood. De-contextualized from the history of the ‘fifteen-year war’, in the words of Imahori Seiji, ‘this declaration is replete with the single-minded assertion that Japanese were the victims of the atomic bomb’ (quote in Orr 2001, 1). American writers’ frequent remarks on ‘Auschwitz and Hiroshima as terrible twin symbols of manmade mass death’, especially after the Soviet Union’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, seemed to evince Japanese victimhood (Novick 2001, 112). Radhabinod Pal, the Indian judge at the Tokyo trial, confirmed Japanese victimhood by suggesting that the American use of the atomic bomb might be deemed to be the closest counterpart to Nazi atrocities in the war (Dower 2002, 226). In the public memory of post-war Japan, however, it was Japanese military leaders who victimized the innocent Japanese even before the A-bomb. Fire bombings, the repatriation of Japanese civilians from Manchuria and Korea, and wartime suffering such as hunger and military oppression on the home front have been emphasized also to indicate Japanese victimhood. Citing John Dower,

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‘it became commonplace to speak of the war dead themselves – and indeed, of virtually all ordinary Japanese – as being victims and sacrifices’ (ibid., 228). The public memory of war to mythicize the ordinary Japanese as innocent victims of a system rather than as accomplices of war atrocities was not solely self-generated. The Supreme Command of the Allied Powers (SCAP) encouraged this morally comfortable tale from another direction. SCAP worked under the assumption that the Japanese people had been slaves of feudal habits of subservience to authority. A secret report by the Psychological Warfare Branch of the US Army reads: ‘The Japanese personally have contributed their full measure to the war effort and fulfilled their obligation to the Emperor. All their effort is to no avail because their military leaders have betrayed them. The people are not to be blamed for their suffering […] The military clique has practiced false indoctrination’ (quoted in Orr 2001, 16). By patronizing the Japanese people, SCAP’s Orientalist view exempted ordinary Japanese from war culpability and guilt. This discursive amnesty was paid for with the agency of ordinary Japanese. Deprived of agency, ordinary Japanese became passive subjects, blindly loyal to authority and thus innocent of the nation’s various transgressions done in their names and with their participation. Victims, deprived of agency, cannot be held accountable for the misuse of power. Both left-wing activists and right-wing politicians appropriated the Japanese victimhood in their own way. It was a good device for them either to blame the Cold War US–Japan security alliance or to detach themselves from the legacy of militarism and war responsibility (Orr 2001, 7, 14, 15, 32). The term of ‘Pacific War’ imposed by SCAP was another deliberate conceptual tool to waive Japanese war responsibility from its Asian neighbours. SCAP substituted the ‘Pacific War’ for the ‘Great East Asia War’ which, paired with the ‘Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Zone’, had been designed by the Japanese total war system to legitimize Japanese invasion of its Asian neighbours. With its focus on the conflict between America and Japan, the term ‘Pacific War’ downplayed Japanese military aggression against its Asian neighbours. That term brought into relief Japanese aggression against Americans or Europeans, such as the maltreatment of Allied POWs. Japanese military transgressions, like Unit 731’s biological warfare, forced labour mobilization through Asia, comfort women and other violations of human rights in Asia, fell into oblivion. That explains partly why ‘the Japanese people don’t have much consciousness of having invaded China and have a tendency to emphasize only the suffering they bore in the Pacific War’ (quoted in Orr 2001, 32).

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Without doubt, that exemption of the Japanese people from a sense of war guilt contributed to building victimhood nationalism in post-war Japan. It was in anti-nuclear pacifism that Japanese war victimhood was most easily detached from Japanese wartime atrocities. The exceptionalism as ‘the only nation ever to have been atom-bombed’ de-contextualized this traumatic tragedy from its historical background. All the anguish and agony that Japanese people suffered was to be epitomized by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hiroshima as an absolute evil was often compared with the Holocaust. A popular novella singled out the Japanese and Jews as the archetypal victims of White racism (Buruma 2002, 119–26). But the public memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been repressed by SCAP censorship. By the early 1950s, it was treated more or less as an unexpected natural calamity. It was only through the Lucky Dragon incident on 1 March 1954 that atomic victimhood developed into victimhood nationalism with a pacifist tint. Thus, ‘Hiroshima became an icon of Japan’s past as an innocent war victim and a beacon for its future as a pacifist nation’ (Orr 2001, 52). Perhaps the victimhood narrative of hikiage, including Yoko Kawashima Watkins’ memoir, had the anti-war pacifist movement as its cultural matrix of collective memory. As the ‘Yoko Story’ (as the book is called in Korea) controversy shows, in the historically structured antagonistic complicity of nationalisms in East Asia, Japanese obsession with having been victimized by the A-bomb spurs on victimhood nationalism in Korea. And ‘a distasteful competition over who suffered most’ seems inevitable. Although Japanese wartime aggression was totally forgotten in victimhood discourse, Japanese conventional war atrocities seemed relatively insignificant compared to this apocalyptic hell. The story of the aesthetic origins of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is very intriguing in this respect. The design for the Park, selected through a public competition in 1949, shares a nearly identical ground plan with the Commemorative Building Project for the Construction of Greater East Asia, projected in 1942 as a grandiose Shintoist memorial zone to be built on an open plain at the foot of Mountain Fuji. In fact it was Tange Kenzo¯, a world-renowned architect, who did the designs of both projects. The striking parallels between the imperial commemorating project of the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (planned in 1940) and the Hiroshima memorial site for peace and mourning of the victims of the atomic bomb are symptomatic of the Japanese apologetic memory based on the shift from victimizers to victims (Yoneyama 1999, 1–3). It is also noteworthy that Yamahata Yosuke, who became world famous

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for his picture of a Nagasaki A-bomb child victim, campaigned with the Japanese Army in China as a war photographer during the ‘Fifteen-Year War’ and had taken lots of photos of innocent Chinese children smiling with Japanese soldiers (Morris-Suzuki 2006, 127–33). In the turbulent memories of the Nazi past in Germany, it is not clear yet whether the Germans were Hitler’s first victims or his last victims. Perhaps Willy Brandt’s widow Brigitte Seebacher’s thesis of ‘Hitler’s first victims’ may be more vulnerable because Germans ought to compete with Austrians for the position of Hitler’s first victims. But Seebacher’s thesis, represented by Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film The Downfall, is no less problematic. In this deeply problematic film, ‘perpetration and victimhood are played out within the national collective, between evil Nazis and good Germans, thus (almost) excluding memory of Jewish suffering’ (Niven 2006, 16). The seemingly sudden rise of German suffering through events such as the Allied bombing and post-war, Communist expulsions was possible thanks to the ‘Fall’ (of the Berlin Wall) which made it possible for Germans to confront their complicated past directly, free from the ideological constraints of the Cold War. Günther Grass’s novella Im Krebsgang represents this new current. While the novella focuses on the tragic fate of about 8,000 German civilian refugees on the Wilhelm Gustloff, which was torpedoed and sunk by a Soviet submarine, it never fails to contextualize the disaster in historical terms by alluding to the history of the ship in the service of the Nazi’s ‘Strength through Joy’ campaign, the Nazi career of its dedicatee, and the presence of noncivilians on board (Grass 2002). Grass’s well-balanced view of victimized victimizers can’t be compared with Yoko Kawashima Watkins’s de-contextualized saga which is immune to history. Grass’s novella opened the public discussion on German suffering. Simultaneously, its political implication was to criticize the revisionist historiography in the 1990s which de-contextualizes the German suffering as a result of Allied bombing and expulsion. The novella carries the message that perceives, and considers the roles of, the thousands of German victims on board the Wilhelm Gustloff as Nazi collaboratorsvictimizers. The historical meandering implied in the title ‘crabwalk’ transmits a warning against the naïve dichotomy of victimizers and victims on the abstract level and in absolute terms. It does not necessarily amount to a new victims’ discourse. Indeed, Grass’s cautious handling of contextualization seems quite different from that of Joerg Friedrich in his account of the Allied bombing, which relativizes the Holocaust by comparing the suffering of the German civilians with the suffering of European Jews through linguistic association. As Stefan

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Berger points out, ‘Friedrich refers to Bomber Command 5 as “task force (Einsatzgruppe)”; cellars and bomb shelters are described as ”crematoria” and the bombing victims are being “exterminated” (vernichtet)’ (Berger 2006, 219–20). What is evident in Friedrich’s victimhood narrative is seemingly intentional de-contextualization. The historical contextualization, as shown in Im Krebsgang, means not to justify the Allied bombing as a punishment for historical culprits, but to reveal the historical complexity and ambiguity beyond the dichotomy of absolute good and evil. Victimhood nationalism is a-historical since it dwells in the realm of over-contextualization and de-contextualization. Very often, being ahistorical is a matter vulnerable to politicization. Thus, victimhood was selective in both Germanys. In West Germany the suffering of expellees from Eastern Europe and German POWs imprisoned in the Soviet Union was collectively mourned. Their private memories structured the public memory of Communist brutality and the loss of eastern Germany. The ‘Documents of Expulsion’ were full of countless reports of terror, rape, plundering, separation of families, forced deportations, starvation, slave labour and killings. Citing Robert G. Moeller, ‘the editors of documentation projects claimed that what Germans had suffered under Communists was comparable in its horror only to what Jews had suffered under Nazis’ (Moeller 1996, 1013, 1017, 1027). Discursively, it was a continuation of Goebbels’ attempts to orientalize Russians, to portray them as subhuman Asian hordes. In East Germany, the expulsion of Germans from brotherly Communist countries was never questioned. The rape of German women by Red Army soldiers was a taboo. Instead of criticizing the heroic Red Army, the Allied bombing of East German cities such as Dresden was interpreted as a devious plan to sabotage socialist building in the GDR. GDR citizens had primarily been victims of the criminal Allied bombing. At times, the suffering of the bombing victims in the GDR area was equated with the suffering of the Jews in Holocaust (ibid., 215). With the unification of Germany, German victims who had politically differentiated historical memories were also unified. Tensions then grew over the position of victimhood between the unified Germany and its Slavic neighbours, and ‘a distasteful competition over who suffered most’ has become more heated as the German expellee organizations demand compensation. Under post-Cold War circumstances, the leaders of the expellee organizations appealed to the Polish court to return properties confiscated by the Communist regime. A vociferous outcry

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was heard that Free Poland should not condone the oppressive policies of the Communist regime (Wielin´ski 2006). Erika Steinbach, president of ‘Der Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV)’, has been more aggressive in her assertion. She urged the German government to set the annulment of the Beneš Decree as the precondition for the Czech Republic’s and Poland’s entry to the European Union. Steinbach is not reluctant to describe the internment camps of German expellees in what are now parts of the Czech Republic and Poland by using the terms ‘forced labour, extermination camp and genocide (Zwangsarbeits- und Vernichtungslager, Genozid)’. ‘Genocide of more than 15 million people’ was her estimation of the victimhood of the German expellees. In fact, she equated the suffering of German expellees with the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust (Piskorski 2005, 37, 42f.). In other words, Poles and Czechs who victimized these expellees were equated with the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust. Indeed, Steinbach compared the rightist Polish government with the neo-Nazis in Germany for its indifference to the question of expulsion in an interview with ‘Passauer Neue Presse’ in March 2007 (Wyborcza). It is undeniable that Germans were victimized by Poles and Czechs upon Germany’s defeat in the Second World War. On 30 June 1945, 22 Sudeten Germans and one Czech woman were shot by Czechs in the Czech town of Teplice (Wekelsdorf). ‘In September 2002, the Polish town Lambinowice (formerly Lamsdorf) consecrated a graveyard containing the bodies of 1137 Germans […] most of which were women, children and other people, not Nazis’ (Niven 2004, 238). They died of starvation and hard labour in a work camp run, with Soviet permission, by Poles. On 31 July 1945, Czech militia and civilians threw more than 50 Germans into a river and opened fire on them in Ustí nad Labem (Aussig). The list of atrocities is too long to be enumerated here. But it is also true that these German expellees were hardly innocent of responsibility for Nazism. For example, the Sudeten Germans were strong Nazi supporters who voted for the Nazi-style Sudeten German Party with an overwhelming majority of 90 per cent. The de-contextualization of German victimhood by Steinbach and others gives rise to a furious response from their counterparts who were victims of Nazism. Poles and Czechs are responding to the de-contextualization of German victimhood with over-contextualization, which would seemingly justify their violent acts against the German expellees. What is left is ‘a distasteful competition over who suffered most’ and the antagonistic complicity of victimhood nationalisms.

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If the over-contextualization inherent in historical contextualism gives rise to historical conformism of whatever happened in history, the de-contextualization results in a form of a-historical justification of the historical aftermath. Indeed, the spectres of de-contextualization and over-contextualization hovering over the victimhood controversy make historical reconciliation vulnerable to politicization. It is true that Japanese expellees fell victim to Koreans, and that German expellees were victimized by Poles and Czechs upon defeat in the Second World War. But it is also true that both the Japanese and German expellees were hardly innocent of responsibility for atrocities resulting from colonialism and Nazism. With its unilateral emphasis on victimhood, de-contextualization of Japanese and German victimhood nationalism gives rise to a furious response from their counterparts who had been victimized before and during the Second World War. They are responding to the de-contextualization of Japanese and German victimhood nationalisms with over-contextualization, which would seemingly justify their violent acts against Japanese and German civilian expellees. The competition for exclusive victimhood between opposing victimhood nationalisms begins in this way. What is left is the antagonistic complicity of victimhood nationalisms among unequal victims.

Responsibility: From whom to whom? Collective memories are not fixed but floating. They float among the continuous negotiations between available historical records and current social and political agendas. Historical responsibility on the other hand is not floating. Look up ‘responsibility’ in an English dictionary and one may find an interesting synonym, namely ‘answerability’ – an ability to answer. Indeed, ‘Verantwortung’, ‘odpowiedzialnosć´’, ‘responsibilite’ as equivalents of ‘responsibility’ in other European languages have the same connotation. The word ‘answerability’ sounds very casual. But if the question of ‘answerability to whom?’ arises, this suddenly becomes a very charged term. Answerability presupposes an ability to listen to the voices of others. If we remind ourselves of Derrida’s remark that ‘the Other is my justice’, listening to others is a substantial part of my justice and yours. The voice of others is very often a dissenting one. Listening to the outrageous, distressing, moaning voices of others is very often disturbing and painful. Historical responsibility means listenability and answerability to the voices of others who passed away in the brutal past. Ontologically, nobody can be either blamed or convicted for what one did not do. One can be responsible only for what one did. In other

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words, ‘only the murderer is responsible for the murder’. Collective guilt or innocence cannot help us to come to terms with the brutal and tragic past in the present history. It would only encourage people to perceive reality in national terms and thus justify their own victimhood nationalisms. The perpetrators’ principle of ‘a reductive selectiveness’ would remain intact. It would signify a posthumous victory for the oppressors. However, denying collective guilt does not equal denying the existence of ‘cultural collectiveness’, constructed from a sense of participation in a common past spanning a period of many generations (Engel 2004, 413). Adam Michnik’s confession is intuitive in that sense: ‘I do not feel guilty for those murdered, but I do feel responsible […] I feel guilty that after they died they were murdered again, denied a decent burial, denied tears, denied truth about this hideous crime, and that for decades a lie was repeated’ (Michnik 2004, 435). If responsibility means answerability to the voices and pains of others, historical responsibility means the responsibility for the present memory of past. We, as historians, are responsible for the apologetic memory of victimhood nationalism. Memorial collectives are still in the making, with us all playing our parts in the process.

Notes 1 I borrowed the term ‘hereditary victimhood’ from Bauman (2000, 238). 2 In the turbulent debates on Jewish massacres in Jedwabne, a 70-year old ordinary Pole admitted that ‘we were taught as children that we Poles never harmed anyone. A partial abandonment of this morally comfortable position is very, very difficult for me’ (Polonsky and Michlic 2004, 1). 3 It is in the same vein that the Chinese diaspora in the US has seized on the Nanjing Massacre to perceive an ethnic identity. Many American Jews cling to the sanctity of the Holocaust as basic to their identity too (Fogel 2000, 3). Isn’t the victimhood a mainstay of the long-distance nationalism among the diaspora communities in the US? 4 It is noteworthy that a sexist reconstruction of history can be found also in the Korean nationalist discourse on the comfort women. 5 It should also be noted that in the international arena Israeli officials and American Jewish political activists have tried to increase public awareness of the Holocaust to generate sympathy and support for Israel. See Novick (2001, 156–7). 6 For an excellent analysis of the uniqueness discourse, see Rosenbaum (2001). 7 It is striking that 40 per cent of respondents in a nationwide survey of public opinion in 2004 declared that Poland is still being governed by Jews. See Gross (2006). 8 It is symptomatic that it has not been allowed to reprint the Polish version of Wladyslaw Szpielman’s The Pianist in the era of People’s Poland.

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9 ‘Interview with the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Józef Glemp, on the Murder of Jews in Jedwabne, 15 May 2001’ (Polonsky and Michlic 2004, 167).

Bibliography Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0844668109/ref⫽cm_cr_dp_ all_helpful?%5Fencoding⫽UTF8&coliid⫽&showViewpoints⫽1&colid⫽&sortBy⫽ bySubmissionDateDescending (last visited 13 April 2007). Arendt, Hannah (1994), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books). Bauman, Zygmunt (2000), Modernity and Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Berger, Stefan (2006), ‘On Taboos, Traumas and Other Myths’, in: Bill Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan), 210–24. Bikont, Anna (2004), ‘We of Jedwabne’, in: Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic (eds), The Neighbors Responded: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 267–303. Błonski, ´ Jan (1996), Biedni Polacy Patrza˛ na Getto (Kraków: wydawnictwo literackie). Boston Globe (2007): http://www.boston.com/news/globe/west/2007/02/korean_ official.html (last visited 8 December 2009). Buruma, Ian (2002), The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. Korean translation by Chung Yonghwan (Seoul: Hangyoreh Shinmun). Chosun: http://issue.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2007/02/15/2007021500361. html (last visited 15 April 2007). Diner, Dan (1995), ‘Cumulative Contingency: Historicizing Legitimacy in Israeli Discourse’, History and Memory, Special Issue: Israel Historiography Revisited 7/1, 147–70. Dower, John W. (2002), ‘An Aptitude for Being Unloved: War and Memory in Japan’, in: Omer Bartov, Atina Grossman and Mary Nolan (eds), Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (New York: The New Press), 217–41. Engel, David (2004), ‘Introduction to the Hebrew Edition of Neighbors’, in: Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic (eds), The Neighbors Responded: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press), 408–13. Engelking-Boni, Barbara (2003), ‘Psychological Distance between Poles and Jews in Nazi-Occupied Warsaw’, in: Joshua D. Zimmerman (ed.), Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Brunswick/NJ: Rutgers University Press), 47–53. Fogel, Joshua A. (ed.) (2000), The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley/CA: University of California Press). Grass, Günther (2002), Im Krebsgang. Korean translation by Chang Hee-Chang (Seoul: Minumsa). Gross, Jan T. (2002), Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York: Penguin Books). Gross, Jan T. (2006), Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House). Levi, Primo (1989), The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage Books).

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Lim, Jie-Hyun (2001), ‘Nationalist Message in Socialist Code: On Court Historiography in People’s Poland and North Korea’, in: Solvi Sogner (ed.), Making Sense of Global History (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget), 373–80. Lim, Jie-Hyun (2006), Jˇogdaejˇok Gongbˇumjadeul (Antagonistic Accomplices) (Seoul: Sonamu). Lim, Jie Hyun (2007/1), ‘Victimhood Nationalism: Compelling or Competing?’, The Korea Herald, April 9. ˇ Lim, Jie-Hyun (2007/2), ‘Hˇuisaengja Uisik Minjˇ okjuˇui (Victimhood Nationalism)’, Bipyung (Criticism) 15 (Summer), 154–76. Lim, Jie-Hyun (2008), ‘The Antagonistic Complicity of Nationalisms-On Nationalist Phenomenology in East Asian History Textbooks’, in: Steffi Richter (ed.), Contested Views of a Common Past: Revisions of History in Contemporary East Asia (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag), 205–22. Michnik, Adam (2004), ‘Poles and Jews: How Deep the Guilt?’, in: Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic (eds), The Neighbors Responded: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press), 434–9. Moeller, Robert G. (1996), ‘War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany’, American Historical Review 101/4 (Oct), 1008–48. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa (2006), The Past within Us: Media, Memory, History. Korean translation by Kim Kyoungwon (Seoul: Humanist). Niven, Bill (2004), ‘The Globalisation of Memory and the Rediscovery of German Suffering’, in: Stuart Taberner (ed.), German Literature in the Age of Globalisation (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press), 229–45. Niven, Bill (2006), ‘Introduction’, in: Bill Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan), 1–25. Novick, Peter (2001), The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London: Bloomsbury). Orr, James J. (2001), The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu/HI: University of Hawai’i Press). Pappe, Ilan (1995), ‘Critique and Agenda: The Post-Zionist Scholars in Israel’, History and Memory, Special Issue: Israel Historiography Revisited 7/1. Piskorski, Jan M. (2005), Vertreibung und Deutsch-Polnische Geschichte (Osnabrück: fibre Verlag). Polonsky, Antony and Michlic, Joanna (2004), ‘Introduction’, in: Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic (eds), The Neighbors Responded: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press), 1–43. Renan, Ernest (2002), Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Korean translation by Shin Haengsun (Seoul: Chaeksesang). Rosenbaum Alan S. (ed.) (2001), Is Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder CO: Westview Press). Segev, Tom (2000), The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. Translated by Heim Watzman (New York: Owl Books). Steinlauf, Michael (2003), ‘Teaching the Holocaust in Poland’, in: Joshua D. Zimmerman (ed.), Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Brunswick/NJ: Rutgers University Press), 262–70. S´wida-Ziemba, Hanna (2004), ‘The Shortsightedness of the Cultured’, in: Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic (eds), The Neighbors Responded: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press), 103–13.

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Warschawski, Michel (2005), On the Border. Eng. translated by Levi Laub (Cambridge/MA: South End Press). Watkins, Yoko Kawashima (2005), So Far from the Bamboo Grove (New York: Beech Tree, 1994). Korean translation Yoko-Iyagi (Seoul: Munhakdongne). Weinberg, Werner (1985), Self-Portrait of a Holocaust Survivor ( Jefferson/NC: Mcfarland). Wielinski, ´ Bartosz T. (2006), ‘Czego z˙a˛da owiernictwo pruskie’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 19 December. Wyborcza: ‘Steinbach: Polski rza˛d jak niemieccy neofaszysći’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 7 March 2007. Yoneyama, Lisa (1999), Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Yoneyama, Lisa (2007), ‘Asiagye Mikukin gwa Ilboˇui Jˇonjaengbˇomjoi’. A Paper Presented to 4th Symposium of Korean-Japanese Solidarity 21, July 14. Yoon, Sang In (2007), ‘Sunandamˇui Yuhok’, Bipyung, 15 (Summer), 197–8. Zertal, Idith (1998), From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Zerubavel, Yael (1994), ‘The Death of Memory and the Memory of Death: Masada and the Holocaust as Historical Metaphors’, Representations 45 (Winter). Zimmerman, Joshua D. (ed.) (2003), Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Brunswick/NJ: Rutgers University Press).

8 Remembering Asia: History and Memory in Post-Cold War Japan Sebastian Conrad

‘Asia’ has returned to Japan, and Japan to ‘Asia’. For about one-and-ahalf decades, intellectuals and politicians have been trying to redefine Japan’s place in the global order. Until 1990, the country’s primary orientation had been towards America. Under the umbrella of the security treaties with the US, Japan had defined herself essentially as part of the ‘West’. Asia, on the other hand, was virtually absent from Japanese discourse. The situation has changed markedly with the end of the Cold War and with the dissolution of the bipolar world order. While the US continues to be an important point of reference, the Asian neighbours in recent years have assumed increasing relevance in Japan. This ‘return of Asia’ to Japan – but also to China and Korea – needs to be placed in the context of current globalization. The integration of the world goes hand-in-hand with processes of fragmentation and the reconfiguration of difference. In the process, the privileged role of the nation states gives way to new ways of regional concentration. Significantly, these shifts go beyond politics and economics and have important repercussions in the ways in which the past is reinterpreted and appropriated. Indeed, in many ways public memory is one of the central arenas in which the dynamics of these new regionalisms are negotiated. In what follows, I will discuss what this emergence of regional structures implies for memory debates in Japan. Clearly, different actors and social groups within Japan have articulated these new contexts in different and contested ways. Moreover, viewed from China, Taiwan or Korea, the dynamics of East Asian regionalism look again very different. When talking about memory within East Asia, then, it will be important to keep the positionality of interpretations and debates in mind. What I will argue is that concomitant with the process of globalization, the East Asian context has assumed an increasing relevance in appropriations 163

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of the past. The fundamental transformation of the field of memory in contemporary Japan, then, is not only due to internal developments, to the effects of traumatization or to the results of a process of coming to terms with the past; rather, the dynamics of memory need to be situated in the shifting geopolitical context since the 1990s that opened up spaces for new actors, concerns and perspectives.

Regionalism in Asia When assessing the trajectories of the globalized world of late capitalism, two main lines of interpretation have been pursued (Ching 2000). One argument focuses on the global stage in the history of capitalism. As an integrated system, global capitalism seems to have undermined all existing boundaries, and consequently markets, actors and commodity flows are no longer confined by territorial units. As a result, the traditional binary models – such as centre and periphery, or colonizer and colonized – have lost much of their explanatory potential and have yielded to notions of power and global space that are no longer structured by dichotomies. A second and seemingly contradictory position relates the rise of the global economy to a series of spatial displacements. Giovanni Arrighi, among others, has argued that the capitalist centre has shifted and moved from Western Europe in the sixteenth century to Great Britain and on to the US, and the significance of the early twenty-first century is marked by the advent of the hegemony of East Asian economies. This almost Hegelian vision of world history then suggests that the current regionalism in East Asia can be interpreted as the triumph of ‘new’ regions such as East Asia over ‘older’ regions like North America (Arrighi 1994). Rather than juxtaposing the paradigms of globalism and regionalism, however, it is important to recognize that global integration and the emergence of regional structures have gone hand-in-hand. Processes of globalization have not led to the emergence of a unified and homogenous world, but have been accompanied by fragmentation and the constitution of difference. The current forms of regionalism – that are by no means confined to East Asia but can also be witnessed in Europe or the Americas – therefore need to be seen as an integral component of contemporary globalization, and not as an obstacle to interaction. ‘In the present historical juncture’, as Leo Ching has argued, ‘regionalisms intercede between the eroding of national autonomy and the de-territorializing of capitalism to re-territorialize transnational capital’

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(Ching 2000, 243). Similar phenomena can be observed elsewhere – as in Europe or the Americas. The formation of new regionalisms – be it as commercial blocks, as supranational political entities or defined in cultural terms as ‘civilizations’ – must be seen as one of the crucial phenomena of the reconfiguration of territoriality under conditions of global entanglements (Dirlik 2007). East Asia, however, may appear as a rather unlikely place for the emergence of transnational structures. The region was tormented by a long history of conflict and war, and the memory of Japanese imperialism is still vividly present in many countries. Moreover, East Asia – pragmatically defined as South East Asia plus Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China – is characterized by a wide array of differences: culturally, but also linguistically and in terms of religion. What is more, migration was relatively scarce between these countries – Malaysia is the only country in the region with more than four per cent of the population born outside the national borders. For a long time, it was received wisdom among political scientists that East Asia would not be up to transnational cooperation. This has begun to change in recent years. Firstly, institutions of political cooperation are gradually emerging. To be sure, the process cannot be compared to the European Union, as there is no parliament or common judicial system, and a movement pressing for a constitution is nowhere to be seen. But cooperation and strategic planning are developing, and on the sub-governmental level the interaction of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on issues such as environment and water management, migration, and terrorism is increasing markedly. Secondly, East Asia has turned into a region of intensive trade relations since about the mid-1990s. Bilateral agreements and the establishment of free trade zones have had their effects on intraregional commerce. In Japan, too, trade with the neighbouring Asian countries surpassed economic exchange with the US in 1993 – symbolically in the same year that the Liberal Democratic Party, with its fixation on the US, lost its hegemonic position in the Japanese parliament. And thirdly, even demographically things have begun to change. Still a far cry from mobility rates in Europe or the US, Japan has nevertheless witnessed increasing immigration, and the gradual dissolution of the myth of the homogeneous nation has elicited much public debate. The large majority of those entering the country – over 90 per cent – come from East Asia. Fourthly, the most important site for East Asian integration has been the realm of culture. It is probably not exaggerated to say that compared to the economically driven regionalism in the Americas, and to the political institutions in Europe, East Asian regionalism is negotiated

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primarily in the cultural arena. On an ideological level, the claim to cultural commonalities such as Confucianism and the so-called Asian values is ubiquitous. Materially, however, it is popular culture that has contributed most to East Asian integration, as Chinese and Korean soap operas, Japanese manga and pop music are consumed transnationally. This is a marked departure from the post-war period, as many governments had prohibited the diffusion of cultural products of their neighbouring countries. In Taiwan, for example, the ban on Japanese music and television programmes was only lifted in 1994; today, Japanese pop culture in Taiwan is ubiquitous.1 It is against this background that history has emerged as an important site of competing claims and contested interpretations. In the process of shaping an East Asian future, the past is constantly reinterpreted and appropriated for conflicting interests and concerns. The trajectories of memory debates, as a consequence, need to be situated in a context of transnational interaction and regional negotiations. Among the more dramatic examples of this process are the outbursts of violence in Beijing and Seoul in 2001 and 2005, when thousands of demonstrators marched the capitals in protest at a new Japanese history textbook they believe downplays Japanese wartime atrocities. Indeed, a politics of history geared to the exigencies of the new regionalism – including a Japanese apology and a check on revisionist interpretations – is frequently seen by political commentators as a crucial precondition to increasing economic and political cooperation in East Asia.

The post-war years: Victimization and ‘De-Asianization’ In order to assess the dynamics of debates in recent years, it is instructive to take a brief look at the logics of memory production before the 1990s. This will necessarily be a very schematic overview, and it will gloss over many of the complexities of negotiating the past in post-war Japan. Memory production was never monolithic, and appropriations of the recent past were always contested and linked to competing interests and concerns (Seraphim 2006; Saaler and Schwentker 2008). But with the aim of generalization, we can say that the long post-war period until about 1990 was dominated by the narrative of Japanese victimization. Typically, Japan was depicted as the object of suppression, power and circumstance: honourable politicians (and also the Emperor) as the victims of staunch militarists, the people as victims of its leaders, and Japan as the first and sole victim of the Atomic bomb.2 On the other hand, the memory of Japanese atrocities, such as the Nanjing massacre

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or the experiments in biological warfare, were only picked up by a small number of oppositional activists and were largely neglected in official memory (Orr 2001; Fogel 2000). When compared to post-war West Germany, for example, it becomes apparent that this narrative of victimization was facilitated by, and in many ways corresponded to, the international context within which debates in post-war Japan unfolded.3 Within the binary structures of the Cold War period, Japan followed a path of close Alliance with the US, with less concern for the neighbouring countries and their stakes in a shared and conflict-ridden past. The discursive hegemony of the US, moreover, colluded with and helped legitimate the victimhood perspective. The occupation played a crucial role in casting the history of war and fascism essentially in domestic terms, a war that was caused primarily by internal factors and could thus be addressed by measures of social reform. Alongside the notion of victimization, the second important feature of post-war Japanese debates was a preponderance of concerns with internal development, with the internal trajectories leading to fascism and aggression. This paradigm has helped occlude, as it were, the Asian context of the Japanese past. Indeed, while the principal referent of Japanese politics and world view was the US, Asia was virtually absent from postwar discourse. Karatani Kôjin has spoken of the ‘De-Asianization’ of the Japanese mind, as a general characteristic of the political and intellectual landscape in the years of the economic miracle (Karatani 1993).4 This was particularly true of the war itself – and here, too, the American presence colluded in a partial amnesia of the recent past. A particularly telling example concerned the naming of the war, which until 1945 had been glorified as the ‘Greater East Asian War’ (daitôa sensô), a term prohibited during the occupation. Instead, ‘Pacific war’ was introduced as the official name of the Second World War in Japan. This term, however, highlighted certain aspects of the conflict, namely the Japanese war against the US beginning with the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The long period of fighting on the Asian mainland with its estimated toll of over 20 million Chinese lives was marginalized (Minear 1995). These terminological interventions had a long afterlife, as they generally corresponded to the role of Asia in the post-war decades. When historian Ienaga Saburô in 1968 produced a Marxist narrative of the war that focused on the events in China, he nevertheless chose to call his book The Pacific War because otherwise (as he admitted in the preface) he anticipated the readership’s ignorance of what the book was about (Ienaga 1968).5 In Japanese discourse, ‘Asia’ had disappeared in a historiographical vacuum, and this continued to be so for a long time.

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Transnational memory production The 1990s witnessed dramatic changes in the landscape of Japanese memory. The end of the Cold War helped to open up a new space for debate, for new social actors and dissenting voices. The fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union not only had effects in these countries themselves, but were indicative of the end of the post-war world order in a broader sense. With the disappearance of the East-West dichotomy, the clear-cut framework within which all events were endowed with political meaning also disappeared. In many respects, the symbolic conflicts over the meaning of the past took its place and substituted for the ideological antagonisms (Gluck 1993; 1996). As a result, we can speak of a virtual explosion of memory in Japan in the 1990s. After the ‘end of history’, as some commentators have called it (at least the end of a history dominated by universalist projects), the permanent discourse on the past corresponded with a post-ideological economy of signs (Iida 2000). The most notable effect of the end of the Cold War was the change it spawned in Japan’s relationship to her Asian neighbours. After a long period of relative ignorance, the most important development in the 1990s was what many perceived as a return of ‘Asia’ – even if the term arrival may be more appropriate, as continuities with a shared Asian past proved to be less important than shifting geopolitical grounds.6 This had important repercussions in the field of memory. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war in 1995, in particular, the demand for an official apology on the part of the Japanese government was expressed by many Asian governments and civil society groups (Seraphim 1996). Since then, the debates in Japan cannot be understood disconnected from this broader context. Issues of how to deal with the past have to constantly negotiate this highly contested terrain.7 This Asian dimension of Japanese memory is played out in different arenas. Examples include the conflicting interpretations of the Nanjing massacre, the treatment of former forced labourers, and also the recent publication of a textbook that tries to articulate the modern history of China, Korea and Japan from three different albeit intertwined perspectives.8 The most conspicuous site for the regionalization of memory is the issue of compensation for former ‘comfort women’ (jûgun ianfu), more precisely forced prostitutes in the service of the Japanese army. The coercion of women and girls into the system of sexual slavery during the war years involved an estimated 80,000 to 200,000 victims from throughout Asia, particularly Korea and China (Field 1997; Yoshimi 2000; Tanaka 2002).

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The issue of forced prostitution was by no means unknown, but had not had, for a long time, a place in the public memory of the war. The problematic entered public consciousness as late as the mid-1990s, as a result of a complex interplay of individual agency and institutional lobbying. At a 1988 conference in Korea, the feminist scholar Yun Chung Ok presented her research on the subject. Women’s groups in Korea and in Japan took up the issue, and while governments continued to slight the topic, these groups created a public space for themselves that eventually also made it possible for former forced prostitutes to come forward and speak of their personal past. The media then picked up the topic, and as the pressure on the Japanese government rose, the so-called Asian Women’s Fund was established in 1995 with the aim of compensating former ‘comfort women’. The fund came in for a wave of criticism both in Japan and in the neighbouring countries for deflecting state responsibility by making the compensation a private rather than a governmental task. A high number of former ‘comfort women’ consequently refused payment because it avoided acknowledgment of state responsibility. The issue was thus raised and articulated by social groups and individuals, and this grass-roots movement from below forced the governments (not only in Japan, but also in Korea) to acknowledge the problem in the first place. In subsequent years, the nationalist Right in Japan – protesting the public attention to the matter, and in particular the mentioning of ‘comfort women’ in middle-school textbooks – embarked on the issue, further entrenching the critical voices and also contributing to wider repercussions in other Asian countries. Until today, treatment of the topic, both in Japan and elsewhere, is highly charged with emotions and overwritten with conflicting social and political interests. For the purposes of our discussion, two dimensions seem of particular interest: Firstly, it is important to recognize to what extent the production of memory in Japan owed to transnational processes. Individuals and groups in Korea and Japan, China and the US colluded in different ways to ensure the topic would be firmly established on the public agenda. The interactions between these groups were facilitated by the media, from newspapers and television to the Internet. In this process, transnational NGOs played a crucial role. The most conspicuous example was without doubt the International Women’s War Crimes Tribunal that was conducted in Tokyo in the year 2000 with the explicit aim of re-visiting, and thereby improving upon, the War Crimes Tribunal of 1946 by addressing crimes committed against women (VAWW-NET Japan 2000–2).

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Transnationality, however, and this is the second point, does not necessarily imply a unified perspective. Quite the contrary: the terrain of memory was highly contested, and individuals and groups had competing if not conflicting concerns, agendas and perspectives. Civil society in South Korea, for example, typically represented the ‘comfort women’ as the victims of imperialism and thus created a larger frame of reference for a problematic that otherwise might have been marginalized as a mere ‘women’s issue’. Human rights activists and international lawyers in the West, on the other hand, articulated the problem in a language that referred to ‘sex slaves’ because their main concern was to remove legal impunity for state-sanctioned sexual violence against women. Activists in the Asian diasporas, and in Japan, pursued the issue differently again and frequently adapted the terminology and rhetoric of their publications to the situation and context. This diversity, as Carol Gluck has observed, ‘was one reason for their impact, for no single locus of engagement could have generated as effective a public presence as these crisscrossing networks of commitment’ (Gluck 2007, 72).

The quest for an ‘Asian’ past The above example has demonstrated how increasing transnational interaction has contributed to the regionalization of memory in Japan. The focus here was on the social actors and groups and the ways in which transnational contexts have shaped and transformed the dynamics of debates in Japan. In the final section we will turn to a different, albeit related, phenomenon, in which transnationality is less characteristic of the process but rather of the contents of what gets remembered. Even if context and content are in practice difficult to disentangle, here the emphasis is not so much on the transnational conditions, actors and forces at play in the production of memory, but rather on the strategies to inscribe the Japanese past firmly within the region of East Asia. The attempts to rewrite the Japanese past as an integral part of the history of the larger region form part of a broader trend, and the Asian context has played an increasingly important role as a framework within which to situate Japanese modernity (Furuya 1996; Yonetani 2006). For example, colonial history has emerged as an important area in which to rewrite Japanese history in Asia. Under the influence of post-colonial studies, recent scholarship has explored the extent to which the social transformations of modern Japan need to be situated within a broader, colonial setting (Kang 2002; Takaoka 2002). Likewise, the history of the expansionist years between 1931 and 1945 is currently being revisited

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and re-contextualized. On the one hand, a spate of work has been produced that reconstructs the ideological background that underwrote Japan’s imperialist drive in Asia (Oguma 1998). The concept of Pan-Asianism, with all its variations and ramifications, has been one of the foci of this research (Yamamuro 2001; Eizawa 1995; Saaler and Koschmann 2007). On the other hand, interpretations of the war have recently shifted to focus on its Asian dimension, thus reversing the canonical view of the long postwar decades.9 A final example concerns the less immediate past, as historians of the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) have in the last two decades begun to rewrite the history of what has conventionally been known as the era of seclusion (sakoku). While earlier research had stressed the isolated nature of the country and the limited contact with the West, recent scholarship has begun to paint a more complex picture. Instead of interpreting the regulations of cross-border intercourse as a reaction to the influx of Christianity and the threat of European colonialism, historians like Arano Yasunori have placed the ‘system of maritime prohibitions’ (kaikin) within the context of East Asia where limitations on foreign trade and intercourse were typical. Moreover, they have argued that the Shogunal control of tributes and trade needs to be understood as part of a Japanese attempt to construct its own sphere of influence, independent of China (not least as a reaction to the loss of power of the Ming dynasty in 1644 and the ascent of the ‘barbarous’ regime of the Qing). From this perspective, the limited trade with the Dutch in Nagasaki does not appear as the last vestige of relations with Europe, but rather as one part of a larger scheme to entertain tributary relationships in the region – not only with Holland, but also with the Ryûkyû islands and Korea (Arano 1988; 1992–93; Acta Asiatica 1994). The new approaches to the Tokugawa period are a particularly interesting case as they have been used, by nationalist circles, as a springboard for revisionist interpretations of the country’s past. The limited contact with the West, in particular, is no longer deplored in these revisionist accounts, but rather appreciated as an important ingredient of the emergence of a unique – and not derivative – form of Japanese modernity. Traditionally, the politics of seclusion had been interpreted as a severe impediment to modernization and as a tool to preserve the political and social status quo. The period of Sakoku was seen as an outright deviation from the course of world history, and as it impeded the influx of ideas and institutions, in particular from Western Europe, it was taken as an obstacle to development and progress in Japan. To transcend isolation, then, was seen as a precondition for progress and modernization.

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Revisionist historians such as Kawakatsu Heita of Waseda University and the popularizing Nishio Kanji, by contrast, have begun to erode this picture. For them, the leading paradigm is no longer one of Japan catching up with the West, but rather one in which Japan (as an integral part of East Asia) is pitted against the ‘West’. Kawakatsu Heita, for example, formulated his view of the world as an explicit critique of what he considers Eurocentric accounts, a reference to Marxism and to Wallersteinian world systems theory in particular: ‘It is my aim to devise a view of the world which in all respects will rival the dominant image of world history in modern Western society’ (Kawakatsu 1999). Both Kawakatsu and Nishio follow the recent scholarship in Tokugawa history in arguing that economic integration in East Asia went hand in hand with strategies of rigid control of commerce and migration, including the strictly enforced prohibition to leave the country. However, following Nishio, this cannot be interpreted as ‘seclusion’, but rather as a form of conscious withdrawal while keeping up contact and a necessary amount of trade. ‘Some people refer to the phenomena of this period in Japan by the term “closed country” (sakoku), but I prefer to call it the “wisdom of internal focussing” (jiko shûchû no chie). […] Thus, in an epoch of turbulent dynastic changes and internal revolts in Asia, Japan was able to keep a long period of peace, to calmly collect energies for the development of the arts, technology and productivity, and to mature’ (Nishio 1999, 406). Japan in the Edo period focused almost entirely on internal development; the ‘wisdom of internal focusing’ served as an incubator for an Indigenous version of modernity. And here, for Nishio, the world historical significance of the Edo period becomes obvious: while the modernization of the West hinged on expansion, slavery and colonization by force, the Japanese civilization confined itself to internal trade within an inherently peaceful society. This version of a peaceful modernity (only discarded, one surmises, after exposure to Western military threat since the Meiji period) is presented as an alternative path in world history. This is, of course, a nationalist and highly ideological vision of the past. It is not without influence in contemporary Japan, as it has, in recent years, found a considerable following among scholars who aim at a fundamental change in Japanese historiography. The most notable strand is related to the project of propagating a ‘liberalist view of history’ (jiyûshugi shikan) associated mainly with Tokyo University historian Fujioka Nobukatsu. Fujioka aims to replace what he sees as a ‘masochistic view of history’ allegedly forced onto the Japanese people by the American authorities, by a version of the past that allows the

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Japanese to feel pride in their history and culture. A central element in the widely publicized campaign to revise national historiography is the attempt to establish new school books to inculcate the new gospel in the next generation (Fujioka 1996). In spite of trenchant critique by the leftist majority of university historians, the movement found broad public support, also within the political establishment, and it was able to secure ample private funding – even though the project has made only limited institutional advance as the textbooks were adopted by just a tiny minority of school districts. The political and international reverberations of the movement, however, have been substantial. When the textbook was formally admitted for classroom use in 2001 and then again in 2005, this decision elicited hostile responses in the neighbouring Asian countries and led to the violent protests in Beijing and Seoul (Saaler 2005; Kyôkasho ni shinjitsu to jiyû o’ renrakukai 2000). For the purposes of our discussion, however, it is less important to see whether the revisionist interpretations appropriately describe the Japanese past. What is interesting, rather, is to read this construction of a Japanese history in Asia as an intervention in our globalizing present. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, these Japanese revisionists, with broad public resonance, presuppose world history not as a unified process, but rather as divided spatially. The economic and cultural integration in the region thus corresponds with versions of the past in which Japan is seen as a part of East Asia, conspicuously positioned vis-à-vis the West. In this context, the return of the category of ‘civilization’ is one of the most striking features of the new regionalism since the 1990s.10

Conclusion Since the 1990s, and after the dichotomies of the Cold War began to fade, a process of regional integration in East Asia has commenced that also plays out in the field of memory. Driven by memory activists, the media, professional historians and social interest groups, the Japanese past is increasingly situated within a larger framework of East Asia. As the examples above illustrate, this discourse is far from homogeneous, as social actors both on the left and the right of the political spectrum have appropriated the discourse of ‘Asia’ for their particular purposes. This changing perspective is clearly connected to a specific chronology of memory. The emergence of the issue of forced prostitution on the political agenda is linked to a generational logic as for many of the former ‘comfort women’ the mid-1990s represented the last opportunity

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to speak of their personal suffering. The increasing interest in issues of empire, too, can be interpreted as a reaction to the long decades of postwar amnesia. But these temporal dynamics notwithstanding, the currents of geopolitics and the concomitant spatial contexts were even more decisive for the regional shift of memory debates. It is clear that over the last decade, the transnational cooperations and tensions bearing upon the interpretations of the past have multiplied and are increasingly harder to ignore. They have manifested themselves both on the level of memory production, as an increasingly complex set of actors are intervening transnationally in debates that are no longer confined to Japanese voices, and on the level of the content of memory, as the Japanese past is inscribed into a larger framework of East Asian history. To conclude, two dimensions of the regionalization of memory are important to note. Firstly, while the emergence of regionalism needs to be understood as a particular response to globalism, at the same time this does not eliminate the nation as a point of reference. Memory continues to be linked to national concerns, and transnational interaction is frequently complicated – but at times also enhanced – by diverging interests and trajectories. Rather than abolishing the category of the nation altogether, transnational discourses of memory have interacted on different levels, as the global, the regional and the national (and also the local and individual) levels are negotiated and intertwined. Secondly, one should not be led to believe, as is sometimes suggested, that the forms of new regionalism in Japan are just a rehash of the old (colonial) regionalism Japan aspired to in the 1930s. East Asia may be pitted against the ‘West’, but this dichotomy is no longer part of a strategy to ‘overcome modernity’, as was the case during the Second World War (Calichman 2008; Harootunian 2000). Instead, East Asia is championed as a resource for an alternative Japanese/Asian variant of modernity, based on specific cultural traditions and a unique historical trajectory. Remembering ‘Asia’, then, does not imply to go beyond modernity, as radical thinkers in the past had suggested, but rather feeds into a vision, frequently highly essentialist, of multiple modernities.

Notes 1 On regionalism in East Asia, see Pempel (2004), Katzenstein (2005) and Katzenstein and Shiraishi (2006). For an analysis of 1990s-Japan, see also Yoda and Harootunian (2006) and Samuels (2007). 2 For the occupation period, see Dower (1999) and Braw (1991). 3 For comparisons with Germany, see Buruma (1994), Gluck (1991), Conrad (2010), and Kittel (2004).

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4 The philosopher Takeuchi Yoshimi in his Kindai no chôkoku (Tokyo 1983) has made a similar point. 5 On the different terminological approaches to come to terms with the war, see Reynolds (2003). 6 To be sure, a concern for things Asian has never been entirely absent from Japanese debates. See, for example, Ubukata et al. (1966). Before the 1980s, however, these perspectives remained marginal. 7 On the conflictual terrains of memory production between Japan and Korea in particular, see Dudden (2008). 8 The textbook Mirai o hiraku rekishi: Ajia sankoku no kingendaishi, Tôkyô (Kôbunken) was published in 2005 and sold over 70,000 copies in Japan, 30,000 in Korea and 120,000 in China, despite the fact that it is not an officially approved textbook and is therefore not used in schools. 9 See the book series Iwanami kôza Ajia, Taiheiyô sensô, 8 volumes, Tokyo (Iwanami Shoten) 2005–7. 10 The most influential statement is of course Huntington (1996). On the popularity of the concept of civilization in Japan, see Morris-Suzuki (1995).

Bibliography Acta Asiatica (1994) 67, theme issue: Foreign Relations of Tokugawa Japan: Sakoku Reconsidered. Arano, Yasunori (1988), Kinsei Nihon to higashi Ajia (Tokyo: Tôkyô Daigaku Shuppankai). Arano, Yasunori; Ishii, Masatoshi; Murai, Sho¯suke (eds) (1992–3), Ajia no naka no Nihonshi 6 (Tokyo: Tôkyô Daigaku Shuppankai). Arrighi, Giovanni (1994), The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times (New York: Verso). Braw, Monica (1991), The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan (New York: M.E. Sharpe). Buruma, Ian (1994), Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (London: Jonathan Cape). Calichman, Richard F. (ed.) (2008), Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan (New York: Columbia University Press). Ching, Leo (2000), ‘Globalizing the Regional, Regionalizing the Global: Mass Culture and Asianism in the Age of Late Capital’, Public Culture 12, 233–57. Conrad, Sebastian (2010), The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century (Berkeley, CA: California University Press). Dirlik, Arif (2007), Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers). Dower, John W. (1999), Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton). Dudden, Alexis (2008), Troubled Apologies among Japan, Korea, and the United States (New York: Columbia University Press). Eizawa, Kôji (1995), ‘Daitô-A kyôeiken’ no shisô (Tokyo: Kôdansha). Field, Norma (1997), ‘War and Apology: Japan, Asia, the Fiftieth, and After’, Positions 5, 1–50.

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Fogel, Joshua A. (ed.) (2000), The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Fujioka, Nobukatsu (1996), Kyôkasho ga oshienai rekishi (Tokyo: Sankei Shinbunsha). Furuya, Tetsuo (ed.) (1996), Kindai Nihon no Ajia ninshiki (Tokyo: Ryokuin Shobô). Gluck, Carol (1991), ‘The Long Postwar: Japan and Germany in Common and in Contrast’, in: Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer (eds), Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan (Baltimore/MD: Johns Hopkins University Press), 63–77. Gluck, Carol (1993), ‘The Past in the Present’, in: Andrew Gordon (ed.), Postwar Japan as History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 64–95. Gluck, Carol (1996), ‘Das Ende der “Nachkriegszeit”: Japan vor der Jahrtausendwende’, in: Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit (ed.), Überwindung der Moderne? Japan am Ende des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), 57–85. Gluck, Carol (2007), ‘Operations of Memory: “Comfort Women” and the World’, in: Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter (eds), Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 47–77. Harootunian, Harry D. (2000), Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Huntington, Samuel (1996), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster). Iida, Yumiko (2000), ‘Between the Technique of Living an Endless Routine and the Madness of Absolute Degree Zero: Japanese Identity and the Crisis of Modernity in the 1990s’, Positions 8, 423–64. Katzenstein, Peter J. (2005), A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Katzenstein, Peter J. and Shiraishi, Takashi (eds) (2006), Beyond Japan: The Dynamics of East Asian Regionalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Kawakatsu, Heita (1999), ‘Imanishi’s View of the World’, Journal of Japanese Trade & Industry 18/2 (March), 14–18. Kittel, Manfred (2004), Nach Nürnberg und Tokio: ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ in Japan und Westdeutschland 1945 bis 1968 (München: Oldenbourg). Kang, Sang-jung (ed.) (2002), Posuto koroniarizumu (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha). Karatani, Kôjin (1993), ‘The Discursive Space of Modern Japan’, in: Masao Miyoshi and Harry D. Harootunian (eds), Japan in the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 288–315. Kyôkasho ni shinjitsu to jiyû o‘ renrakukai (eds) (2000), Tettei hihan: ‘Kokumin no rekishi’ (Tokyo: Ôtsuki Shoten). Minear, Richard (1995), ‘Nihon no rekishika to sensô: 1945–1965nen’, in: Nakamura Masanori et al. (eds), Sengo Nihon. Senryô to sengo kaikaku, 5: Kako no seisan (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten), 133–56. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa (1995), ‘The Invention and Reinvention of “Japanese Culture”’, Journal of Asian Studies 54, 759–80. Nishio, Kanji (1999), Kokumin no rekishi (Tokyo: Sankei Shinbunsha). Oguma, Eiji (1998), ‘Nihonjin’ no kyôkai (Tokyo: Shin’yôsha). Orr, James (2001), The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press). Pempel, T. J. (ed.) (2004), Remapping East Asia: The Construction of a Region (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).

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Reynolds, David (2003), ‘The Origins of the Two “World Wars”: Historical Discourse and International Politics’, Journal of Contemporary History 38, 29–44. Saaler, Sven (2005), Politics, Memory and Public Opinion: The History Textbook Controversy and Japanese Society (München: Iudicium). Saaler, Sven and Koschmann, J. Victor (eds) (2007), Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders (London: Routledge). Saaler, Sven and Schwentker, Wolfgang (eds) (2008), The Power of Memory in Modern Japan (Folkestone, UK: Global Oriental). Ienaga, Saburô (1968), Taiheiyô sensô (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten). Samuels, Richard J. (2007), Securing Japan: Tokyo’s Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Seraphim, Franziska (1996), ‘Der Zweite Weltkrieg im öffentlichen Gedächtnis Japans: Die Debatte zum fünfzigsten Jahrestag der Kapitulation’, in: Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit (ed.), Überwindung der Moderne? Japan am Ende des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), 25–56. Seraphim, Franziska (2006), War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2006 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Takaoka, Hiroyuki (2002), ‘“Jûgonen sensô”, “sôryokusen”, “teikoku” Nihon’, in: Rekishigaku Kenkyûkai (ed.), Rekishigaku ni okeru hôhôteki tenkai: Gendai rekishigaku no seika to kadai I (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten), 37–55. Tanaka, Yuki (2002), Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation (London: Routledge). Ubukata, Naokichi; Tôyama, Shigeki and Tanaka, Masatoshi (eds) (1966), Rekishizô saikôsei no kadai: Rekishigaku no hôhô to Ajia (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobô). VAWW-NET Japan (ed.) (2000–2), Nihon gunsei doreisei o sabaku: 2000nen josei kokusai senpan hôtei no kiroku, 5 volumes (Tokyo: Ryokufu Shuppan). Yamamuro, Shin’ichi (2001), Shisô kadai to shite no Ajia: Kijiku, rensa, tôki (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten). Yoda, Tomiko and Harootunian, Harry D. (eds) (2006), Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Yonetani, Masafumi (2006), Ajia/Nihon (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten). Yoshimi, Yoshiaki (2000), Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press).


Part IV Global Icons and Cultural Symbols


9 Globalizing Memory in a Divided City: Bruce Lee in Mostar Grace Bolton and Nerina Muzurovic´

We will always be Muslims, Serbs or Croats, but one thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee. —Veselin Gatalo1 Commenting on the Bruce Lee statue in Mostar, in southern BosniaHerzegovina, the Bosnian author and journalist Miljenko Jergovic´ recounts an anecdote about a clerk at a currency exchange office in Zagreb, Croatia ( Jergovic´ 2003). During a transaction, a Bosnian couple experienced a peculiar discriminatory incident. While accepting one Bosnian banknote with the portrait of the Bosnian Muslim poet Mehmedalija ‘Mak’ Dizdar, the clerk refused to handle another banknote, which bore the face of Aleksa Šantic´, a Bosnian Serb poet from Mostar.2 It turned out that the clerk, who had single-handedly refused to handle currency marked by Serb ethno-nationality, was himself a Bosnian Croat who, as Jergovic´ explains, forged his distinct identity around ‘bitter, belligerent, and distorted dispositions’. Jergovic´ comments on this incident: ‘These same people, “our” people fervently believe that Bosnian currency cannot bear the portraits of both a Croat, even if his name were Muslim, Mehmedalija, and a Serb, even if he had a Christian name, Aleksa’. As the pre-war local heroes have lost their ‘exchange value’ by virtue of their incommensurability with post-war universal equivalents, Jergovic´ suggests one possible solution: to adopt global icons as universally commensurable state symbols. Considering the divided state of Mostar’s post-war society, Jergovic´ suggests that the global icon Bruce Lee remain a common universal symbol which everyone should be able to take at face value: ‘That’s why […] for the hundredth time recently, I realize how important it is to have a Bruce Lee statue in Mostar’. 181

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Once home to Bosnian Croats, Muslims, Serbs, Jews, Roma and other communities, Mostar received long-standing praise as one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the former Yugoslavia. This cosmopolitan tradition continued after the Second World War within the changed political framework of Tito’s socialism. Peaceful multicultural coexistence came to an abrupt end with the Bosnian war which followed the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1992.3 Most Mostarians today have only faint memories of how the war began. All agree that the ‘others’ started it. However, when asked to describe the moment when their town ‘died’, the citizens of Mostar unanimously answer: ‘Our town died when the old bridge was destroyed, on 9 November 1993. On that day, the fate of our town was sealed’ (Koschnik and Schneider, 1995, 8 [transl. G.B.]). As a result of severe shelling, which destroyed a significant portion of its urban infrastructure, Mostar was devastated during the war. In Mostar, the war was fought in two distinct phases. During the first phase, which began in early 1992, the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and Serbian paramilitary forces fought the Croatian/Bosniak alliance, resulting in the expulsion of the local population to the western part of the city. During this time, most of the Bosnian Serb population left Mostar. In the second phase, the Croatian Defence Council (HVO), comprising Bosnian Croats and the Croatian army, fought against the Bosnian Muslims throughout 1993. During the armed conflict between the Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims, the non-Croat inhabitants of western Mostar were driven from their homes and fled to the devastated eastern part of the city. This resulted in the complete demographic division of Mostar along religious and ethnic lines: Bosnian Croats in the West, Bosnian Muslims and a few remaining Bosnian Serbs in the East (Hromadžic´ 2008; Vetters 2007). The destruction of the sixteenth-century Old Bridge (‘Stari Most’) by the Croatian paramilitary HVO was the ultimate act which led to the geographic and symbolic segregation of the two communities. This demographic change has shaped Mostar’s post-war identity until the present day. At the political level, the segregation was ‘institutionalized in post-war government’ with the founding of seven municipal districts, consisting of three separate municipal units on each side with their respective Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Muslim majorities, and a small, jointly controlled Central Zone. Until the city’s official political reunification in 2004, Mostar appeared to be the Balkan equivalent of Berlin during the Cold War, divided by a ‘deserted boulevard’ rather than a wall (Gunzburger Makaš 2006, 3). Since then, more and more families have been able to return to their pre-war homes on the ‘other’

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side; nevertheless, West Mostar is mainly inhabited by Bosnian Croats while East Mostar is predominantly inhabited by Bosnian Muslims. Despite the restoration of Stari Most in 2004 as a symbol of hope for the city’s and the country’s reunification and reconciliation, Mostar remains a divided city. The division of Mostar is manifest in the segregation of all institutions of public life. There is two of everything in Mostar: two healthcare, educational, postal and transportation systems, as well as two universities, two theatres, two cultural centres, two television stations, two mobile phone networks, two waste disposal services, two sewerage systems and two football clubs. East and West Mostar are also served by two electricity companies and two separate police forces. To mark their respective spaces, the local authorities painted the street signs in West Mostar with a red background, symbolic of the Croatian national colour, while the original pre-war blue background remains in East Mostar (Gunzburger Makaš 2006, 5). Furthermore, the street names were also changed with reference to appropriate national heroes. As already mentioned, the case of Bosnian Serb poet Aleksa Šantic´ is especially striking. After 1995, his appearance was banned not only from banknotes but also from street signs. To overcome these separatist practices, which turned Mostar into a divided city, a number of projects and initiatives were developed with the aim of reinstating Mostar’s identity as a multicultural city. Several locally initiated post-war projects were undertaken to return a number of symbols, which were banished during the war, to public spaces; these included commemorations of Aleksa Šantic´. This chapter focuses on three cultural projects which aimed at creating new zones of multi-ethnic interaction and communication after the war: the Abraševic´ Youth Center, the United World College and the erecting of a statue of Bruce Lee.

Stari Most O brother, I was born a long time ago, never having left this city, and yet I had seen the world aplenty, for it came all the way here to touch me.4 Considered a key symbol of Mostar’s cosmopolitanism, the Stari Most (cf. Figure 9.1) reflects the city’s heterogeneous, multicultural history. The bridge was constructed during the reign of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Following its completion in 1566, Mostar established itself as an early modern trading centre. As such, the bridge symbolizes diversity, stemming from multicultural interactions dating

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Figure 9.1

Stari Most

back to the sixteenth century. The keepers of the bridge over the River Neretva were known as ‘Mostari’, giving the city its name. The vernacular term ‘stari most’ also emphasizes the bridge as ‘ours’: a locally common site rather than an exclusive designation such as ‘Ottoman’.5 Since the war, the bridge has served as a metaphor for the shared limb of a bifurcated city.6 Its collapse and restoration divided and (symbolically) reunited the two sides. A popular 1990s war song illustrates this process by emphasizing the need to make a downward leap only to ‘re-emerge from the water once again for all the ones who love him’ (‘izronicé stari za one što ga vole’). The song’s imagery draws on the long tradition of intergenerational diving competitions that still take place on the bridge every summer. Following the destruction of Stari Most by the HVO on 9 November 1993, this shared space of multicultural tradition and coexistence collapsed, leading to the emergence of a symbolic and physical separation of the two communities. In a collected volume Mostar ’92-Urbicid, a group of architects from Mostar make a compelling argument that the targeted and systematic destruction of the urban fabric of Mostar was strategically


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aimed at extinguishing the heterogeneous character of its citizens and heritage (Coward 2002). In July 2004, nine years after the Dayton Peace Agreement, the bridge was rebuilt with the aid of UNESCO and the World Bank. It is hoped that the restored bridge will stand as a symbol of reconciliation for the inhabitants of Mostar.

Signs, symbols and memories in Mostar Mostar’s urban identity has dramatically changed since the war in BosniaHerzegovina. The face of the city has been marked by war – many of the buildings are still peppered with bullet holes. In West Mostar, the memorial to Tito’s partisans, one of the unifying symbols of the Yugoslav era, has fallen into a state of disrepair. After the war, the conflict continued on a symbolic level, thus reinforcing the division of the city. It took on the form of an aggressive competition to construct monumental post-war

Figure 9.2 The reconstructed bell tower of the Franciscan Church of Saints Peter and Paul, the Jubilee Cross is in the background

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architecture. By far the most visible construction projects have been religious buildings and monuments. The reconstructed church and bell tower of the Franciscan Church of Saints Peter and Paul (cf. Figure 9.2) was extended after the war to make it more prominent on the city’s skyline. On the landmine-strewn hill of Hum, the Diocese of Mostar erected the 33-metre tall concrete and steel Jubilee Cross. Considered the ‘most contested’ site in Mostar by survivors of the war, the hill still displays traces of destruction which inspire powerful memories. From this strategic military spot, the Bosnian Serb paramilitaries and later the Bosnian Croat militia shelled Mostar, inflicting misery on the lives of its civilians, and destroying Stari Most and the city’s surrounding infrastructure. Given its religious symbolic value, the cross also functions as a political marker akin to a flag hoisted over the ‘conquered territory’ as a sign of victory and power (Gunzburger Makaš 2006). On the other side, many new mosques have been built in Mostar and at least three or four minarets can be seen from any point in the city (cf. Figure 9.3). As the burgeoning proliferation of religious symbols within the geopolitical space in Mostar demonstrates, the previous struggle for territory continues today on a symbolic level (Sells 1996; 2003).

Figure 9.3

Minarets ‘emerging’ from the ruins


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Minarets ‘emerging’ from the ruins Funded by riches accrued from war profiteering and unfolding in a competitive display of nationalist aspirations, Mostar’s reconstruction involves a radical geopolitical revision of the cityscape’s historic fabric, as demonstrated by the new ‘tradition’ of garish post-war monumental architecture. In 2002, the Urban Movement group of artists organized a provocative photographic exhibition entitled ‘Beauties of Reconstruction and Rebuilding – 34 pearls of Mostar’s Post-War Architecture’. The exhibition featured the 34 ‘most showy and spectacular examples of present urban “destruction”’. These recently erected architectural ‘jewels’ of Mostar’s cityscape comprised ‘buildings owned by new tycoons with the necessary kitsch elements, mosques that would make Saudi Arabia jealous, churches with towers the size of rockets’ (Prnjak 2003). In addition, the multicultural historical identity of the city has been destroyed through another practice of ethnic homogenization – that of renaming of the public spaces and institutions to assert each side’s exclusive claim to cultural hegemony. An example of converting a multicultural city into an ethnically divided one is the popular traffic circle, once known simply as the Rondo and now referred to as the Trg Hrvatskih Velikana (‘the Square of Illustrious Croats’). Located on the West side, the circle now contains a new monument honouring the dead soldiers of the Bosnian Croat army, who either defended or destroyed the city, depending on one’s viewpoint. The monument is placed at the site of the former Rondo Café, once a popular meeting point in Mostar. The building next to it, the Dom Kulture, which served as the youth centre for all of Mostar’s youth before the war, has now been renamed the Croatian Cultural Centre (Gunzburger Makaš 2006). The ‘politics of reconstruction’ aim at safeguarding each group’s vested interest in consolidating their ethnic space, thus further reinforcing the division of the city. The ethnic groups are allowed to build cultural and religious institutions as long as these are delimited within the ethnonationally designated poles of the city: eastern, Bosnian Muslim and western, Croatian. Because of the mutual interest in keeping ethnonational distinctions clearly legible in separate, ethnically pure spaces, the jointly controlled and neutral Central Zone of Mostar displays no structures with visible signs of communication between the two ethnic groups. Any construction with exclusionary potential was prohibited in the Central Zone. The city’s administration had to terminate several large-scale building projects in the Central Zone by the city’s Croat community. In 1996, they blocked plans to build a new Catholic Cathedral

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to replace the city’s old cathedral building, and prevented the construction of a Croatian National Theatre in 2002 (Gunzburger Makasˇ 2006; Hromadžic´ 2008).

The Abraševic´ Youth Centre In the midst of the conflict-laden situation in Mostar, a range of cultural activities have developed which aim to construct new conciliatory bridges in attempts to overcome the physical manifestations of division in the city. Named after the Serbian poet Kosta Abraševic´, the Abraševic´ Youth Centre (cf. Figure 9.4) coordinates a wide range of cultural activities. In an interview conducted by the Studienkolleg in April 2007, Sandi Puce, student and youth activist at Abraševic´, explained that there were many uncoordinated youth clubs in Mostar, including a film club and a photography club. We had the idea to create a single institution out of all these different organizations. So we created Abraševic´, a big organization containing all the small ones. This would allow us to save a lot of money and to have more people available for our ideas and programmes. In short, two years ago we founded Abraševic´. (Studienkolleg interview 2007a) The Abraševic´ Youth Centre opened its doors to the public in 2003 and has been organizing a variety of cultural activities such as exhibitions, readings, concerts, plays and film screenings. With these and other events, the Abraševic´ Youth Centre promotes a cosmopolitan spirit which aims to reconnect people across the divided sides of Mostar, in the hope of restoring the old urban spirit of the city. Known by local teenagers simply as ‘Abraševic´’, the Youth Centre is much more than a space for the youth of Mostar; it is a place where prominent international and local authors organize workshops, exhibitions and events, including a recent film festival on human rights. In the interview, Sandi emphasized the popularity of the film screenings at Abraševic´, since there is no cinema in Mostar. When asked to explain this situation, his response underlined the divisive nature of post-war construction in Mostar: I know how much a cinema costs and it doesn’t cost that much. I mean, it doesn’t cost that much in relation to all the buildings being constructed in Mostar. They build giant houses, giant churches and


Figure 9.4

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The Abraševic´ Youth Center

giant mosques. And they don’t just build one mosque, but they build 15 of them, and they don’t just build one church, but 15 churches – just in case. In the meantime, has started a replacement centre for Mostarians who wish to watch films together. Sandi, who is involved in this project, described the conditions of the service: There are two possibilities: either we organize the whole film screening or we rent our equipment to other people. So, if someone wants to screen a movie but lacks the necessary equipment, he might ask us and we will help. In the beginning, Sandi was optimistic about the project, offering technical equipment to people in Mostar and thereby encouraging them to interact with the global film culture. But he experienced serious drawbacks, as many clients were religious communities who used his services for their own purposes: Well, yesterday there was the screening of ISUS in the Croatian Cultural Centre, a kind of church movie […] but we had problems because our

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projectionist didn’t manage to insert the second film reel correctly. So after Jesus had been crucified, the image turned upside down and Jesus came back down from the cross […]. People ran out screaming. So yesterday we had a huge scandal. Our projectionist was accused of ‘sabotage’ by religious people, while the art community saw him as an artist of the avant-garde because he was the first person who managed to vee-jay with a 35 mm projector which didn’t look so good, I mean bad, sorry. That was somehow a sign from God … Enough of this nonsense.

The United World College The United World College (UWC) in Mostar opened its doors on 25 September 2006 as the twelfth United World College. It is housed in the building of the Stara Gimnazija Mostar (Old Mostar Gymnasium). Founded in 1889, the Stara Gimnazija is a symbol of pre-war coexistence and was considered one of the most reputable academic institutions in the country. For the local inhabitants of Mostar, the school also represents a longstanding legacy and a deep-rooted and prestigious tradition. There is at least one person in every family in Mostar who is a graduate of Stara Gimnazija. The former Stara Gimnazija, also known as Gimnazija Aleksa Šantic´ (Aleksa Šantic´ Gymnasium) during the Socialist era, is now located on the ground floor of the building. The renaming of the gymnasium further exemplifies the tendency to refashion the city’s infrastructure according to the present political agendas of the local authorities. Once again, this is another example of yet another attempt at removing the visibility of Aleksa Šantic´ from the public space. Since the 1990s war, each ethnic group in Bosnia has begun to develop a ‘national’ syllabus, particularly in subjects designated by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) as ‘national group’ subjects such as language, geography, literature, music, religion and history (Torsti 2003). The Stara Gimnazija now teaches two separate national secondary school curricula, one for Croat and the other for Bosniak students. Under a ‘two schools under one roof’ policy, a new type of ‘school geography’ has arisen; one which is simultaneously shared and separate. Facilitated by the emerging parallel education in Mostar, the nationalist politics of ethnic homogenization extend as far as to deliberately polarize and segregate the youth (Hromadžic´ 2008). On the first floor of the building, by contrast, the United World College offers an integrated education in English for students age 16–19 within the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP). By constructing and establishing transnational educational programmes, the UWC


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works towards the integration of young people of different ethnicities. As Zana, music teacher at the school explained in an interview with the Studienkolleg in April 2007: It was just wonderful to see that now you have kids from thirty different countries in one place […] automatically, children from Mostar who come from different sides of the city feel more connected when they’re sitting there with someone from France or Israel because there they realize that they are not so different, because they are not. (Studienkolleg interview 2007b)

Bruce Lee On 26 November 2005, the Urban Movement artists’ group from Mostar unveiled a life-size statue of Chinese-American actor and Kung-Fu legend Bruce Lee (cf. Figure 9.5). The statue was erected in Mostar’s central park, Zrinjevac, next to the Stara Gimnazija, as the world’s first Bruce Lee

Figure 9.5

The Bruce Lee statue

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monument (one day before a second one was inaugurated in Hong Kong). The statue was conceived by a writer and an artist, both Mostar natives in their thirties, Veselin Gatalo and Nino Raspudic´. It was realized as part of the project ‘De/construction of Monument’ run under the auspices of the Centre of Contemporary Art in Sarajevo, which critically questions the use and abuse of monuments and symbols in a city by groups that hijack public spaces for national and religious agendas. The divided city has been offered an icon uniquely unrelated to its place and history. Aspiring to define themselves outside the ethnoreligious framework, the artists appeared to be appropriating symbols which were completely alien to Mostar’s history. However, the writer Veselin Gatalo considered this the statue’s particular charm and potency. Gatalo depicts the Kung-Fu hero Bruce Lee as a common figure of identification and integration for both sides, a hero whom the whole community of Mostar could accept. The writer’s vision aimed to transcend the local strife by telling Mostarians a new and different story by choosing a symbol to which no group could take offence or feel threatened by. In his choice of this global icon, he was anxious to elide all controversial topics, explaining in an interview with the Studienkolleg: ‘It’s not a story about a divided town, about concentration camps, about war, about aggression, about defence, it’s a story about us. That’s why [we chose] Bruce Lee.’ (Studienkolleg interview 2007c) The artists dedicated much thought as to how the statue was to be placed. As the statue shows the Kung Fu fighter in a move of attack, it could have been read as an insult to either the Bosniak or the Croat side: If he faces east, they will say: ‘It is a Croat Bruce Lee, threatening eastern Mostar where Muslims live’. If he faces west, they’d say: ‘It’s Muslim Bruce Lee against Croat people’. So, we decided he will face the north! […] Perhaps as ‘Herzegovinian’ Bruce Lee against Sarajevo, Zagreb, Belgrade, Brussels, Washington, etc. (Nino Raspudic´’s comment in Miharˇcic´ 2006) Meanwhile, Gatalo made an impassioned plea for Bruce Lee as a global icon against ethnic division: Bruce Lee is close enough and away enough from us. He’s a guy from the other side of the planet, but we all like him, because he wasn’t


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Serb, Croat, Bosniak, he wasn’t Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, but everybody liked him […] We wanted to show that one part of us, the biggest part of us, has nothing to do with all this war, socialism, capitalism, nationalism, militant anti-fascism, like in Sarajevo for example, that we have so many sub-identities. For example, I’m a man who loves dogs, for example, or I’m a father of a family, I’m a tall man, 1.82m, and I like Bruce Lee, and on the 15th or 16th place I am a guy who belongs to some nation, but everybody forgets it! (Studienkolleg interview 2007c) In spite of the artists’ ingenious considerations, Bruce Lee was not welcomed. In the night following the inauguration of the monument, the statue was damaged by hooligans who broke the fighter’s chain and stole one of his handles. A few citizens of Mostar gathered around the damaged statue the next day to express their outrage at its defacement, exclaiming that this was an ‘atrocity’ and additional proof of ‘Balkan barbarism’ (Studienkolleg interview 2007c). Over the next months, the statue was subjected to continuous attacks. The Urban Movement decided to remove the statue, repair it and re-erect it after the planned renovation of the park. It turned out that the invincible Bruce Lee had to be placed under special protection: Bruce Lee is not there, but he’ll be there in 25 days, when they finish the park, you know. They will put cameras, they will put lights and everything a park must have to be a park, especially in these kind of transitional countries. And nobody can touch Bruce Lee without consequences anymore. (Studienkolleg interview 2007c) In ‘De/construction of Monument’, Nino Raspudic´ explains that the ‘Bruce Lee statue mixes a “high” stylistic register (monuments, grandeur, bronze) with a “low” one (mass-culture, Kung Fu, our childhood heroes) producing a “short circuit of reception” which “deconstructs” the “high” stylistic register and myth-making in an ironic manner, leading to questions such as the following: Who are our heroes? For whom and why do we build monuments? The statue attempts to revalorize the “low” register which evokes ordinary things of everyday life that do not have anything to do with politics and ideologies, and that bring people and nations together instead of separating them’ (Raspudic´). Apart from standing as a symbol of justice and an embodiment of a universal value that transcends ethnic divisions, the creators believed that Bruce Lee is ‘simply loved by all’.

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There is a certain paradox involved in choosing an actor as a symbol of peace and non-aggression whose claim to fame is based on movies filled with fighting, violence and heroic aggression. Gatalo and Raspudic´ play with this paradox when they introduce a fictitious hero to overcome a divisive history. However, their symbolic strategy of de-escalation and integration was challenged. Nino Raspudic´ commented on the defacement of the statue by saying: Only after everything that happened I can say, he is finally accepted in Mostar. Did he also have to become a victim, so people could feel close to him? Maybe that was his destiny. Anyway, they did all they could; that stick was the only vulnerable piece of the statue. The rest was cast in one piece. Anyway, he survived! (Nino Raspudic´’s comment in Miharˇcic´ 2006) In a hyper-politicized space, the battle with symbols is not easily brought to a halt. The paradoxical intervention of introducing Bruce Lee into Mostar created a complex case that highlights the (im)possibility of implanting global icons into a local history.

Postmodern identity as a negotiation of global-local In postmodern societies, questions of identity are negotiated between the local and the global. The construction of identity is conceived in a pluralistic way to open up new possibilities for identification. The individuals no longer build their cultural identities exclusively within their local milieus, but have the possibility to choose between different identities comprised of different values and lifestyles. However, in the nationalist time zone of post-war Mostar, identities are formed according to the norms of homogenous ethnicities, which do not allow for multiple forms of belonging. Gatalo and Raspudic´ reintroduced the global culture that was popular in the 1970s and 1980s in the former Yugoslavia. Their emphasis on the Chinese-American actor Bruce Lee as a unifying and universal symbol was perceived as a threat to the new ethnic identity founded on the strong beliefs of exclusive belonging. One might argue that it is precisely in response to the growing relativization of ethnicity as a legitimate source of identity in the new, post-1990s wave of globalization that groups feel an urge to assert their ethnic belonging and reaffirm their threatened national identity by recourse to the ‘grand narrative’ of ethnic purity.


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Bruce Lee as a countermonument A monument usually has a diachronic function. It protects something from being forgotten, incorporates the past into the future and instils a specific value to future generations. By contrast, the underlying message of the Bruce Lee statue in this case is synchronic. It carries the message of ‘here and now’; that is to say, it is supposed to serve as the lowest cultural common denominator of the divided ethnic groups. The Bruce Lee statue, therefore, is designed as a countermonument with the function to suspend historical memory. Bruce Lee is a phantasma, a childhood fantasy and nostalgic childhood memory. As Gatalo put it, ‘[Bruce Lee] is like a child’s dream about a better world with more justice’ and a ‘hero from childhood of every one of us’ (Prnjak 2003; Siegel 2005). He was the idol of his generation who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. Even Emir Kusturica, one of the most successful and controversial contemporary Bosnian filmmakers, has referred to Bruce Lee as a conciliatory and therapeutic fairy tale figure: ‘The cinema is a fairy tale … I use the cinema as a therapeutic tool in order to help people feel better. My dream is to reconcile Bruce Lee and Ingmar Bergman’ (Keller 2008 [transl. N.M.]). The traumatized generation of the artists restored a ‘fairy tale’ hero of their youth as an antidote against a world that has produced too much destructive history. The case of Bruce Lee in Mostar counters the nationalist function of a statue as an embodiment of heroic form of action. It seems to say, ‘If you need heroic action, avail yourself of images from the cinema’. The nationalistic register rests on an appeal to sacrifice, be it heroic or intellectual, to willingly shed blood for one’s territory, nation and religion. Bruce Lee was also a fighter, but one who fought evil and injustice in a film world, a muscular superman who does not have to stand the reality test and is uncontaminated with the gore of history. Architects have reconstructed the Stari Most, but new divisive religious symbols have re-emerged. There are remarkable initiatives which are developing new civic spaces, such as the Abraševic´ Youth Centre with its cinema, the United World College, and the Bruce Lee monument in Zrinjevac central park. In the meantime, Bruce Lee, formerly a global Kung Fu legend, has also become a local Mostar legend. He lives in discourse and memory rather than in the tangible material shape of a monument. His short presence and long-term absence is evoked by the empty pedestal that remains as a reminder of the Bruce Lee-Mostar-legend in Zrinjevac (cf. Figure 9.6). The absent monument poignantly symbolizes something that has not yet been restored in Mostar: a minimum of communal consensus.

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Figure 9.6

The Bruce Lee monument

Notes This text is the product of European cooperation. It is based on a 2007 research project entitled ‘Film: New Perspectives for Mostar?’ within the framework of the Studienkolleg zu Berlin (an initiative of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and the Hertie Foundation). Grace Bolton, Ivonne Dippmann, Kerstin Germer, David Link, Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann and Sara-Sumie Yang travelled to Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina in March 2007 to conduct fieldwork and interviews, which resulted in the creation of a documentary film (… A Story about Us, 2007) and a photographic exhibition at the Berlin Academy of Science. As representative author from the Studienkolleg group, Grace Bolton wishes to acknowledge the individual contribution of each member to the collective project. Nerina Muzurovic´, a graduate student from the University of Chicago, became a co-author of this chapter in the process of this book’s publication. With her Bosnian background, she introduces an inside view, local knowledge and a special concern with narratives relating to political violence, trauma and memory. 1 The quote is taken from the speech delivered by Veselin Gatalo, a local writer and president of the organization Urban Movement of Mostar, during the unveiling of the Bruce Lee statue in Mostar in November 2005. 2 Aleksa Šantic´ was celebrated as a cultural icon of Mostar during Yugoslav Socialism and his song about a Muslim woman, Emina from Mostar, became a cultural trademark of the city. 3 According to the official ethnic breakdown from the Yugoslav Population Reference Bureau in 1991, the general population in Mostar consisted of 34.4 per cent Muslims, 34 per cent Croats, 18.8 per cent Serbs, 11.2 per cent


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Yugoslavs and 2.5 per cent ‘others’ (Federalni Zavod za Statistiku 1991). In 2006, there was no specified census report (Vetters 2007, 189), but the Croat share of the city’s population had by 1998 increased to around 45 per cent from 34 per cent before the war (ICMPD/RIC 1998); in 2002, it was estimated to have increased to 60 per cent. The given population estimate for Mostar was 111,271 persons (Federalni Zavod za Statistiku 2006). The demographic decline of the Muslim population is a consequence of the way the Bosnian War played out in Mostar (Hromadžic´ 2008, 347). 4 The verses are taken from a popular 1990s war song entitled Stari written by the Bosnian songwriter Zlatan Fazlic´ Fazla about the destruction of the Stari Most. 5 Bosnian Muslims were officially recognized as a constituent ethno-nationality, the people (‘narod’) of Socialist Yugoslavia. The religious identity is, therefore, the basis of the distinct ethno-national claims. The nationalist discourses often extend this Muslimness to include all non-Bosnian Muslims, often with derogatory meaning, hence the conflation of Bosnian Muslims with Turks or Ottomans. 6 The bridge is a contested symbol in Bosnian cultural memory. Alongside the image of the Stari Most in Mostar as a symbol of reconciliation and multiculturalism, there is another Bosnian bridge that is charged with historical memories. ‘The bridge on the Drina’ has been monumentalized by Ivo Andric´, the Bosnian Nobel laureate, as a quintessential traumatic symbol. Andric´’s literature, in turn, was instrumentalized by Serbian Royalists during the Second World War and Serb nationalists in the 1990s for the purposes of creating myths of the distant past under the Ottoman rule and transposing the cruelty associated with the Ottomans into their present contexts to serve new nationalist ambitions. During the war in the 1990s, the bridge in Višegrad was re-appropriated once again as a physical site of the most horrific re-enactment of brutal violence. The violence was committed by Serbs in the name of retributive justice for past crimes against the distant Ottoman enemies, conflating them with Bosnian Muslims.

Bibliography Bolton, Grace, Dippmann, Ivonne, Germer, Kerstin, Grosse-Wiesmann, Charlotte, Link, David and Yang, Sara-Sumie (2008), ‘Film – Neue Perspektiven Für Mostar?’, in: Studienkolleg zu Berlin (ed.), Projekt Junges Europa 4 (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag). Coward, Martin (2002), ‘Community as Heterogeneous Ensemble: Mostar and Multiculturalism’, Alternatives 27/1, 29–66. Federalni Zavod za Statistiku [Federal Office of Statistics] (1991), Stanovništvo Prema Opcínama i Mjesnim Zajednicama [Populations of Bosnia-Herzegovina according to Municipalities] (Sarajevo: Federalni Zavod za Statistiku). Federalni Zavod za Statistiku [Federal Office of Statistics] (2006), HercegovacˇkoNeretvanski Kanton u Brojkama [Hercegovacˇko-Neretvanski Canton in Numbers] (Sarajevo: Federalni Zavod za Statistiku). Gunzburger Makaš, Emily (2006), ‘Competing Visions of Mostar’s Postwar Identity’. Unpublished paper delivered at Urban Europe in Comparative Perspective: European Association for Urban History 8th International Conference, Stockholm, Sweden.

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Hromadžic´, Azra (2008), ‘Discourses of Integration and Practices of Reunification at the Mostar Gymnasium, Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Comparative Education Review 52/4, 541–63. ICMPD/RIC (International Centre for Migration Policy Development/Repatriation Information Center) (1998), Municipality Information Fact Sheet: The City of Mostar (Central Zone) (Sarajevo: International Center for Migration Policy Development). Jergovic´, Miljenko (2003), ‘Bruce Lee na KM’, Dani, 7 November [Bruce Lee on the KM, quotations translated by Nerina Muzarovic´]. Keller, Florian (2008), ‘Die Serben sind schlau und schwer zu kontrollieren’ [The Serbs are clever and difficult to control] Tages Anzeiger, 8 May. Koschnik, Hans and Schneider, Jens (1995), Brücke über die Neretva. Der Wiederaufbau von Mostar (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag). Miharˇcic´, Ozren (2006), Documentary: ‘U zmajevom Gnjezdu’ [Enter the Dragon] Bosnia-Herzegovina (52 minutes). Prnjak, Hrvoje (2003), ‘We are All Bruce Lee’, Feral Tribune, 4 September. Translated by Anes Alic´. Raspudic´, Nino: ‘De/construction of Monument’, Bosnia-Herzegovina, http:// www.projekt-relations.de/en/explore/deconstruction/index.php (last visited 4 December 2009). Sells, Michael (1996), The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Sells, Michael (2003), ‘Crosses of Blood: Sacred Space, Religion, and Violence in Bosnia-Hercegovina’, Sociology of Religion 64/3, 309–31. Siegel, Robert (2005), ‘Bosnian City’s Unique Statue Choice: Bruce Lee’, transcript: National Public Radio, 13 September. Studienkolleg interview (2007a) with Sandi Puce, student and youth activist at the Abraševic´ Youth Center in Mostar, 3 April 2007. Studienkolleg interview (2007b) with Zana Mesihovic´, Music Teacher at United World College in Mostar, 1 April 2007. Studienkolleg interview (2007c) with Veselin Gatalo in Mostar, 3 April 2007. Torsti, Pilvi (2003), Divergent Stories, Convergent Attitudes: A Study on the Presence of History, History Textbooks and the Thinking of Youth in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina (Denmark: Kustannus Oy Taifuuni). Vetters, Larissa (2007), ‘The Power of Administrative Categories: Emerging Notions of Citizenship in the Divided City of Mostar’, Ethnopolitics 6/2, 187–209.

Acknowledgements Photographs: Abraševic´, The Franciscan Church of Saints Peter and Paul and Cross, Empty Pedestal: Mostar Project Group, Studienkolleg zu Berlin 2007 Stari Most, Minaret Image: Adin Šadic´ (with kind permission) Bruce Lee on Pedestal: Magazine Dani (with kind permission) Interviews: Interview with Sandi, Zana and Veselin extracts are taken from the documentary film A Story About Us (2007) by the Studienkolleg Mostar Group

10 ‘Fragments of Reminiscence’: Popular Music as a Carrier of Global Memory Ana Sobral

As [individuals] face an erasure of inherited cultural memories and the need to reconcile and synthesize fragments of reminiscence with new experiences according to shifting contexts, memory may serve them as ‘an atlas of the difficult world’. —Kunow and Raussert 2008, 10

Introduction During my stay at a German university as an exchange student, the music by the Franco-Spanish nomadic artist Manu Chao hit the radio waves, receiving a willing listenership throughout our international student residence. Manu Chao’s album Clandestino (1998) was a unique blend of musical styles (reggae, salsa, rumba and rap) and languages (Spanish, French, Brazilian-Portuguese and English) which suited our cosmopolitan atmosphere. It also featured samples from traditional Latin-American songs, Brazilian and Soviet radio, Spanish TV, Jamaican dub sessions and the Zapatista manifesto. Reminiscent of a frantic trip across a world in disarray, the mood of Clandestino was at once ironic and melancholic. The lyrics dealt with the experiences of illegal immigrants in Western Europe and North America, and they presented the singer himself as a restless wanderer unable to commit himself to one place. This medley of sounds and ideas provided the fitting soundtrack for my own transnational, polyglot and somewhat confused identity. Having grown up between post-colonial Angola, Yugoslavia and Portugal, I had the impression that I belonged everywhere and nowhere. Like Manu Chao’s song ‘Desaparecido’ (the vanished), I was ‘lost in the twentieth century, moving towards the twenty-first’. Listening to Clandestino helped me realize 199

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Popular Music as a Carrier of Global Memory

that my own placelessness was not so exceptional. The album was a testimony to the millions of individuals traversing borders, who refused to allow themselves to be contained with control posts and immigration laws. The commercial success of Clandestino (more than three million copies were sold worldwide) indicated that many other people identified with its multicultural stance. Manu Chao’s work bears all the hallmarks of a new subgenre of popular music which since the late 1990s has achieved considerable cultural influence in the Western world and which could be termed ‘global music’.1 It is based on a blend of popular genres such as rock, rap and reggae with traditional rhythms and sounds from all over the world. Its practitioners are predominantly immigrants, refugees or ethnic and racial minorities in the West. Accordingly, their songs largely deal with their experiences of being uprooted and with their new identity as global citizens. A look at Manu Chao’s profile page on MySpace (the leading Internet platform for pop musicians) reveals the current scope of global music: the bands featured at the top of the list of his many ‘friends’ (that is, links to other MySpace profiles) include, among others, the London-based Asian Dub Foundation (second-generation Indian immigrants), the New York-based Gogol Bordello (multi-ethnic with Eastern European Gypsy influences) and the New York and Paris-based Keziah Jones (Nigerian immigrant). Clicking on their MySpace links produces another long strain of connections to global musicians. In spite of its ‘grass-roots’ appearance, this genre is currently enjoying enormous attention: several million people have visited the above-mentioned MySpace pages; global musicians regularly perform before large crowds at music festivals worldwide; and their songs are featured on the soundtracks of various films, documentaries and video games. Their work has also been distinguished with major awards.2 The wide appeal of this type of music is indicative of an emerging global consciousness. Negotiating local with global experiences and tradition with innovation, global music projects new collective identities that are not bound to one nation, ethnicity or culture. During this process, cultural memory, one of the pillars of collective identity, also undergoes significant changes. Focusing on three quite distinct examples of global music – Asian Dub Foundation (ADF), Gogol Bordello and the American Chassidic-Jewish reggae singer Matisyahu – the following analysis explores the connections of this genre to globalization and the ways in which it contributes to the development of global memory.

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The sounds of globalization In most general terms, globalization is synonymous with the growing mobility of people, goods, information and cultural products across frontiers. Ulrich Beck coined the expression ‘second modernity’ to refer to the consequences of these transformations on people’s sense of belonging (Beck 2000). According to Beck, globalization challenges our traditional attachment to a stable place. Whether through migration, daily commuting or the use of electronic media, many people now lead a ‘nomadic’ life (in the literal or the figurative sense) and are permanently exposed to transnational influences. This undermines the idea of nation states as self-enclosed entities with distinct cultures, which was the defining feature of first modernity. Globalization implies a high degree of interdependence: major events and crises affect everyone, irrespective of where on the planet they actually take place, thus contributing to our awareness of a common fate (Giddens 1999, 3; Beck 2000, 41). At the same time, the spread of predominantly Western consumer products and tastes across the world has led critics to denounce the suppression of local identities and cultural distinctiveness in favour of Americanstyle consumerism and mass entertainments (Barber 1995). One reaction to this trend has been the reinforcement of local loyalties and parochial identities, most visible in the rise of religious fundamentalism and separatist nationalist movements. These two opposing poles of cultural convergence and re-territorialization constitute the extremes of globalization, yet they are complemented by a third aspect that neither denies differences nor eschews the fusion of cultures. To understand this specific position, it is useful to apply Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ (Bhabha 1994), which focuses on the experiences of minorities and defends the right of individuals and cultures to retain their ‘difference’. However, rather than preserving a specific cultural trait or tradition in its original form, vernacular cosmopolitanism relies on hybridity; that is, a remaking of cultural identities by bringing together elements from the ‘diasporic’ and the ‘hegemonic’ cultures. This is the attitude adopted by global musicians: while they promote the distinctive musical features of their countries and cultures of origin, their work also serves as a bridge between cultures, both within their (new) nation and across borders. Bhabha’s observations are valuable insofar as they illustrate how transnational artists attempt to articulate their ‘in-between’ identity, where they belong neither to the country or the culture of origin, nor to their new location. Nevertheless,

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the notion that vernacular cosmopolitanism constitutes a basic opposition to a hegemonic culture should be regarded with caution. Even though many global musicians adopt a vocabulary of resistance, they are embedded in the very commercial structure that they supposedly question. The marketing of rebellious styles, the very engine of Western popular culture, makes the distinction between ‘genuine’ and ‘commercial’ art difficult to sustain.3 This highlights one of the main paradoxes of global music: while it essentially thrives on the globalization of culture and is in fact a predominantly Western(ized) product consumed by Western youth,4 it is also the most prominent genre in pop music which addresses the problems and challenges set off by globalization. In order to emphasize their subcultural status, global musicians adopt popular music styles traditionally associated with protest and rebellion. This emphasizes the importance of cultural conventions for the performance and reception of music (Frith 1998; Eckstein 2008, 48). Each musical style is embedded in a larger socio-cultural context that conveys certain meanings; for example, even without listening to the words, people tend to link folk with sincerity, punk with anarchism, reggae with emancipation, and so on. By defining their sound as ‘Asian Jungle Punk’ (ADF), ‘Chassidic Reggae and Hip-Hop’ (Matisyahu) or ‘Gypsy Punk’ (Gogol Bordello), these performers feed on specific genre conventions in order to communicate their world view. Additionally, the ‘right to difference’ of minorities is firmly articulated in the lyrics of global musicians. Lyrics have occupied a central role in popular music since (at least) the influence of rock and roll on the politicization of youth in the 1960s. This is evident from the opening page of Gogol Bordello’s official website, which introduces the band as follows: ‘Troubadours are coming, Troubadours are here, Their word is fire, Their sound is a spear’ (Gogol Bordello). This evocation of a major figure of Western traditional literature and music challenges the current separation of (written) poetry from (performed) lyrics.5 Indeed, many global musicians define themselves – and are acknowledged by their fans – as poets, preachers, teachers, prophets and shamans. On the fan forum of Matisyahu’s official website, several people mention the artist’s religiously charged lyrics as a source of spiritual illumination, even if they are not Jewish. Matisyahu himself defines his work as ‘conscious music’ that should help people of all faiths to achieve ‘more depth and understanding’ (Wentworth). Similarly, the adoption of academic titles by ADF’s vocalist, ‘Master’ D, and by the bass-player, ‘Dr’ Das, illustrate the educational aims of the band. Identifying themselves as ‘teachers’, ADF draw on the ‘fun’ associated with listening to music in order to inspire their audience to ‘[think]

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about the world’ (Guardian 2003). This blurring of boundaries between entertainment and raising consciousness has become a central aspect of modern popular culture. Global musicians reclaim the traditional function of songs as the dominant means of expressing communal values and collective identities. While this is motivated by their desire to build a transnational community of fans, it is only made possible by the rise of global media. The changing character of musical performance and music technology also has significant implications for the transmission of cultural memories and it constitutes an essential precondition for the emergence of global memory.

Music, memory and the impact of global media In oral cultures, singing is one of the leading forms of preserving and transmitting information about a community’s collective past, its heroes and its myths. The combination of relatively short rhymes, alliterations, rhythm and melody enhances the singer’s mnemonic capacity, while also providing an engaging performance that appeals to both the listener’s emotions and their intellect. This interactive process is not only based on the presence of singer and listeners within a limited space, but also on the ritual repetition of a limited repertoire shared by both parties. By contrast, in literate cultures, the storage of knowledge and information was relegated chiefly to texts, as these can transcend the space and time in which they are produced, thus reaching a potentially infinite number of individuals. The advent of writing was crucial for the formation of states, which require the cohesion and control of large populations (Assmann and Assmann 1983). The monopoly of writing and later print culture over the storage, transmission and assimilation of cultural memory was only challenged in the twentieth century. Increasingly sophisticated recording equipment made it possible not only to preserve and carry the actual musical sounds (as opposed to the mere musical notation) across space and time, but to also eventually quote and modify (via sampling and remixing) a potentially endless number of songs, melodies and rhythms. Music culture began to function as a ‘memory engine’ (Zuberi 2001). Moreover, the advent of electronic media such as radio, television and lately the Internet has made it possible to spread music instantly to different geographic areas. The detachment and abstraction implied in the act of reading are thus superseded by the immediate (emotional and intellectual) impact of sounds and images. In this context, Walter Ong noted that the electronic media have led to the development of a ‘secondary orality’ (Ong 1988) which shares a number

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of essential features with traditional oral cultures: the direct interaction between addressers and addressees, the concentration on the here and now, the promotion of a sense of community. As a multimedia phenomenon, global music thrives in this environment. Although music albums and live performances are still central, the electronic interaction between performers and audiences has become an indispensable aspect of music culture. In fact, the music itself is part of a larger product-package that includes video-clips and films, interviews, fashion accessories and assorted writings (from lyrics to social commentary).6 Apart from consuming their products online, fans become ‘friends’ with their favourite bands on MySpace or Facebook and they discuss songs, lyrics, concerts and gossip on diverse forums. On YouTube, fan-made music videos and concert footage compete with the bands’ official videos. The notion that consumers actually generate meaning by the way they relate to specific cultural products (Fiske 1989) is visibly enhanced by the Internet. The frequent inclusion of comment sections produces spontaneous discussions that reveal the direct impact of events and ideas on the viewers: an interview with Eugene Hütz (the RomaUkrainian lead singer of Gogol Bordello) posted on YouTube has inspired fans to compare their knowledge on anarcho-syndicalism (YouTube 1), while an episode of the documentary series Music of Resistance about ADF’s efforts to combat racism in Britain has sparked an aggressive confrontation between viewers that is full of racist undertones, thus confirming the urgency of the documentary’s message (YouTube 2). As the comment sections show, the staging of texts in a mediatized culture takes on a variety of shapes that transcend the conventions of print culture. A case in point is the use of printed words in music videos such as Matisyahu’s ‘King Without a Crown’ and ADF’s ‘Fortress Europe’, where snippets from the lyrics are projected in large letters on screens behind the performers, closely resembling slogans on a wall. The musicians can also address the fans ‘directly’ by writing about their political activism, as ADF do on their official website, or by keeping a blog while on tour, as, for example, Matisyahu does. The impression that the performers are sharing their personal views and even their personal lives with the audiences amplifies the sense of communion characteristic of pop music (Reinfandt 2003, 278). The widespread use of expressions such as homepage and chatroom, community of fans and hyperlinks to friends highlights the tendency to translate virtual web-based connections into more familiar (and cosier) notions of space and belonging. This brings us back to the relationship between secondary orality and cultural memory. The de-territorialization of contacts via global media

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facilitates a shared consciousness among people, independent of their actual location (Levy and Sznaider 2005; Stepnisky 2005). This means that a specific group’s collective past and identity markers can take the information highway and influence other individuals and cultures. Instead of the glow of a fire ring, people now gather virtually around the glare of their computer screens or factually before the bright lights of a concert stage and absorb cultural elements that may have little or no relation to their own background and origins: dressed in traditional Jewish attire, Matisyahu translates his faith into a vocabulary of hope and struggle accessible to a non-religious audience; ADF evoke the Naxalite resistance movements in rural India as a symbol of emancipation; Eugene Hütz promotes Eastern European culture by reading passages from Nikolai Gogol’s novel Taras Bulba during concerts. This impetus of the performers to celebrate their roots combined with the simultaneous desire to reach out to a global audience raises some fundamental questions. What role does memory actually play when national and cultural markers are rapidly shifting? What sort of remembering processes are set off by pop songs? And to what extent can the specific cultural memories of a group be globally shared? To answer these questions, this chapter now turns to the analysis of three representative song lyrics that deal specifically with the topic of memory.

The role of memory in the lyrics of global music Based on their immigrant background and their membership to a minority group, ADF, Matisyahu and Gogol Bordello project different notions of belonging that challenge the ‘imagined community’ of the nation (Anderson 1983). The exact aspects of the nation that are problematized depend on the origins, experiences and outlook of the musicians. The self-definition of ADF as teachers, of Matisyahu as a spiritual guide and of Gogol Bordello as troubadours stresses their distinct aims. Robert Baumann’s concept of ‘keying’ (Baumann 1977) is useful here to emphasize the performative character of song lyrics. Examining verbal art in oral cultures, Baumann noted that performances rely on the choice of a specific vocabulary, tone and structure which are familiar to the audience, thus reinforcing or expanding meanings that are merely suggested by the text. The following analysis therefore explores the connections between the musicians’ background and the keying of their lyrics, in order to examine how this relates to and influences the treatment of memory in contemporary songs.

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‘Memory War’: The Empire raps back From the band’s inception in 1993, ADF have presented themselves as the ‘consciousness of the nation’ of Great Britain, advancing issues that are either ignored or misreported by the mainstream media.7 This reflects two important aspects of ADF’s music, namely that it is intended as a form of socio-political commentary and that it emphasizes the British aspect of the members’ mixed nationality. While references to India’s history abound in ADF’s lyrics, they are essentially a reminder of the colonial past and of its reverberations in contemporary Great Britain. This comes clearly across in ‘Memory War’, which was released on ADF’s third album, Community Music (2000). Named after the community project in East London that brought them together, the title of the album is also a celebration of the power of ADF’s music to unite people of different backgrounds. In line with the band’s previous work, the songs in Community Music criticize Britain’s treatment of ethnic minorities and the West’s exploitation of developing countries, while also conveying a sense of imminent crisis due to the corrupt practices of global capitalism.

Figure 10.1

Asian Dub Foundation in Concert

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An edgy and revolted atmosphere is conveyed by ADF’s characteristic ‘in-your-face’ musical energy, mixing jungle breakbeats, electric guitar riffs, a deep bass line reminiscent of Jamaican dub and a vigorous rapping style. One of the most militant songs in the album, ‘Memory War’ emphasizes the importance of historical consciousness for the self-preservation of minorities. These are the lyrics: Who controls the past controls the present And who controls the present controls the future The battle for the past is for the future Must be the winners of the memory war Smash reach out and then grab the flower At the end of the day their defeat will be for sure (2x) Have you inside your memory the scene of the crime If you don’t have a clue then you’re running out a time Struggle continues while di sunshine The past and the truth two of them you have to combine Because books dem a burnt and documents are shredded Cover ups are covered up in the name of the law Presidents and royalty caught red handed And you won’t know about it for fifty years or more [Chorus:] Come pay attention to the re-educator The battle for the past is now the battle for the future Fire for the messengers of this fake nostalgia Soon come judgement day (2x) Who controls the past controls the present And who controls the present controls the future The history they teach is the voice of the victor You need to look again you need to have a propaganda! If truth is your price then come join the bounty hunters Because truth make you the enemy of all these liars Because books dem a burnt and documents are shredded… (and so on) [Chorus]8 Before dealing with the lyrics, it is necessary to note two important aspects. In typical post-colonial fashion, ADF subvert ‘proper’ English in

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order to create a distinctive voice for the minorities represented in the song. The proximity of the vocalist’s accent to Jamaican Patois automatically places the band within the conventions of reggae culture, while also highlighting the influence of this genre on many British-Asians who grew up in communities with Caribbean immigrants. The second aspect which should be considered is the unabashed propagandistic style of the song’s lyrics, culminating in one-dimensional lines such as ‘Because truth make you the enemy of all these liars’. While this may reduce the aesthetic pleasure of the text, it stresses the political aims of ADF. In the context of its activism against demagogic racist groups such as the British Nationalist Party, the band has opted for blunt didacticism (Zuberi 2001, 219; Eckstein 2008, 263). These lyrics transform the song into a political manifesto and create a counter-memory that challenges the official channels of cultural memory and subverts the self-image of the nation. As a political tool of the oppressed, counter-memory is a form of delegitimizing the dominant power structure (Assmann 1999, 139). In ‘Memory War’ the process of delegitimization occurs in three steps. First, the lyrics identify power with manipulation and corruption. The opening verses of the song, which are delivered as a shout, are an adaptation of a slogan from George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984. The reference to 1984 sets off a series of associations – totalitarianism, thoughtcontrol, torture – that amplify the oppressive atmosphere of ‘Memory War’. Quotation and allusion are in fact the chief rhetoric devices in song lyrics, because they prompt the listener to supplement the meaning of the text with his or her own cultural baggage. This highlights a major aspect of the songs analysed here: the lyrics collect the flotsam of dispersed cultural references and generate with this material their own popular memory. ADF’s decision to quote 1984, one of the most famous British novels, firmly places ‘Memory War’ within the cultural context of the British Empire. The core of the song is a ‘crime’ of the past which the ruling elite wishes to ban from the nation’s collective memory. Considering ADF’s background, it is fair to assume that this is a reference to colonialism, more specifically to the plundering of India during British rule. The contribution of these acts to the wealth of Great Britain is too often ‘forgotten’ when immigrants from ex-colonies are accused of unjustly profiting from the prosperity of the West. In a second step of delegitimization, the singer deploys a martial vocabulary (‘battle’, ‘smash’, ‘defeat’) and the inversion of a number of dominant notions: the heroes of history books are exposed as tyrants, defiant ‘propaganda’ becomes a form of raising consciousness, and the truth itself comes across as a sneaking criminal chased by ‘bounty hunters’. ‘Memory

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War’ thus borrows counter-discursive strategies typical of post-colonial literature (Ashcroft et al. 1989) in order to show how language itself has been (mis)used to perpetuate the colonial power relations. Finally, the song’s chorus resorts to apocalyptic language in order to announce the imminent victory of the system’s opponents. The predominance of Biblical imagery in the chorus seems quite unexpected in a song by ‘progressive’ British-Asian youths. One possible reason for this paradoxical reference is the historical appeal of revolutionary eschatology.9 Apocalyptic visions are as much concerned with the establishment of God’s Kingdom on Earth as they are with the desire of individuals and groups to overthrow an oppressive situation. This is precisely the message contained in the chorus of ‘Memory War’: brought back to the surface, the suppressed and denied past can guarantee a different future.10 Here, the Biblical references are clearly meant to be interpreted in a secular political way. The second argument brings us back to the mixed nationality of ADF’s members. As the opening song of Community Music announces, ADF see themselves as the face and voice of the ‘Real Great Britain’. Rather than quoting Indian novels and resorting to symbols of Indian religion, they have drawn on the archives of Western culture, because this is fundamentally their cultural heritage, too. Indeed, just as ADF acknowledge that British-Asian youngsters hardly listen to Indian music, it is quite likely that they are more familiar with the themes of the major Western religions directly or indirectly quoted in so many Western products, including popular music. In short, the message of ‘Memory War’ is clearly aimed at British audiences, or at most at Western European nations with a similar history of colonial domination. Proudly embracing their role as radical re-educators, ADF announce that it is time to readjust the practices of remembering to the reality of a multicultural Great Britain (and Europe at large) in which notions of racial difference and cultural dominance inherited from the colonial past no longer apply. Exactly how this information is absorbed by the listener depends very much on her or his own cultural background. It is here that the concept of keying comes into play. ‘Memory War’ draws on two major references in the Western canon answering a vision of total oppression with a vision of total liberation. This canon might be only partially (if at all) shared by a global audience. However, the predominance of forceful contrasts and militant language may appeal to socially marginalized individuals anywhere in the world. The message of ‘Memory War’ is thus potentially applicable to different socio-political and cultural contexts.

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‘Jerusalem’: Rebuilding the Temple The use of Biblical language for political aims was made famous by two interconnected post-war musical forms: the African-American gospels of the 1950s and the Jamaican roots-reggae of the 1970s (which drew inspiration from the Civil Rights movement in the US). The latter is of particular interest here because of the great influence of reggae on global music. Representing the local religion of Rastafarianism, rootsreggae singers appropriated the Old Testament to narrate the history of enslavement and deportation of Africans to the West Indies. This illustrates the need of a group or community to translate its experiences and reminiscences into narratives that outlive single individuals.11 The importance of memory for the sustenance of a persecuted people is the main theme of one of Matisyahu’s most famous songs, ‘Jerusalem’ (2006). Matisyahu, who grew up in an American liberal Jewish family and adopted orthodox Judaism at the age of 22, provides a remarkable example of the influence of popular music as a ‘memory engine’: he has often stated that the references to Zionism in reggae songs opened him up spiritually to ‘questioning and searching’ as a teenager.12 Consequently, Matisyahu has completed the circle of cross-cultural influence between Rastafarians and Jews by adopting roots-reggae in order to promote his own cultural heritage.

Figure 10.2

Matisyahu in Concert

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In accordance with his self-definition as a spiritual guide, Matisyahu applies Biblical themes to current issues. His second studio album, Youth (2006), contains a blend of mysticism and oblique social criticism: describing life as a series of challenges and suggesting that the modern world is in crisis, Matisyahu presents faith as a weapon. ‘Jerusalem’, which deals with the struggle of the Jewish people to retain their identity, emerges as one of the most political songs in the album. These are the lyrics: [Chorus:] Jerusalem, if I forget you, Fire’s not gonna come from my tongue. Jerusalem, if I forget you, Let me right hand forget what it’s supposed to do. In the ancient days We will return with no delay Picking up the bounty And the spoils on our way We’ve been travelling from state to state And they don’t understand what they say 3,000 years with no place to be And they want me to give up my milk and honey Don’t you see it’s not about the land or the sea Not a country but the dwelling of his majesty [Chorus] Rebuild the Temple and the crown of glory Years gone by, about 60 Burned in the oven in this century And the gas tried to choke, but it couldn’t choke me I would not lie down, not fall asleep Them come overseas trying to be free Erase the demons out of our memory Change your name and your identity Afraid of the truth and a dark history Why’s everybody always chasing we? Cut off the roots of your family tree Don’t you see, that’s not the way to be [Chorus] Caught up in these ways The worlds gone craze

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Them don’t know it’s just a phase Case of the Simon says If I forget the truth Then my words won’t penetrate Babylon burning in the haze Can’t see through the maze Chop down all of them dirty ways That’s the price that you pay for selling lies to the youth No way, not ok Ain’t no one going to break my stride, ain’t no one going to hold me down Oh no, I got to keep on moving, Stay alive. [Chorus]13 Very much like ADF’s vocalist, Matisyahu has adopted a singing style that is strongly based on Jamaican Patois, as some passages of the printed lyrics highlight (‘let me hand forget’, ‘chasing we’). Additionally, he frequently resorts to chanting and shouting typically found in roots-reggae. Marked by slow, minimalistic rhythms and a melancholic synthesizer melody, ‘Jerusalem’ opens with the chorus, which is based on psalm 137. One of the most prominent passages in the Old Testament, it deals with the Jewish exile after the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem. Matisyahu adopts the main verses of the psalm in which the Israelites pledge to keep Jerusalem present in their memory as a compensation for the geographical separation from their temple. The rhetorical strength of psalm 137 is amplified by its historical relevance: it marks the moment when prayer became the central form of worship in Judaism. In exile, the Holy Scriptures served – as the poet Heinrich Heine put it – as a ‘mobile temple’ (Assmann 1999, 306) and the practices of remembering and recounting became the main bond between Yahweh and his people.14 Just as the reference to 1984 set the tone for the militant message of ‘Memory War’, Matisyahu’s quotation of a key Biblical episode establishes the distressed mood for the rest of the song. With its emphasis on captivity, mourning and memory, psalm 137 sums up the collective experiences of the Jewish people. These precise experiences are used as an argument in defence of the resettlement of the holy land in ‘Jerusalem’, thus implicitly supporting Israel’s contested policies of occupation of Palestine. However, rather than making territorial claims or overt political statements, the lyrics resort to several layers of allusion: Biblical, literary, historical and (pop) musical.

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In the first stanza, the Biblical references to Israel as the land of milk and honey target a primarily Jewish audience, revealing the song’s postassimilationist stance. The term ‘hipster Judaism’, currently circulating in the media, captures this trend: it refers to a growing number of successful Jewish artists in America who proudly celebrate their cultural heritage and their ‘otherness’; Matisyahu is evidently one of its emblematic representatives (Findarticles). In this context, the religious arguments in favour of the Jewish settlements in Israel (‘the dwelling of His majesty’) are to be taken literally. At the same time, the song taps into a wider cultural memory fund that transcends the confines of Jewish religion and identity. The literary treatment of psalm 137 has a long tradition in the West: it has been translated, quoted or paraphrased by many canonical and non-canonical artists who all emphasize a painful feeling of dislocation, independent of religion or ethnicity.15 Matisyahu’s lyrics partially build on this common literary base in order to appeal to the listener’s sympathy (‘Can’t you see …’) for the specific situation of the Jewish people. The sorrow over the (enforced) Jewish ‘unsettledness’ is underlined by the reference to the Holocaust in the second stanza – thus drawing a parallel between the Babylonian exile and one of the most traumatic events of the twentieth century. Like ADF’s ‘Memory War’, Matisyahu’s song associates this defining episode of Jewish history with a fundamental ‘truth’ that runs the danger of being banned from collective consciousness. However, whereas in ‘Memory War’ the process of forgetting was essentially enforced by an oppressive power, in ‘Jerusalem’ the Jews themselves try to deny their ‘roots’. The stanza describes the impulse of those affected by the trauma of the Holocaust to forget the past and start anew, relieved of the burden of memory. Matisyahu focuses on the immigration of Holocaust survivors to the US, where the melting-pot mentality and post-war optimism encouraged them to distance themselves from their origins (Novick 1999). The last stanza of ‘Jerusalem’ suggests that the elders have failed to pass on to the young a sense of collective identity and purpose. In order to counter this, and thus to ensure the future of Israel, the Jewish people need to retain their faith in Jerusalem, the definitive temple of their identity. The closing lines adopt the ‘voice’ of memory, affirming its power of endurance. These lines also highlight the importance of musical allusions in ‘Jerusalem’. Matisyahu borrows the words as well as the melody from a famous pop music hit of the early 1980s: Mathew Wilder’s ‘Ain’t Nothing Gonna Break My Stride’. Matisyahu turns what was essentially a song about a failed love affair (the lyric subject is left by his girlfriend, who

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arrogantly claims that she has to ‘keep on moving’) into a celebration of memory. The original meaning of Wilder’s song is thus subverted: whereas love is fleeting, memory is lasting and its course cannot be stopped. This is the single most obvious reference to popular music in ‘Jerusalem’. Audiences from the reggae community are reminded of at least one other ‘canonical’ song, namely ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’ (1970) by the Jamaican roots-reggae band The Melodians, which quotes psalm 137 to portray the suffering of the Jamaican slaves. This underlines the special processes of remembering which operate within popular music culture. In today’s heavily mediatized world, the musical references may well be the most important point of identification and of meaning, at least for the younger generation. By exploring and exploiting the potential of popular culture as an archive of cultural memory, Matisyahu makes sure that his message reaches his main target, namely a multicultural youth. Whereas ‘Memory War’ focused on the importance of memory for the struggle of minorities against discrimination, the analysis of ‘Jerusalem’ has shown that memory itself involves a process of discrimination. Matisyahu’s keying of his lyrics as a Jewish lament may provide an insight into the distinct experiences and motivations of the Jewish people, but it circumvents Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘selective memory’ (Hall 1995) emphasizes this tendency to omit facts which do not fit into a group’s self-perception. Essentially intended as a form of self-preservation, such selective interpretations of the past run the risk of becoming hermetic. Even though Matisyahu draws important analogies between the Jewish experience and other cultures via literary and musical allusion, the strong emphasis on Jerusalem as a specific marker of Jewish identity may alienate other groups. On the other hand, it is likely that the first acquaintance of audiences with ‘Jerusalem’ comes via its official music video on MTV or on the Internet. Because the meaning of lyrics can be altered by keying them via different media (Eckstein 2008, 110), a brief examination of the video for ‘Jerusalem’ creates the space for an alternative interpretation of the song. The video depicts people of diverse ethnicities and age groups, including Matisyahu himself, essentially ‘building’ a wall with glowing photographs and hand-written documents instead of bricks. The photographs alternate between festive snapshots of families and friends and documentary pictures of NS concentration camp inmates, the AfricanAmerican civil rights movement of the 1960s, the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, demonstrations by Latin Americans and clashes between street demonstrators and police forces. Surrounded by darkness and thus de-territorialized, the wall actually bears a close

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resemblance to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, one of the most important Jewish religious sites. The video turns it into a universal temple where people come to honour the best moments of their lives as well as to denounce the most cataclysmic episodes of human history. Thus, the ‘local’ scope of the lyrics has been totally supplanted by a depiction of the universal need to remember the past. The music video for ‘Jerusalem’ turns the song into a celebration of the unifying power of memory across nations and cultures. ‘My Strange Uncles from Abroad’: Connecting the margins The common thread running through the analysis of ‘Memory War’ and ‘Jerusalem’ has been the close relationship between displacement and memory. The determination of the lyric subjects to unearth fragments of the past which have been either covered up or neglected emphasizes the changing (and contested) status of national and ethnic boundaries. But what happens when the sense of belonging cannot be anchored in one place or culture? The multiethnic band Gogol Bordello, whose members include a Roma-Ukrainian, two Russians, an Israeli, an Ethiopian, an Ecuadorian, an American and two female dancers of mixed Thai and Chinese descent respectively, represent a case in point. Labelling themselves ‘immigrant punks’, Gogol Bordello have adopted a markedly

Figure 10.3

Gogol Bordello in Concert

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celebratory tone, turning displacement into an asset. As one of their anthemic songs announces: ‘Between the borders the real countries lie’ (Gogol Bordello, ‘Through the Roof ’n’ Underground’, 2002). The special relationship between cultural marginality and cultural memory is the main focus of ‘My Strange Uncles from Abroad’ from Gogol Bordello’s fourth album, Super Taranta! (2007). Highlighting the gypsy background of the charismatic leader and lyricist, Eugene Hütz (whose grandmother was a Sinti-Roma), the album propagates the mythologized view of gypsies as proud nomads while promoting an Eastern European brand of hedonism based on mass celebrations and heavy drinking. Containing high doses of idealism, several songs envision the formation of a ‘tribal connection’ between disaffected people; music and poetry serve as the great unifiers here. It is in this context that the exaltation of artistic creations as vehicles of memory in ‘My Strange Uncles from Abroad’ (henceforth MSU) serves also as an appeal for global cooperation. These are the lyrics: My strange uncles from abroad yes I never met them but I took everything they wrote and I’ll never forget them [Chorus] Through the mystical communication deep within it all comes true forming underground railroad for our ultimate break through! My strange nephews from beyond I’ll meet them on the Cosmos streets and we will drink to how we never told you to trust a plastic beat [Chorus] Bright open eyes, they are still looking they are still finding a few unpoisoned hearts no matter where you are exiled no matter where you are exiled! (2x)16 MSU essentially subverts notions of belonging. National boundaries are rejected and derided as inefficient barriers against the influence of unusual (or, for that matter, unwanted) individuals and cultures.

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The abundance of spatial references to an external realm, culminating in outer space, suggests that marginality is an advantage, because it literally expands the individual’s horizons. The celebrated family ties which replace national loyalties are themselves not based on blood-relations but on shared ideas. In this way, they challenge the limited scope of ethnicity. This provides a clear contrast to the lyrics of ‘Memory War’ and ‘Jerusalem’, which focused on the importance of memory for sustaining the cultural identity of specific ethnic groups. Instead, MSU highlights the vital role of memory for the production of transnational and transcultural identities, celebrating both print and music culture for their capacity to establish bonds between kindred spirits across time and space. The predominance of vocabulary associated with marginality (‘strange’, ‘underground’, ‘exiled’) and the celebration of authenticity in music (as opposed to ‘plastic beats’) place the lyrics within the conventions of subcultural opposition. This is emphasized by the Eastern European gypsy flavour of the song, which relies heavily on accordion and violin solos – so that the message of the rather short lyrics is complemented by the music itself. As in ‘Memory War’ and ‘Jerusalem’, MSU suggests that the majority of the population has lost their access to some sort of higher truth. A further parallel can be established between the exiled status of the Jews described in ‘Jerusalem’ and the psychologically ‘exiled’ rebellious and creative spirits explored in MSU: in both cases, the capacity to remember and reconnect with the past is presented as a protection against dislocation and dispersal. The key metaphor of MSU is the ‘underground railroad’ in the chorus, a term used in the US in the nineteenth century to refer to a clandestine network of routes, meeting points and illicit organizations set up to help African-American slaves to flee to the northern free states or to Canada. Considered one of the landmarks of the abolitionist struggle, the underground railroad has become part of the American imaginary and has been upheld as a symbol of interracial cooperation (Bordewich 2006). In MSU, it is art itself that takes on the function of an illicit system of communications between individuals who do not fit into the dominant pattern. By applying a central topic of American collective memory to the de-territorialized status of art, Gogol Bordello provide a remarkable example of global memory: what was once a specifically (African-) American experience has been turned into an emblem of global creative collaboration between marginal cultures. The multicultural global family projected by MSU seems to be at odds with the prevailing spirit of individualism and postmodern ironic detachment in Western societies. Indeed, the keying of MSU in terms of

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folk protest and cultural subversion is reminiscent of the counterculture of the 1960s which was based on the notion that the rebellious youth would carry out a world revolution. Rather than indicating a mere case of nostalgia, this attests to the current revival of the core ideals of the 1960s by movements which are critical of (Western-style) globalization. Indeed, the success of global musicians such as Gogol Bordello, ADF or Manu Chao is very much connected with the emergence of a global counterculture (Lechner and Boli 2005). Consisting of a loose amalgamation of grass roots movements from across the world which come together at occasions like the World Social Forum or the mass protests against the G8 Summits, global counterculture blends elements from the countercultural 1960s (the unifying tendencies, the Romantic idealism) with the distinct priorities of the so-called anti-global outlook (concern with fair-trade and with the environment, the promotion of self-organizing autonomous groups and the emphasis on decentralization). Under the slogan ‘Another world is possible’, the global counterculture has become an important promoter of alternatives to neoliberalism; however, like the countercultural movement in the 1960s, it tends to disregard its profound ties to the system it claims to oppose.17 In spite of the hopes of its members and sympathizers, the main contribution of this movement lies not so much in its potential to overthrow global capitalism, but rather in the fact that it promotes solidarity on a world scale. Global music is one of its chief means of expression;18 songs such as MSU, based on a Romantic ideal of spiritual affinity that is completely de-territorialized, articulate its visions of an alternative ‘imagined community’ that celebrates diversity, while remaining undivided by economic, national, ethnic or religious differences.

Conclusion One of the particularly striking things about Manu Chao’s Clandestino is that it actually plays like one song, lasting for 45 minutes, with a variety of musical, lyrical and sonic elaborations over a basic melodic and textual pattern. This provides an appropriate model of the way cultural memories are transmitted in global music, which has pop culture as its common basis and globalization as its main topic. Cut into fragments, cultural memories can be appropriated, modified and incorporated into a pop song (very much like the illegal immigrants in Clandestino infiltrate a country), in the process producing new associations that are no longer restricted to one place, people or culture. The analysis of the song lyrics by ADF, Matisyahu and Gogol Bordello revealed a series of

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such associations: second-generation Indian immigrants adopt Biblical themes to protest against institutionalized racism in Europe; a Chasidic Jew evokes the holy city of Jerusalem as a universal expression of people’s struggle for self-affirmation; post-Cold War Eastern Europeans associate the emancipation of African-American slaves with twenty-first century oppositional subcultures. In a way, song lyrics function like an Internet page, with a number of hyperlinks available in almost every verse; it is up to the audience to make the connections. This also means that the interpretations can vary widely. The thematic analysis highlighted this ambivalence by focusing on the fragmentary and fragmented quality of memory in the lyrics. It is fragmented because only certain elements from the past are brought to light, while others are delegitimized, suppressed or rejected. This highlights the relationship between collective memory and processes of selection based on changing historic circumstances. In addition, because it is evoked in order to affirm membership to a specific group, nation or movement, memory becomes fragmentary, that is, a means of distinction. Globalization has in fact led to redefinitions of collectivity that stress heterogeneity and stimulate the production of a multiplicity of small, local narratives or ‘petit récits’ (Lyotard 1984). Via global media, these narratives are easily spread beyond their local source and become part of a global consciousness. The term ‘glocalization’, advanced by Ronald Robertson, captures this trend and underlines the qualities of global culture as a mixed process of diversification and synthesis (Robertson 1995). This analysis of lyrics has used the dynamic relationship between local identities and global experiences to explore the emergence of global memory as an open project, subject to constant negotiations and corrections. If the polyglotism of Clandestino serves as an auditory example of this project, the music video for Matisyahu’s ‘Jerusalem’ provides a fitting visual emblem. The temple of memory symbolized by the illuminated wall can only exist and expand if each person adds his or her own fragmented reminiscences to the whole. As in the case of the Internet, there are no hierarchies and no guidelines: everyone’s testimonial is deemed equally valuable. Indeed, it is personal rather than institutional versions of cultural memory, symbolized by the snapshots and the handwritten documents (letters and diary passages), which are being celebrated here. It is also significant that these fragments are illuminated in a way that makes them resemble digital images – an appropriate reflection of our digital age. A sense of unity emerges out of this immense patchwork; however, the wall cannot actually be fixed or contained. Reflecting the unstable boundaries

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Figure 10.4

Music Video for ‘Jerusalem’, directed by Mathew Cullen

between nations, cultures and ethnicities, memory has become ‘liquid’ (Levy and Sznaider 2005; Baumann 2000) with each individual adaptting it to her or his own shifting contexts.

Notes 1 Global musicians are often subsumed under the category of ‘world music’, a label that many of them resent and reject. Coined in the late 1980s, the term was supposed to create a new niche market for traditional music that did not originate in the West. In effect, this tends to perpetuate the gap between Western culture and the rest of the world (Gilroy 1993, 99; Eckstein 2008, 272). It also devalues the strong connection of global musicians to the West, where many of them actually live and where they have launched their careers. For these reasons, I have opted for the term ‘global music’, which highlights the relationship between diasporic cultures and musical innovation in the West. Additionally, it points to the close link between the success of these musicians and globalization itself. 2 To name but a few: Manu Chao and Gogol Bordello received the BBC World Music Award in 2002 and 2007 respectively; Asian Dub Foundation’s DJ, Pandit G, was awarded the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for his community work, but he declined the award; the American

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Chassidic-Jewish reggae singer Matisyahu was nominated for a Grammy award in 2008; the British-Sri Lankan musician M.I.A. was nominated for an Academy Award for her song ‘Paper Planes’, which is featured on the soundtrack for the film Slumdog Millionaire (2008). The issue of the corporate co-optation of music has been debated since the commercial success of rock in the 1960s and may never be satisfactorily resolved, because it is based on a shaky premise. As Paul du Gay suggests, the notion that ‘business’ and ‘culture’ are separate entities is misleading for two reasons: on the one hand, economic processes and practices involve the production of cultural meaning (the most conspicuous examples being marketing campaigns and the design of products); and on the other hand, cultural artefacts (such as music CDs) are necessarily embedded in a process of commodity production and distribution which is regulated by economic laws (du Gay 1997). I include diasporic communities in the West here – the point being that: the music of Asian Dub Foundation speaks more directly to British-Asian youth than to people actually living in India; Gogol Bordello’s fan base includes more Eastern European immigrants in the West and more assimilated Romany individuals than people actually living in the Ukraine or marginalized communities of Romany nomads; the music of Matisyahu appeals more to liberal Jewish youngsters in North America than to orthodox Chassidic Jews in Israel. For a literary analysis of the relationship between song lyrics and poetry, see Reinfandt 2003 and Eckstein 2008. It is significant that the majority of global musicians have either adopted English as their main idiom or they include a number of songs in English in their repertoire. The language of MTV and of the Internet, English has become the lingua franca of youth across the globe. Yet this also implies that the words and the grammar are continually modified in accordance with the speaker’s origins or intentions. This constitutes another example of the vernacular cosmopolitanism of global music, which has adapted English as a ‘glocal’ idiom; that is, a form of addressing various nationalities without necessarily renouncing the particularities of one’s native tongue. The line ‘Asian Dub Foundation – “for the consciousness of the nation”’ appears in the song ‘Jericho’ from ADF’s first album, Facts and Fictions (1995), and it is also the closing slogan for the CD booklet’s liner notes. Printed in ADF, Community Music (2000) A. Das/J. Pandit/S. Savale/S. Tailor/ D. Zaman. As Ernst Bloch argued in his seminal work The Principle of Hope (1986 [1959]), millenarianism stems from the rebellious attitude of underground heretic religious movements throughout the history of the Christian faith, which were essential for the development of the utopian thinking that informs modern secular ideas of emancipation. ADF’s leaning towards leftist politics makes it conceivable that they have been influenced by the strain of Marxist Humanism promoted by Ernst Bloch. The liner notes to ADF’s album Facts and Fictions include a reference to the book Black People in the British Empire (1988) by the British journalist and member of the Socialist Labour League, Peter Fryer. Stuart Hall explains the reinterpretation of the Bible by Caribbean people as a result of two factors: firstly, they had lost any connection to their place of

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Popular Music as a Carrier of Global Memory origin, their own language and religion; and secondly, they lacked a historical trace of their past. The Bible was in effect the only written document they came in contact with, due to the missionary efforts of the European colonizers (Hall 1995). Interview with Matisyahu on the Night Talk show (YouTube 3). Printed in Matisyahu’s No Place to Go (2006). Hans-Joachim Krauss also interprets the political implications of this episode of Jewish history. The Jewish forms of worship in exile, epitomized in the celebration of the Shabbat, were an act of distinction from the ostentatious Babylonian state cult. This emphasized the determination of the Israelites to retain their autonomy (Krauss 1991, 312–16). They include authors such as William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Thomas Carew, Isaac Watts and Heinrich Heine (Hamlin 2004; Cook 2002), and more recently works by the Canadian poet Elizabeth Smart and by the best-selling Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho. Printed in Gogol Bordello’s Super Taranta! (2007). The case of Gogol Bordello attests to these contradictions: although Eugene Hütz criticizes mass entertainment culture in a number of songs, this has not prevented him from performing with Madonna at the major Live Earth concert in 2007 or starring in her debut film Filth and Wisdom (2008) or posing for high-fashion designers. See for example the compilation CD Another World is Possible (2005) which supports the anti-globalization group Attac and includes performances from Manu Chao, ADF and the Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica’s Romany punkrock band The No Smoking Orchestra. The CD is accompanied by a booklet containing essays by leading critics of globalization such as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso). Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen (1989), The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge). Assmann, Aleida (1999), Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des Kulturellen Gedächtnisses (München: C. H. Beck). Assmann, Aleida and Assmann, Jan (1983), ‘Schrift und Gedächtnis’, in: Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann and Christof Hardmeier (eds), Schrift und Gedächtnis: Beiträge zur Archäologie der Literarischen Kommunikation (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag), 265–84. Baumann, Richard (1977), Verbal Art as Performance (Rowley, MA: Newbury House). Bauman, Zygmunt (2000), Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press). Barber, Benjamin R. (1995), Jihad vs McWorld: How the Planet is Both Falling Apart and Coming Together and What This Means for Democracy (New York: Times Books). Beck, Ulrich (2000), What is Globalization? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press). Bhabha, Homi (1994), The Location of Culture (London/New York: Routledge). Bloch, Ernst (1986 [1959]), The Principle of Hope 3. Transl. Neville Plaice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

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Bordewich, Fergus (2006), Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement (New York: Harper Collins Publishers). Cook, Roger F. (2002), A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine (New York: Camden House). du Gay, Paul (1997), ‘Introduction’, in: Paul du Gay (ed.), Production of Culture/ Cultures of Production (London: Sage Publishers), 1–10. Eckstein, Lars (2008) (completed manuscript), Reading Song Lyrics. Findarticles: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20060325/ai_n16170863 (last visited 29 August 2009). Fiske, John (1989), Understanding Popular Culture (London/New York: Routledge). Frith, Simon (1998), Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press). Giddens, Anthony (2003 [1999]), Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping our Lives (London/New York: Routledge). Gilroy, Paul (1993), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso). Gogol: http://www.gogolbordello.com (last visited 26 August 2009). ‘My Strange Uncles From Abroad’, Lyrics reprinted by permission © 2007 Hutz Muzon (ASCAP). Guardian (2003): http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2003/jan/24/artsfeatures (last visited 26 August 2009). Hall, Stuart (1995), ‘Negotiating Caribbean Identities’, New Left Review I/209, January–February, 3–14. Hamlin, Hannibal (2004), Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Krauss, Hans-Joachim (1991), ‘Israel’, in: Golo Mann and Alfred Heuß (eds), Propyläen Weltgeschichte. Zweiter Band: Hochkulturen des Mittleren und Östlichen Asiens (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag), 237–349. Kunow, Rudiger and Raussert, Wilfried (eds) (2008), Cultural Memory and Multiple Identities: An Interdisciplinary Approach to 20th Century Identity Politics (Berlin: Verlag Dr W. Hopf ), 7–18. Lechner, Frank J. and Boli, John (2005), World Culture: Origins an Consequences (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing). Levy, Daniel and Sznaider, Natan (2005), The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Translated by Assenka Oksiloff (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press). Lyotard, Jean-François (1984 [1979]), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Novick, Peter (1999), The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company). Ong, Walter (1988), Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World (London/ New York: Routledge). Orwell, George (1981 [1949]), 1984 (London: Penguin Signet Classic). Reinfandt, Christoph (2003), Romantische Kommunikation: Zur Kontinuität der Romantik in der Kultur der Moderne (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter). Robertson, Richard (1995) ‘Globalization: Time-Space and HomogeneityHeterogeneity’, in: Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (eds), Global Modernities (London: Sage Publications), 25–44.

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Stepnisky, Jeff (2005), ‘Global Memory and the Rhythm of Life’, American Behavioral Scientist 48/10, 1383–402. Wentworth: http://wentworth-courier.whereilive.com.au/lifestyle/story/matisyahuspeaks-to-the-courier-about-god-drugs-and-the-state-of-israel (last visited 26 August 2009). YouTube 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v⫽mbzLzcYlIsU&feature⫽related (last visited 26 August 2009). YouTube 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v⫽WEonGRG25Ss (last visited 26 August 2009). YouTube 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v⫽kPz7XyuSLtg&feature⫽fvsr (last visited 12 July 2009). Zuberi, Nabeel (2001), Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music (Chicago: University of Illinois Press).

Discography Asian Dub Foundation (1995), Facts and Fictions. Nation Records. Asian Dub Foundation (2000), Community Music. London Records 90. Gogol Bordello (2002), Multi Kontra Culti vs. Irony. Rubric Records. Gogol Bordello (2007), Super Taranta! Sideonedummy Records. Keziah Jones (2008), Nigerian Wood. WMI (Warner). Manu Chao (1998), Clandestino. Virgin France (EMI). Matisyahu (2006), Youth. Sony BMG Entertainment. Matisyahu (2006), No Place to Be. Sony BMG Entertainment. M.I.A (2007), Kala. XI/Beggars (Indigo). The Melodians (1970), Rivers of Babylon. Trojan. Various Artists (2005), Another World is Possible. Uncivilized World. Wilder, Mathew (1983), I Don’t Speak the Language. Epic Records.

Acknowledgements Asian Dub Foundation in Concert: Photograph by Andrea Leone, http://www. flickr.com/photos/hanktattoo/sets, Copyright Andrea Leone, Reprinted by kind permission of the author. Matisyahu in Concert: Photograph by Peter Kim, http://www.flickr.com/people/ peterkimphotography, Copyright Peter Kim, Reprinted by kind permission of the author. Gogol Bordello in Concert: Photograph by Jessica Hitch, http://www.flickr.com/ photos/jesshu, Copyright Jessica Hitch, Reprinted by kind permission of the author. Music Video for ‘Jerusalem’, directed by Mathew Cullen: Still from video-clip, http://www.motiontheory.com/work/matisyahu_jerusalem#sub, Copyright Motion Theory, Reprinted by kind permission of Motion Theory and The Artists Organization. ‘My Strange Uncles From Abroad’, Lyrics reprinted by permission © 2007 Hutz Muzon (ASCAP).

11 Neda – the Career of a Global Icon Aleida Assmann and Corinna Assmann

‘We must remember that blood.’ Delbar Tavakoli in the BBC documentary ‘An Iranian Martyr’ On 26 December 2009, the London Times chose Neda Agha-Soltan as ‘person of the year’. The article stated: ‘Neda Soltan […], a young beautiful woman who had studied philosophy, was now an aspiring singer, […] found herself abruptly catapulted from the crowds of Tehran to become the face of protest against Iran’s repressive rulers; a symbol of rebellion against the fraudulent election that had just returned Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to power’. Neda is included in a list of recent heroes and victims whose suffering became a beacon of protest against repressive injustice and brutal violations of human rights (Times 1 2009). Neda was just one of Tehran’s over one million inhabitants who, in defiance of death, repeatedly took to the streets to voice their resentment against the government and claim their rights in the six months after the Iranian presidential election on 12 June 2009. Peaceful, unarmed and with dauntless bravery, these protesters encountered the batons, tear gas grenades and guns of the police forces. Within six months of her death, her standing had shifted from anonymity to global symbol. Yet she was not the only one who lost her life in the brutal confrontations with the representatives of Iranian’s state power. What was it that distinguished her from all the others? Why was she so suddenly catapulted to this peak of fame and how did she come to occupy this extraordinary position in collective memory? This chapter looks at this process in detail, analysing some of the means and channels by which Neda, through images of her in life and death, was transformed into a global icon. 225

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From street to Internet What marked Neda apart was the fact that her death happened to be captured on a mobile phone camera and this footage was flashed around the world on the Internet via global social networking sites. In no time, she became the icon of the opposition movement in Iran and a symbol of the brutal crackdown of the protests. She gave her face to the bloodshed and her name to many other innocent victims who were killed, injured or abused during the ongoing demonstrations. Today, Neda’s clip is the most seen Iranian film footage in the world. The spreading story, however, was not just the effect of new communications technology. The following section traces in four steps the conditions that had to be fulfilled for her images to receive worldwide attention. The first level: Creating the evidence What exactly had happened on 20 June 2009? The Iranian presidential election in June triggered the biggest protests in the history of the Islamic Republic. Neda was not a political figure; she had not even voted in the election. When it became apparent, however, that the election process had been grossly manipulated, she began to join the demonstrations. On the fatal day, Neda, together with her music teacher Hamid Panahi and two other unidentified friends, had been on her way to the demonstrations when their car got stuck in traffic. They left the car in a side street not far from one of the main streets where the demonstration was taking place. A video that was later released shows Panahi and Neda among a crowd that was shouting ‘Death to the dictator’ and ‘Down with Khamenei’. They did not join in with the chants but merely observed the events. It was in this side street that she was suddenly hit by a bullet. An on-the-spot witness tried to help the unknown person who had fallen close by. He became the personal carrier of Neda’s story. This was the part of Arash Hejazi, a publisher and trained doctor, who heard the sudden blast and saw the young woman collapsing in the street. Hejazi rushed to her assistance but was powerless against the profuse bleeding. She died within minutes. In an interview, he demonstrated that he fully lived up to his public, ethical status as witness to the event, saying: ‘Totalitarian regimes always want to cover up their violence and terror, but evidence always surfaces to show the world what is really happening’. He is proud that he rose to the challenge: ‘In every person’s life there are moments of truth that determine the sort of person you are, that test your beliefs and values. For me Neda’s death and speaking

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out was that moment, and I think I’ve been true to myself’ (Times 2 2009). Another witness present at the time captured these minutes in a 40-second video-clip on his mobile phone camera. In addition to the oral testimony of the witness, the video provided a visual representation of the event that could be transmitted to ‘secondary witnesses’. The second level: Multiplication and communication On the day of the incident, the video-clip, together with the commentary of the oral witness, was uploaded to the Internet where it was absorbed, multiplied and sent around the world along the rhizomatous channels of social networks. Once such a digital message has escaped, it can neither be called back nor be ever fully extinguished. The dispersal acquires a dynamics of its own which is regulated by the magnetic mechanisms of attention. As soon as the clip of Neda’s death went online, it quickly became known all over the world. The news spread as quickly as it did because many people around the world were watching the events in Iran closely and minute by minute. Thus, within hours, the discussion about her death, marked with the hashtag #neda, was among the first on the list of ‘trending topics’ on Twitter, surpassed only by other topics related to the events in Iran such as #iranelection and #prayforthem.1 During the next few hours and days, Neda’s image went global, moving from local streets in Tehran to the Internet as millions of users all over the world changed their profile pictures and avatars on various social networking sites to pictures of Neda in order to show their solidarity with the opposition movement in Iran. The young woman Neda was an unnamed and helpless target. But in conjunction with the World Wide Web and its many channels of distribution, her image became the most effective counterforce in the hands of the protestors. It was sent ‘around the world in 60 minutes’ (Independent 2009) to become ‘a worldwide cyber icon of the opposition’ (CBS 2009). The global career of her image, however, was not restricted to the Internet. Images from the amateur video-clip were also broadcast on television through official news channels and printed in newspaper articles that retold her story all over the world. The third level: From private and public communication to political action The dispersion of Neda’s images was not random, however, but steered by a political frame of attention. Its driving force were exiled Iranians and other citizens who sympathized with the Iranian protestors and

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organized demonstrations in which they declared their solidarity. Very soon after the distribution of the video, key images started to be recycled in the context of demonstrations. Stills from the clip were printed out and transferred to placards used during new protests in Iran and in other countries around the globe. Images of her death, contrasted with pictures of Neda alive, smiling into the camera, sent a highly emotional statement to the world, serving as the most powerful indictment of the Iranian regime and its violence against peaceful and unarmed demonstrators. Inside Iran, all of the regime’s attempts to constrain the proliferation of these images failed; her name and picture are ubiquitous and accompany ever-new forms of protest. The fourth level: From local action to global observation The dynamics of attention were further stimulated by the ‘secondary’ evidence of videos and photos that protestors and reporters took from the street demonstrations. These representations of representations entered another feedback loop: they were posted in the Internet or published in prominent newspapers, elevating local action onto the level of global observation. In this process of reproducing and recycling her picture on multiple levels, Neda’s image supports a living memory that is kept alive – in much the same way as the hashtag #neda on Twitter – by a combination of active discussion and constant repetition and quotation. On Twitter, the topic of Neda’s death gained global attention through a process called ‘retweeting’ – the act of copying/quoting a message and posting it anew, thereby producing a cascade effect in order to reach an evergrowing number of people. On this forth level, the moment of Neda’s collapse and death in a Tehran street has entered a global public space. The decision by the London Times to choose Neda as ‘person of the year 2009’ was a confirmation of this process.

Censorship and deformations of the image The Iranian post-election protest gained worldwide attention not only because of what was happening on the streets of Iran, but also because of the way the events were documented and broadcast throughout the world. From the very beginning of the protests, this launch of images was countered by the Iranian government with harsh forms of censorship. In order to maintain control over the representation of events and the distribution of unauthorized images, the regime enforced a general reporting ban on foreign journalists. The offices of foreign broadcasting services, Eastern and Western alike, were frequently raided and camera


equipment and material confiscated. Pro-opposition websites were censored, shut down or jammed, as were a number of foreign websites, such as Facebook and YouTube. Access to foreign news media was blocked and national newspapers were closed or prevented from critically reviewing the election results and the ensuing protests. A growing number of journalists were arrested as the protests became more heated (RSF 2009). In consequence, the only source of information that remained were the people on the street. In their role as eyewitnesses, they reported what they had seen and sent into the world the images they had captured using an everyday, commonplace device: the cell-phone. Thus, the crackdown on professional media gave rise to an enormous wave of street journalism, which was published and multiplied with the help of social networking sites on the Internet. Due to a lack of official images, news agencies all over the world fell back on these unofficial sources of information. TV channels included street clips in their broadcasts, downloaded from YouTube, and newspapers recounted the events as reported by Twitter users. The most powerful of these images to have emerged from Iran in the post-election crisis is unquestionably that of Neda’s death.2 We are dealing here with two different systems of information which are usually kept separate for good reasons: professional journalism on the one hand and social networks on the other. The first has the function to provide knowledge and distribute verified information, for which it is held accountable. The second system is designed for the exchange of opinions, which means that the information it conveys is often unreliable, unverified and rarely exact. In this case, the professional information system was blocked, so the amateur communication system took over its function. While this new technology offered a subversive means of democratic empowerment against state censorship, it also had its pitfalls. When, in the early stage of constructing her story, the urge for pictures of Neda stimulated a general search on the Internet, the photo of another Neda, whose surname Soltani was confusingly close to that of the real Neda, was downloaded from her Facebook profile and circulated on the web. Before the proper images of Neda were retrieved, the photo of the other Neda was printed in newspapers, screened on television and displayed at solidarity demonstrations all over the world along with images of Neda’s death. It took some time to clarify the mistake and to replace the images, but the damage could not be undone. For Neda Soltani it had tragic consequences and changed her life forever. Put under pressure by the Iranian regime, which wanted to make use of the mix-up to prove the

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Figure 11.1

Neda Agha-Soltan and Neda Soltani

story’s inauthenticity, Neda saw no other way of guaranteeing her family’s security than to flee Iran. She had to leave behind her work, friends and family, and is currently seeking asylum in Germany. Neda Soltani was not the only one who was forced to emigrate in the wake of Neda’s death. Arash Hejazi’s prominent role as the prime eyewitness has made him another target of the government’s counter-attack. He fled to the UK shortly after the traumatic incident, where he lives in temporary exile, separated from his family and his work (Times 2 2009). The Iranian state decided to recast the story of Neda’s death in its own terms in order to stifle her memory and to prevent her from becoming a martyr of the opposition movement.3 The official version as presented by state-controlled newspapers and pro-government officials is that Neda’s murder was instigated by agents of Western media propaganda to undermine the Iranian regime (IRNA 1 2009; Washington Post 2009). Thus, the story of Neda’s death is brought in line with the repeated claims by the Iranian government that the post-election protests were planned and organized by hostile Western nations, particularly the UK and the US. This view was enforced by a re-enactment of Neda’s ‘real murder scene’, as a national newspaper headline called it, staged outside the British Embassy on 2 December 2009. In this performance, Neda and Hejazi were shown leading anti-regime chants in the protest before she is shot from behind by an accomplice of the doctor. Both the actor playing Hejazi’s role and the killer wear Union Jack armbands marking


them as ‘Western puppets’ (RFE 2009).4 The re-enactment was part of a pro-regime counter-demonstration, which demanded the ‘extradition of Mrs. Neda Agha-Soltan’s murderer, Arash Hejazi, who is a UK resident’ (IRNA 2 2009). The cases of Hejazi and Neda Soltani illustrate in two ways the notorious problem of evidence conveyed by messages spread on the Internet: Firstly, there is always the suspicion of fraud. The government disclaimed the authenticity of the video document and took pains to assemble contrary evidence. Secondly, there is the problem of verification and sloppy research, which led to the unintentional confusion of images.

The subversive power of memory These efforts of state censorship affirm ex negativo the subversive power of memory. In his famous novel 1984, George Orwell presented a graphic description of the mechanisms of censorship in totalitarian regimes (Orwell 1961). Remembering is presented here as the arch enemy of repressive regimes, while forgetting is deployed to legitimize and guarantee the maintenance of power. Orwell analysed in great detail the huge efforts by which the subversive force of memory is extinguished, distorted or overwritten to confirm the official message of the regime. All authoritarian and totalitarian regimes aim at total control over the production and circulation of information within their states, trying to quench autonomous thinking and actions. In the realm of politics, as Orwell rightly emphasized, memory is a prime source of power. Since every personal memory can engender an argument that potentially de-legitimizes the state power, all independent forms of access to and representations of the past must be curbed and prevented. Through a careful elimination of ‘awkward’ information, the past is deprived of its alterity and it ceases to be an independent resource. In the aftermath of such acts of manipulation, the past is limited to the function of supporting and confirming the norms of an atemporal present. Likewise, the prescription of an official construction of the past and the obstruction of all other forms of access to it are a central means in the aim of establishing absolute power. Orwell provided a concise summary of this philosophy of power: ‘If others accepted the lie which the party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth’. His description of totalitarian mnemopolitics is well known: ‘Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past’ (Orwell 1961, 32). Orwell’s novel about a state taking total control over human memory and consciousness was written in the era of print media. In the age of

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electronic media, the censorship project of destroying all contrary evidence is profoundly challenged. Today’s young generation is equipped with mobile phones with an inbuilt camera function, which means that the potential for creating documentary evidence is placed at the disposal of millions of lay hands. A new private, individual and unprofessional medium has become generally available, not only to register public events and personal experiences but also to communicate and circulate them globally via mobile phones, websites, blogs and social networks. In striking contrast to Orwell’s totalitarian vision of a ‘big brother’ universally monitoring human action, millions of private camera eyes are today employed to produce a multiplication of images, thereby enforcing a democratization of evidence. It must be added, however, that it is not only the protestors but also censorship that profits from the new communications technology. It is true that the Iranian state was unable to prevent the spilling of images across its national borders, but it was highly successful in cutting its citizens off from participation in the circulation of these unwanted images and information. Not only had the Iranian state installed a Nokia Siemens communication network, it had also purchased monitoring technology from the same Finnish-German company. This enabled them to intercept electronic communications in Iran and consequently to read and change its content and track down oppositionists (WSJ 2009). In this case, the web that was created for the purpose of communication was turned into a net in which the critics of the regime were caught.

The global icon as a carrier of memory5 The increase in photographic images is not a new phenomenon. Since 1950, the number of photographic shots per second has risen dramatically. Today, photographers and filmmakers are ubiquitously at work. The date 11 September 2001 offers an example of this: it so happened that on this morning someone was busy filming a day in the life of a group of fire-fighters in Manhattan, who went on to become heroes of the twenty-first century. It was surely an accident that a hobby filmmaker, who happened to be in the right place at the right time, produced important documentary material of the attack on the twin towers. Since 11 September 2001, the number of telephone cameras has risen tangentially. After the 7 July 2005 terror attacks in London, for instance, the survivors sent hundreds of image messages from their mobile phones to the world before the first reporters even arrived on the scene. Neda’s images were swiftly propelled and disseminated into global space, but


were they also fastened in memory? The citation index, the number of clicked websites and printed images have become a quantifier in registering both fame and memory. ‘Attention’ which has been termed the currency of the Internet is clearly not the same as memory. While attention is always continuously re-captured by startling new events and is therefore transitory and short-lived, memory is characterized by repeated recall and long-term duration. Let us examine therefore the mnemonic quality of the images themselves. What makes images unforgettable is what we may call their ‘impact factor’: their capacity to stir and sustain strong emotions. It is this impact factor that pierces the shield of indifference that protects us from the flood of images and sparks strong emotional responses (Diers 1997; Mitchell 2005). In order to theorize the impact factor of the images, we turn to the work of the art historian Aby Warburg, who was the first to investigate cultural symbols from this point of view (Gombrich 1970). Warburg defined impact as a cultural repository of unconscious emotional energy. Certain symbols, according to Warburg, retain such an energetic input and constitute the psychic reservoir for a community. His term for such a symbol was ‘pathos formula’ (Pathosformel). A pathos formula is a visual form that condenses a high amount of passionate energy; this energy is congealed (and sometimes concealed) and pent up in a visual form.6 He also described the symbol as a ‘container of cultural energy’ (Energiekonserve) (Kany 1987, 169). The term ‘container’ here refers not only to an indifferent box, but also to a containing power. Salvatore Settis has analysed the hybrid structure of Warburg’s concept, which oscillates between the contrary poles of externalization and embodiment, or, in other words, between hot (energy) and cold (container). The word ‘pathos’ emphasizes the hot charge of an energy, while the word ‘formula’ refers to the packaging of something that can be easily replicated and transmitted. If we accept Warburg’s analysis of the dual structure of the symbol, we may perhaps better understand the mnemonic power of Neda’s images. Let us start with the ‘cold’ dimension of the image. We are dealing here with a specific form that is designed to produce and ensure its reproducibility. Warburg and his colleagues used the term ‘pithiness’ (Prägnanz) to analyse artistic strategies in this context. They investigated ancient symbols and found that they were often the final result of a long search for formal perfection. They argued that, together with the perfection of the formal structure, immediate recognizability and emotional effect are enhanced in the image’s ‘struggle for visual survival’. Once the ‘right’ picture has been identified, it replaces all other candidates. Canonized

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Figure 11.2

Artistic transformations of Neda images

icons take on a new life through their accepted formal perfection and the practice of continuous reproduction. In Neda’s case, we are dealing not with just one image but with a cluster of images; those of the living and those of the dead Neda. The living Neda’s face is to be seen with and without a scarf, presenting her as a person with a cosmopolitan spirit who loves to travel and to cross


boundaries. The face of the dead Neda, which is covered with blood, is present in various versions, many of which are transformed into works of pop-art paintings. In the process of highlighting the face that is defaced by streams of blood and death, it has acquired a ‘Warholian’ iconicity that almost matches that of Che Guevara. But moreover, many of the images of the living Neda are enhanced and ‘photoshopped’, presenting her beauty in glossy perfection. These highly stylized images automatically bury hundreds of thousands of other images in obscurity and anonymity. Through global communication, dissemination and participation, these images become shared items. Their place within collective memory is established through a ubiquitous and reflex-like (‘hardwired’ as it were) connection between image and event. In the process, these images become the substitute not only for other forgotten images but also for the event itself. In its career from image to icon, we can observe an important transformation in the quality of the image. The photo moves from the domain of reference and documentary evidence to the domain of universal iconicity. In this transformation, it is disconnected from its local and historical context and transferred into the global arena. As it moves from one status to the other, the image is bleached of its referential specificity, allowing for an immense widening of its meaning. What had started as an image of ends up as an image for. Neda’s conspicuous image today stands in for the many anonymous others who protested and suffered at the hands of the Iranian government. Her image and tragic story capture the human interest of the historic event, stimulating continuous waves of empathy. In addition to that, her face, her name and her story have become a huge screen for the projection of global messages. As Azar Nafisi, author of the bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, rightly commented: ‘Neda, who is silenced, is now becoming the voice of all those other Iranian women and men who over the past 30 years have been fighting for their freedom’ (CNN 1 2009). The reference to her as a voice has become a topos, supported by the fact that in Farsi ‘neda’ means both ‘voice’ and ‘calling’. ‘Neda, who came to the square thinking of herself as one voice among thousands, turned into the voice of an entire opposition movement’ (CNN 2 2009). First and foremost, she has become the representative of a new generation of people in Iran who are less political than their parents, who love to travel and who, though rooted firmly in Iran and its rich traditions, embody a cosmopolitan spirit. Their revolt is directed against a state that is depriving them of the highest good: their youth. In addition to this, Neda’s images have become a trigger for emotional identification and political expression by individuals and groups all over the world.

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What about the other aspect of the image, its hot kernel? There is no question that Neda’s images carry a maximum emotional charge. We are dealing with a beautiful young woman who, from one moment to the next, was mortally wounded and died in the street as an innocent victim. For the bystanders witnessing her death this was clearly a highly traumatic experience; each and every individual in that street could have been the target of random shots by the militia. Those who became secondary witnesses of Neda’s death, those who watched the film footage on the Internet, did so in a safe surrounding. They were confronted with one representation among others. The Internet affords a large supply of images of death captured in real time by various official and self-appointed reporters. For the secondary witnesses, the shocking quality of these images was highlighted by its framing. Together with its commentary, the image was turned into a symbol and was read within a certain cultural tradition. The cultural symbol is an augmented image; it invests experiences with emotions and values that are drawn from traditional patterns of meaning. Neda’s story was augmented through the fact that it was couched in a narrative of martyrdom. Martyrdom plays an immense role in all three monotheistic religions. The first martyrs occurred in the time of religious resistance and wars in the Hellenistic period of the second century BC. These religious martyrs were defined not only through their violent deaths, but even more by the fact that they preferred death to all offers of compromise and subjugation. His or her death, therefore, was considered an amazing statement of spiritual power over military power. This meaning was constructed by sympathetic bystanders who observed the violent death. The word ‘martyr’ derives from the Greek word for ‘witness’; the person, however, that meets a violent death in religious strife cannot become a martyr without an external witness who tells his or her story. In confrontation with the prevailing military power, a spiritual power is generated to overcome the oppressor, thus transforming a defeat into victory. In the recent history of Iran, the religious narrative of martyrdom has played a crucial role. It was especially prominent in the 1980s, when it was deployed to mobilize young adolescents in the Iran-Iraq war. Today, larger-than-life images of fallen martyrs are a ubiquitous sight in Tehran. With this emotionally charged history of martyrdom in mind, the Iranian state takes great precautions to prevent oppositional martyrs, and, when it cannot do so, it tries desperately, as we have seen in the case of Neda, to re-enact and vilify their story to destroy their sacrosanct status. The protestors, in turn, immediately claimed Neda as a martyr, although she does not exactly fit this prototype.7 She was described as an apolitical


person and thus – in sharp contrast to religious and political martyrs – had no obvious coactive part in her death. It can be argued, however, that she insisted on going out onto the streets, consciously aware of the risks and taking active responsibility on that seminal Saturday after the Friday prayer in which Khamenei had harshly condemned the insurgence. For many, she embodies an innocent victim rather than a determined martyr in the traditional sense. We can observe that the concept of martyrdom has been extended from ‘active’ to ‘passive’ martyrs. This is the case in the London Times article, which proclaims her Person of the Year. There, her name is listed among the canonized heroes and victims of the late twentieth century, including an anonymous student on Tiananmen Square in 1989, Jan Palach in Prague 1969 and the South Vietnamese girl running naked from a napalm attack in 1972. As the article states, these ‘are our modern versions of religious icons’. They back up the sacrosanct value of human rights, providing concrete models of outstanding courage and suffering.

Performing cosmopolitanism The list of Western martyrs brings us to the political dimension of the image and the construction of a global public space. Walter Mignolo distinguishes between globalization and cosmopolitanism: globalization is defined as ‘a set of designs to manage the world’ while cosmopolitanism is defined as ‘a set of projects toward planetary conviviality’ (Mignolo 2000, 721). His project of ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ is a form of political action in which those who are silenced and marginalized bring themselves into the conversation. He describes it as a transformative project based on ‘border thinking’, ‘the recognition and transformation of the hegemonic imaginary from the perspectives of people in subaltern positions’ (Mignolo 2000, 736–7). In order to include the demonstrators marching with Neda’s image in the streets of many cities outside Iran, we need to extend this concept of critical cosmopolitanism to include all protestors for human rights. We want to argue that the use of Neda’s image in street demonstrations is an exemplary case of ‘performing cosmopolitanism’. In their book Performance and Cosmopolitics, Gilbert and Lo (2007) analyse performances in the context of theatres and festivals, but we may also look for such embodied cultural practices in the streets. We have to distinguish the critical cosmopolitanism here from two other kinds: universal cosmopolitanism and cultural cosmopolitanism. Universal cosmopolitanism is based on universal humanism, a concept that was developed in the philosophy of Kant and embedded within

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Figure 11.3 Poster artwork designed in memory of Neda by Los Angeles-based street artist ABCNT in 2009, which was also pasted in Tehran’s streets

Enlightenment epistemology. This philosophy affirms a positive human ‘essence’ as a common factor to back up the enlightened vision of world citizenship. Cultural cosmopolitanism does not start from anthropological sameness but from cultural difference. It affirms a specific lifestyle that allows for a plurality of cultural loyalties and is accessible to people


of different origins. Critical cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, is based on assertions neither of sameness nor of difference, but on specific local and temporal claims to human rights that have been violated. These claims are uttered on behalf of those and by those who have been deprived of them or from whom they have been withheld. It is based on an ethical commitment, which is expressed in acts of solidarity, aiming at the inclusion of those who are being excluded. Critical cosmopolitanism is neither a form of humanism nor is it a way of living; it consists, rather, of the cultural practice of claiming and enforcing equality rights in a world structured by asymmetrical power relations. This form of political action against institutions of state power gains potency to the extent that it is approved and supported by other people in the world who communicate globally and thereby constitute a public space. This public space, created today through the new media, is the domain of performing cosmopolitanism. Its basic act is a form of role-playing, of taking the position of the excluded other. In this case, however, parading as the other is not a form of disowning the other but, on the contrary, of highlighting the other, of marching for the other. The Neda demonstrations were not unique, but they followed a specific tradition of performing cosmopolitanism. On 19 January 2007, the Armenian intellectual and publisher Hrant Dink was murdered by a Turkish nationalist in the street outside his office in Instanbul. When the news spread, thousands of people gathered on the spot in protest against the crime, shouting the slogan: ‘We are all Hrant Dink’. A few days later, Hrant Dink’s funeral turned into an unprecedented rally against fascist trends in Turkish society. About 100,000 people from different political backgrounds and faiths marched the wide avenues of Istanbul, shouting two slogans: ‘We are all Hrant Dink!’ and ‘We are all Armenians!’8 In a demonstration in Paris in July 2009 the protestors chanted ‘We are all Neda!’, holding masks before their faces which displayed identical images of the smiling Neda. This striking aesthetic performance acted out the nightmare of the Iranian state: for one that had been killed, hundreds have arisen. Her images assumed the character of avatars marching in the demonstrations in an uncanny and ghostlike way. The power of images lies in this resurrection, not of the dead person but of her memory, which returns with the universal claim to human rights in public acts of performed cosmopolitanism.

Notes 1. A hashtag is a marker that highlights discussion topics for linking processes in the cyber architecture of the Internet.

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2. The Iranian government already has an unhappy history in coping with the power of images. The student protests in 1999 also produced an iconic image, which gained worldwide prominence as the cover photo of the British weekly newspaper The Economist. This image showed a young student holding a bloodstained T-shirt over his head, suggestive of crimes of violence committed by police forces against protesting students. Its power lies in kindling the imagination of the observer. The student pictured, Ahmad Batebi, was quickly identified by the regime, arrested and sentenced to death for ‘creating street unrest’. Under the pressure of vehement global protests, the sentence was commuted to 15 years in prison. After nine years, two of which were spent in solitary confinement, and repeated torture, Batebi used a temporary stay in a medical institution to escape. He is now living in exile in the US (Economist 2008). 3. The effort of the regime to recast the story of her death even includes an attempt to claim her as a martyr for the state. Neda’s family was offered a monthly pension from the Martyr Foundation, which it has, however, rejected. Afterwards, the family was denied a mourning service for Neda and ordered to remove the mourning banners outside their house. Neda’s grave is constantly guarded by security agents who prevent it from becoming a site of pilgrimage as a martyr’s shrine. Nevertheless the grave has been repeatedly desecrated (Times 3 2009; Times 4 2010). The people in the social circle surrounding Neda have also been subject to severe personal state repression, in particular her boyfriend, Caspian Makan. After giving a number of interviews on foreign satellite stations, Makan was arrested on 26 June 2009 and taken to Evin Prison. Here, he was frequently interrogated and the prison guards pressed him to change his story. Finally, after more than two months, he was released on bail, still charged with ‘conspiracy to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran’. He managed to escape from the country and currently lives in hiding (Observer 2009; Times 3 2009). 4. Photos of the demonstration taken by the Fars News Agency can be seen on Javane Farda. 5. The entry of an image into collective memory is the result of a complicated process which has become the subject of intense academic research (Grossklaus 2004; Haustein 2008). 6. Warburg discovered the deeper layers of passionate pagan forms behind the subdued surface of medieval Christian and Renaissance art. An example is the figure of the freely striding nymph whose veil is blown up behind her in circling shapes as she advances. This figure, which was part of classical iconography, abruptly entered the paintings of Renaissance artists, bringing with her, for Warburg, the vital energy and spirit of a long forgotten and repressed pagan culture. 7. A BBC documentary, directed by Monica Garnsey, broadcast on 24 November 2009, bears the title An Iranian Martyr. 8. In the following days, the mainstream daily Hurriyet launched an online poll on the question: ‘Is it rightful to say “We are all Armenians” in protest of the Dink murder?’ More than 450,000 people replied, nearly half of the respondents with a ‘yes’. This case of performing cosmopolitanism was widely acknowledged as a significant indication that things are changing within Turkish society. There is a new, important trend towards embracing the historical ‘other’. The ‘others’ note this, too. In his piece in the Turkish Daily News,

Aleida Assmann and Corinna Assmann 241 the former prime minister of Armenia, Armen Darbinyan, wrote, ‘Armenians in Armenia did not anticipate such a sincere manifestation of solidarity’ [in Turkey for Hrant Dink] … This leaves no doubt that a core transformation in the worldview of today’s Turkey has occurred … [which] should become a turning point in the relations between Turkish and Armenian nations’ (White Path 2007).

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Mignolo, Walter D. (2000), ‘The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture 12 (3), 721–48. Mitchell, William J. Thomas (2005), What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press). Observer (2009), ‘Caspian Makan: “I cannot believe it yet. I still think I will see Neda again”’, The Observer, 15 November. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2009/nov/15/iran-neda-caspian-makan-interview (last visited 9 January 2010). Orwell, George (1961), 1984 (New York: Hartcourt, Brace and Co). Paul, Gerhard (2005), Der Bilderkrieg. Inszenierungen, Bilder und Perspektiven der Operation Irakische Freiheit (Göttingen: Wallstein). RFE: Allnutt, Luke (2009), ‘Reenactment of Neda’s Death’. Radio Free Europe, 3 December. http://www.rferl.org/content/Reenactment_Of_Nedas_Death/ 1894397.html (last visited 9 January 2010). RSF: ‘An election without free flow of news and information is not democratic’. Reporters Sans Frontières, 14 June 2009. http://www.rsf.org/An-electionwithout-free-flow-of.html (last visited 9 January 2010). Times 1: ‘Person of the Year’. The Times, 26 December 2009. http://www. timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article6968197.ece (last visited 9 January 2010). Times 2: Fletcher, Martin (2009), ‘Iranian doctor Arash Hejazi who tried to rescue Neda Soltan tells of wounds that never heal’. The Times, 13 November. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6913273.ece (last visited 4 March 2010). Times 3: Fletcher, Martin (2009), ‘Grave of Neda Soltan desecrated by supporters of Iranian regime’. The Times, 16 November. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ tol/news/world/middle_east/article6917831.ece (last visited 9 January 2010). Times 4: Fletcher, Martin (2010), ‘Neda Soltan’s grave defaced as Iran issues new internet restrictions’. The Times, 8 January. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ news/world/middle_east/article6979914.ece (last visited 9 January 2010). Washington: Erdbrink, Thomas and William Branigin (2009), ‘Iranian cleric says protesters wage war against God’. Washington Post, 27 June. http://www.boston. com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2009/06/27/iranian_cleric_says_protesters_ wage_war_against_god/?page=2 (last visited 9 January 2010). White Path: Akyol, Mustafa (2007), ‘The Hrant Dink Murder and Its Meaning’. The White Path, 20 January. http://www.thewhitepath.com/archives/2007/01/ the_hrant_dink_murder_and_its_meaning.php (last visited 3 March 2010). WSJ: Rhoads, Christopher and Loretta Chao (2009), ‘Iran’s Web Spying Aided By Western Technology’. Wall Street Journal, 22 June. http://online.wsj.com/ article/SB124562668777335653.html (last visited 9 January 2010).

Name Index Abendroth, Wolfgang, 81 Agha-Soltan, Neda, 14, 225–32 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 113 Anders, Günther, 81, 86 Anderson, Benedict, 205 Andric´, Ivo, 197 Appadurai, Arjun, 1, 3 Arano Yasunori, 171 Arrighi, Giovanni, 164 Assmann, Aleida, 1–15, 11ff., 24, 97–120, 122, 128, 203, 208, 212, 226–41 Assmann, Corinna, 226–41 Assmann, Jan, 109, 121–38, 203 Baldwin, James, 81 Barkan, Elazar, 20, 33, 80 Basso, Lelio, 81, 91 Bauer, Yehuda, 101 Baumann, Robert, 205, 220 Beck, Ulrich, 106, 201 Begin, Menahem, 148 Behrendt, Larissa, 43, 45f. Ben Gurion, David, 145ff. Bhabha, Homi K., 201 Bolton, Grace , 13, 181–97 Brandt, Willy, 7, 155 Bruce Lee, 13, 181–97 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 81 Celermajer, Danielle,10, 32–54 Che Guevara, 69, 85, 235 Ching, Leo, 164f. Conrad, Sebastian, 1–17, 163–77 Coward, Martin, 185 Daase, Christopher, 10, 19–31 de Beauvoir, Simone, 81, 86 Dedijer, Vladimir, 81, 86 Deutscher, Isaac, 81, 86 Diner, Dan, 8, 100, 105f., 146ff. Dink, Hrant, 239ff.

Dizdar, Mak, 181 Dodson, Mick, 44ff. Dodson, Patrick, 45f. Dulles, John Foster, 84f. Eichmann, Adolf, 80, 106, 147 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 84 Fanon, Franz, 89 Fejo-King, Christine, 42 Fujioka Nobukatsu, 172f. Gatalo, Veselin, 181, 192–5 Gilbert, Helen, 237 Gilbert, Margaret, 22–6 Gluck, Carol, 168, 170 Gooder, Haydie, 47f., 54 Gogol Bordello, 200–5, 215ff. Graham, Chris, 44 Grass, Günter, 93, 144, 155 Grossman, Haika, 81 Gunzburger Makaš, Emily, 182f., 186ff. Halbwachs, Maurice, 24, 99, 108 Halimi, Gisele, 81 Hall, Stuart, 214 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 164 Hejazi, Arash, 226, 230f. Howard, John, 38f., 45 Hromadžic´, Azra, 182, 188, 190 Ienaga Saburô, 167 Jacobs, Jane, 47f. Jelin, Elizabeth, 11, 61–78 Jergovic, Miljenko, 181 Jordan, Jennifer, 5 Jünger, Ernst, 13 Karatani Kôjin, 167 Kasuri, Mahmud Ali, 81 Kawakatsu Heita, 172

243

244

Name Index

Kawashima-Watkins, Yoko, 141–5, 154f. Knigge, Volkhard, 100 Kula, Witold, 138, 150 Kusturica, Emir, 195 Langton, Marcia, 43 Laudan´ski Brothers, 139, 148 Lechner, Frank, 218 Lee, Bruce see Bruce Lee Lemkin, Rafael, 82f. Levi, Primo, 97 Levy, Daniel, 8f., 80f., 106, 205, 220 Lim Jie-Hyun, 12, 138–62 Lo, Jacqueline, 237 Lyotard, Jean-François, 219 Manu Chao, 199f., 218 Mandel, Ernest, 82 Marcuse, Herbert, 89 Matisyahu, 200, 202, 204f., 210–19 McCarthy, Thomas, 53 Meir, Golda, 148 Mignolo, Walter D., 237 Molden, Berthold, 11, 79–95 Moses, Dirk, 10, 32–58, 83 Müller, Jan-Werner, 5 Muzurovic´, Nerina, 13, 181–98

Povinelli, Elizabeth, 47 Puce, Sandi, 188 Raspudic´, Nino, 192ff. Robertson, Roland, 219 Rolph-Trouillot, Michel, 8, 20, 28, 32, 34 Rudd, Kevin., 11, 19, 35, 39–42 Russell, Bertrand, 11, 81–91 Sadeh, Yitzhak, 146 Šantic´, Aleksa, 181, 183, 190 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 81–4, 187–92 Segev, Tom, 8, 147–8 Sells, Michael, 186 Settis, Salvatore, 233 Shaltiel, David, 145 Slawson, John, 146 Sobral, Ana, 14, 199–224 Steinbach, Erika, 157 Stokely, Carmichael, 81, 88 Sznaider, Natan, 8f., 80f., 106f., 205, 220 Tavakoli, Delbar, 225 Telford, Taylor, 88 Uhl, Heidemarie, 5, 16, 115, 117

Nafisi, Azar, 235 Nishio Kanji, 172 Oglesby, Carl, 81 Ong, Walter J., 203 Orwell, George, 208, 231f.

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 92, 172 Warburg, Aby, 233 Weinberg, Werner, 145 Weiss, Peter, 81, 86f. Wilson, Charles, 84

Pal, Radhabinod, 152 Park Chung-Hee, 145

Yamahata Yosuke, 154 Yun Chung Ok, 169

Subject Index aborigines, 35–48 see also Maori, Stolen Generations Abraševic´ Youth Center, 183, 188–90, 195 accountability, 2, 7, 10, 52, 138ff. Africa/African, 7, 19, 24, 27, 32f., 80, 85, 90, 107ff., 131, 210–19 American Jewish Committee, 146 Anti-defamation League, 146 anti-global, 218, see also fundamentalism, nationalist movements, World Social Forum anti-semitism, 81, 90, 102–4, 113, 146, 148–51 Jews, Nazis apology, 7–11, 19–29, 32–53, 148, 151–9, 166–8 Australian apology, 36, 41–6, 48 Survey of A., 11, 36 apostasy, 128 Argentina, 11, 61–75, 91, 103 see also CONADEP, Never Again Report. Two Demons art, artist, 5, 13, 66, 127, 187, 190–5, 199–202, 213, 216, 233–40 Asia/Asian, 13, 80, 90, 143, 153, 156, 163–75, 208f. A. Values, 166 A. Women’s Fund, 169 see also China, East Asia, Indochina, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, PAAME, Panasianism, Southern Asia, Taiwan assimilation, 35, 47, 52f., 86, 127–9, 148, 203, 213, 219 atrocities, 69, 114, 141–66 Auschwitz-Birkenau, 80–9, 89–11, 144–52 Australia/Australian, 10f., 19, 32–53, 108

apology, 36, 41–6, 48 Social Movement, 38, 50f. Austria/Austrian, 5, 86, 155 Axial Age, axiality, 12, 109, 121 Balkan War, 13 Beijing, 166, 173 Belgium, 7, 33 Beneš decree, 157 Berlin, 5, 112, 182 Berlin Wall, 70, 90, 155, 168 Bible, 129, 133 Babylonian Exile, 213 Biblical Imagery, 209 Jerusalem, 210–20 Old Testament, 210–12 Psalm, 137, 212–14 see also Rastafarianism Bosnia-Herzegovina, 13, 181, 185 Brazil/Brazilian, 11, 61–72, 91, 199 see also Never Again Report Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV), 157 canonization, 125–7 capitalism, 1, 3, 10, 34, 47, 82, 87, 92, 139, 150, 164, 193, 206, 218 censorship, 154, 228–32 Chile, 11, 61–75, 85 Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación, 68 Comición Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura, 73 see also Never Again Report, Two Demons China/Chinese, 27, 108, 111, 121, 123, 152–5, 163–71, 191, 194, 215 see also Bejing, Ming Dynasty, Nanking, Qing Dynasty, Taiwan Christianity/Christian, 32, 127, 133, 171 see also Bible, Church, Religion

245

246

Subject Index

Church, 35–8, 187–9 Franciscan C. of Saints Peter and Paul, 185f. Roman Catholic C., 32 civil society, 1, 5, 102, 168, 170 transnational c., 22 civilization, 19, 79, 105, 108, 110, 121, 127, 165, 172, 173 Cold War, 7, 12, 16, 32f., 65, 70, 75, 79–93, 146, 153–6, 163–73, 182, 219 collective, 3, 4, 20–9, 33, 66, 84, 111, 138–59, 203–5, 212 c. guilt, 20–9, 35, 139–59 c. identities, 12, 200–3, 213, see also “We” c. memory, 2, 4, 11, 13, 19–29, 99, 111, 122f., 138–59, 208, 217, 219, 225, 235 c. trauma, 98, 106, 108 colonialism, 1, 9, 19, 27, 47, 49–53, 83, 158, 171, 208 comfort women see prostitution commision/comisión, 33, 41, 62, 68, 69, 73, 105, 151 American-organized Citizen C. of Inquiry, 88 Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity C., 36f. C. Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación see Chile C. Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura see Chile C. Para la Paz see Uruguay Russel C., 81–7, 87–91 Truth (and Reconciliation) C., 5, 11, 24, 32, 68, 75, 79 see also CONADEP commemoration, 5f., 62, 102–12, 140, 147, 183 communication, 3–7, 14, 65, 99, 114, 122, 140, 183, 187, 216f., 227, 229, 232, 235 CONADEP (National Commission on the Disappeared, Argentina), 11, 68 see also commissions, Human Rights Movement, transition

concentration camp, 86–9, 97, 144, 147, 150, 192, 214 see also Auschwitz-Birkenau conference see Stockholm, Tricontinental C. Confucianism, 133, 166 Congo, 7, 33 conversation, 40, 237 cosmopolitanism, 183, 237–9 critical c., 237–9 cultural c., 237f. universal c., 237 vernacular c., 201f. culture, 8, 14, 39, 87, 98, 100–9, 113, 121, 125–34, 139, 165f., 173, 189, 193f., 200–20 counterculture, 87, 218 diasporic c., 220 global c., 28 hegemonic c., 201f. literate c., 203 media c., 13 memory c., 5, 8 multicultural, 2, 13, 47, 53, 104, 144, 182–7, 200, 209, 214, 217 music c., 203f., 214, 217 oral c., 14, 203–5 performance c. see performance political c., 39–41, 49 print c., 203f. subculture, 219 youth c., 13 de-asianization, 166f. decolonization, 11, 80–92, 167 see also colonialism decontextualization, 109f., 141, 144f., 156–9 democracy/democratic, 5, 50, 62f., 70, 74f., 82, 89f., 110, 127, 150, 165, 229, 232 d. participation, 4 diaspora, 100, 201 dictatorship, 11, 61–73, 91, 145, 159 difference, 7–12, 42, 48–53, 87, 98, 113, 123, 132f., 163–5, 201f., 209, 218, 238f. diffusion, 13, 87–93, 123, 127, 166

Subject Index 247 discourse, 1–5, 11–13, 28, 37f., 47, 50–2, 64–70, 74f., 79–93, 97, 103–114, 140–8, 154–9, 163, 167f., 173–7, 195 counter-d. strategies, 209 dissemination, 106, 114, 121, 235 dynamics, 2–6, 10–12, 71, 99, 122, 163–6, 170, 174, 227f. dialectic d. of globalization, 133 Dutch, 88, 171 see also Netherlands East Asia, 9–13, 84f., 141–8, 153f., 163–74 see also Greater East Asian War economy/economic, 2f., 8–14, 34, 39, 62, 69–72, 82–85, 99, 111, 121, 134, 150, 163–73, 218 E. Blocks, 10 Edo period, 172 see also Japan emotion, 4, 14, 20, 22, 34, 40, 42, 46, 70, 82, 104, 110, 152, 169, 203, 228, 233–6 Emperor of Japan (Hirohito), 153, 166 see also Japan empire, 121, 124–8, 174, 206 Austro-Hungarian e., 13 British e., 208 Ottoman e., 13 see also colonialism ethnicity/ethnic, 28, 32–5, 80, 85, 91, 128, 133, 144, 149f., 159, 182f., 187, 192–5, 200, 206, 213–20 Gypsy/Roma, 112, 182, 200–4, 215–18 Jewish e. see Jews e. minorities, 206 multiethnic, 183, 200 eurocentrism/eurocentric, 144, 172 Europe/European, 3, 5, 11, 63, 79–81, 87–93, 98–112, 141–8, 153–65, 171, 199f., 204f., 209, 216–21 Eastern E., 9, 79, 87, 90, 156, 200, 205, 216–19 E. memory, 100, 104 E. Union (EU), 3, 102, 157, 165 evidence (secondary), 228

exile, 63, 67, 75, 89, 146, 230 eyewitness, 229f. fascism, 139, 167, 193 forgetting, 34, 63, 148, 213, 231 see also oblivion anxiety of f., 121–34 forgiveness, 24–8, 42, 48, 51f. France, 5, 27, 83, 89, 104f., 146, 191 Franciscan Church of Saints Peter and Paul see Church fundamentalism, 129–33, 201 generation, 6, 23–5, 34f., 65, 70f., 80, 107, 122–5, 138, 159, 173, 184, 195, 200, 214, 219, 232 Stolen G. see Stolen Generations genocide, 2, 7f., 19, 23f., 27f., 46, 79–93, 97–105, 111f., 139, 147–52, 157 G. Convention, 79 geopolitics/geopolitical, 164, 168, 174, 186f. Germany, 7, 11f., 21, 27, 33, 86, 98–104, 111, 140–6, 152, 155–7, 230 East G., 156 Nazi G., 11, 21, 99, 122, 140 West G., 89f., 146, 156, 167 global g. capitalism, 3, 10, 164, 206, 218 g. communication, 114, 235 g. counterculture, 218 g. culture see culture g. history, 79–81 g. media see media see also internet g. music, 14, 200–5, 210, 218 g. observation, 228 globalization, 2–14, 19, 28f., 34, 74, 99, 106–8, 121–34, 163f., 194, 200–2, 218f., 237 cultural convergence 201 de-territorialization, 103, 204 see also anti-global, global music, transnational Great Britain, 33, 164, 206, 208f., 220 see also Queen

248

Subject Index

Greater East Asian War, 167 guilt, 5, 19–29, 34f., 46, 81, 86, 110, 139–44, 150–4, 159 collective g., 20–5, 139–44, 159 historical g., 23–5 political g., 20–4 Hawaii/Hawaiian, 7, 33 hellenization, 127 Hellenism, 12, 124, 127, 129 hereditary victimhood see victimhood Hikiage, 142, 154 Hiroshima, 152–4 H. Peace Memorial Park, 154 histoire croisée, 140f. historian/historical, 5–12, 101, 105, 159, 173 h. memory, 74, 90, 98, 99–114, 156, 195 h. trauma, 12, 74, 111–14 historiography, 90, 99, 126, 145, 149, 155, 172f. Holland see Netherlands holocaust, globalization of h., 74 h. memorial, 98, 101–4 multiperspectival quality of h., 101 see also Jews, Kielce pogrom, memory human rights inalienable rights, 67 international denunciations, 67 language of h.r., 67 h.r. movement, 66f., 71 paradigm, 11, 66–70, 75 universal Declaration of H., 79, 81 hybridity, 201 icon(s), 13, 49, 106, 192, 226f. global i., 10–13, 98, 109–14, 179ff., 181, 192–4, 225ff. iconicity, 235 identity, 4f., 23, 28f., 32, 38, 45, 48–52, 72, 99f., 107f., 122f., 128–34, 143, 147, 181–7, 194, 199–201, 205, 211–17 diachronic I., 122f. images, 3f., 13, 28, 70, 109, 113f., 122, 195, 203, 219, 225–39

photographic i., 232 cluster of i., 234 immigrants see migration impact factor, 233 imperialism/imperialist, 7,9, 32, 80–82, 92, 122–9, 133, 165, 170f. see also colonialism Indochina, 84 International institutions I. Criminal Court, 24 I. Monetary Fund (IMF), 3 I. Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF), 101–5, 108, 112f. I. Women’s War Crimes Tribunal, 169 internationalism, 122–6, 133, 150 internet, 3–6, 99, 114, 169, 200–4, 214, 219–21, 225–39 hyperlinks, 204, 219 YouTube, 204, 229 see also global media, social networking Iran/Iranian, 14, 113, 225–39 I. opposition movement, 225–39 I. presidential election 2009, 14, 225f. Israel, 8, 12, 80, 98, 100–4, 126, 140–52, 159, 191, 212–15 see also Jews Japan, 7, 9, 12, 15, 27, 33, 100, 108, 111, 138–59, 163–74 atomic bombing of J., 154 Liberal Democratic Party of J. (LPD), 165 see also Edo Period, Emperor of Japan, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Pearl Harbor, Tokyo Jedwabne massacre, 149 Jews, 7f., 23, 27, 32, 79–93, 97–134, 138, 144–59, 182, 187, 199–222 see also American Jewish Committee, Anti-semitism, Israel, Yihshuv, Zionism journalism (street j.), 229 justice, transitional, see transition

Subject Index 249 Kielce pogrom, 151 Korea, 12, 27, 138–59, 163–75 see also North Korea, Seoul, South Korea Krebsgang, im, 144, 155f. labour, 3 forced l., 9, 80, 105, 153, 156f., 168 Labor Party, 35–41, 84 Latin America, 9, 11, 24, 32, 61–75, 80, 84f., 90f., 107, 199, 214 lieu de mémoire, 100 limits, 50, 64, 97–114 lingua franca, 124f., 129 Malaysia, 165 Manga, 166 Maori, 7, 19, 33 martyr, 147, 225, 230, 236f. martyrdom, 14, 129, 138, 149f., 236f. Marxism, marxist, 82, 86f., 167, 172 Matisyahu, 200–5, 210–14, 218f. media, 4, 10–15, 56, 103–15, 142, 161, 169, 173, 206, 213f., 229, 239 electronic m., 201, 203, 232 global m., 4, 111, 203f., 219 mass m., 3, 14, 99, 103, 106, 114, 141f. m. attention, 6, 9 m. culture see culture m. events, 4 print m., 114, 231 memory global m., 7, 11, 14, 32–6, 97–114, 123, 199–220 codification of m., 130 collective m., 11, 13, 20, 24, 27f., 99, 108, 122, 140, 147f., 151, 154, 208, 217, 219, 225, 235 communicative m., 98, 102, 122 conflictual political past, 61 Counter-Memory, 208 cultural m., 98, 102, 122–6, 133f., 200, 203f., 208, 213–16, 219 m. culture see culture official m., 167 personal m., 231 political m., 122

public m., 10, 61, 90, 145, 149–56, 163, 169 reorganization of m., 126 selective m., 214 spatial contexts, 61, 174 stages of m., 64 subversive force of m., 231 transnational m., 8–12, 97–103, 112f., 138, 168 western m., 11, 80 migration, 97, 165, 172, 201 immigrants, 147, 199f., 208, 218f. immigration, 146, 148, 165, 200, 213 emigration, 144 Ming Dynasty, 171 mnemohistory, 98, 103 modernity/modernization, 106, 170–4, 201 secondary modernity, 106, 201 monument, 6, 62, 72, 98, 103, 114, 150, 185–7, 191–7 see also Bruce Lee, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Holocaust Memorial Berlin moral consciousness, 5, 98 Mostar, 13, 181–95 see also Abrasevic Youth Center, Old Bridge, Old Mostar Gymnasium multiculturalism, 47, 53 museum, 6, 73, 98, 103f., 110–14, 145 music global m., 14, 200–5, 210, 218 Hip-Hop, 202 MTV, 214 m. video, 204, 214f., 219f. m. performance see performance pop m., 14, 166, 200–4, 212f. Punk, 202, 215 Rap, 199f. Reggae, 199f, 202, 208, 210, 212, 214, 221 Rock, 200, 202 song lyrics, 205, 208, 218f. Nagasaki, 154f., 171 Nanjing massacre, 166, 168 National Security Doctrine, 65

250

Subject Index

nationalism/nationalists, 5, 12, 32, 128, 169, 171f., 187, 190, 193–5, 201, 239 victimhood n., 138–59 nation state, 6, 8, 61–4, 106, 163, 201 nazis/Nazism, 83, 86, 89, 104f., 146, 149–51, 155–8 Netherlands, 5 Never Again Report, 69, 74 Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs), 2f., 37, 68, 75, 103, 112, 165, 169 North Korea, 12, 142 Nuremberg Trial, 24, 79, 81–8 see also Germany, Nazis, War

Pope, 7, 19, 32 popular music see music postcolonialism/postcolonial, 7, 11, 46ff., 52, 80, 85ff.,145, 170, 199, 207ff. see also counter-discursive strategies prostitution, Comfort Women, 13, 141, 153, 168–74 forced p., 9, 13, 169, 173 public space, 7, 98, 169, 183, 187, 190ff., 228, 237ff. public sphere, 2, 5ff., 10, 22, 61,67ff. global p., 7, 80, 139 transnational p., 5ff.

oblivion, 66, 72, 129f., 153 see also forgetting OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 3 Old Bridge (‘Stari Most’), 182–6, 195 Old Mostar Gymnasium (‘Stara Gimnazija’), 190f. Operation Condor, 63

Qing Dynasty, 171 Queen, British, 7, 19, 33

PAAHE (Parents for an Accurate Asian History Education), 143f. Pacific War, 153, 167 Pan-Asianism, 171 Paraguay, 62–4 past, conflicting interpretations, 70, 168 conflictual political p., 61 salvationist discourse on p., 70 normalization of the P., 72 pathos formula, 233 Pearl Harbor, 167 performance (musical), 14, 202ff. political p., 39f., 230 cultural p., 62, 237 keying of p., 205, 209, 214f. petit récits, 219 Poland, 5, 12, 90, 105, 139ff., 148ff. see also Jedwabne massacre politics/political p. culture see Culture p. of history, 79ff. p. performance see performance

racism, 33, 44, 46, 51f., 88ff., 104, 154, 204, 219 Rastafarianism, 210 reconciliation, 5, 19f., 29, 33–8, 44ff., 48, 53, 72f., 139, 158, 183ff. see also Sorry Day Bringing them Home, 35ff. refugees, 146, 155, 200 regionalism/regions, 8–13, 16, 34, 61–7, 99, 107ff., 138, 163–77 religion, 1, 124–134, 195, 209ff., 222, 236 see also Bible, Christianity, Church, Rastafarianism remorse, 20f, 25ff., 30, 51 reorientation, 126f. reparation, 7, 21, 24, 32ff., 62, 72f. Reporting Ban, 228 responsibility, 21–5, 30f., 38f., 52f., 67, 71, 101, 112, 148f., 153, 157, 237 collective r., 20, 25–7, 29ff. individual r., 21 moral r., 5, 26, 30, 148 state/political r., 29, 169 historical r., 21, 158f. revisionism, 86, 155, 166, 173ff., 187 Russell Tribunal, 11, 81–91 see also commissions Ryûkyû Islands, 171

Subject Index 251 sacralisation, 99, 105, 140 Sakoku see seclusion Sanacja Regime, 139 SCAP (Supreme Command of the Allied Powers), 153–4 seclusion (Sakoku), 13, 172f., 175 Seoul, 142, 166, 173 Shogun, 171 social networking, 226ff. Facebook, 204, 229 MySpace, 200, 204 Twitter, 227ff. society, 4, 22, 41f., 66–9, 72f., 83, 89, 85, 102, 106, 126, 134, 149, 168–72, 239f. see also civil society Sorry Day, 37 South Korea, 12, 145, 170 Southern Cone see Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay Soviet Union, 32, 152, 156, 168 Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, 89 spatial turn, 6 Stockholm, 81, 101f. S. Conference, 106f. stolen generations, 11, 32–58 Students for a Democratic Society, 89 Switzerland, 5, 105 syncretism, 129f., 133 Taiwan, 163ff. telecommunication, 3 television, 13, 39, 106, 110, 114, 166–9, 183, 203, 227ff. terror, 61, 64–70, 85, 92, 105, 156,165, 226 September, 11, 232 London Underground 2005, 232 Topography of T., 112 textbooks (History), 104, 169, 173 Third World (Three Worlds), 7, 9, 11, 81, 84, 91, 206 time range, 122 Tlatelolco, 91 Tokugawa Period, 171f. Tokyo, 24, 79, 81, 152, 169, 172 T. Trial, 152 T. University, 172

totalitarian regimes, 226, 231f. tourism, 2 trade, 38, 91, 165, 171f. slave t., 19, 33 tradition, 8, 13f., 24, 43, 69, 123, 125, 130ff., 182, 184, 187, 190, 200f., 213, 236, 239 transethnic, 133 transition, 63–70, 85, 91, 122, 126, 133 political t., 64–6 Truth Commission, 11, 24, 32, 34, 68, 75 see also Human Rights Movement, transitional justice, victims transitional justice, 24, 34, 68 transnational, 2–14, 22, 32ff., 61, 72, 74, 78ff., 105, 115, 119, 133ff., 141ff., 166–74, 199, 217, 224 t. character, 97, 128 t. history, 139ff. t. memory, 8–12, 97–103, 112f., 138, 168–203 trauma, 12, 34ff., 42, 54ff., 74, 97ff., 107–16, 127, 150, 196, 213 c. trauma, 98, 106, 108 cultural t., 107, 116ff. Tribunal Permanente de los Pueblos, 91 Tricontinental Conference, 90 truth T. and Reconciliation Commissions see Commissions concept of t., 122 T. Trials, 73 two demons, theory of, 69 UNESCO (United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organisation), 3, 185 United States, 11, 87, 92, 107 see also Pearl Harbor United World College, 183, 190f., 195 Universal Declaration of Human Rights see Human Rights Urban Movement Group, 187 Uruguay, 11, 61ff. Comisión Para la Paz, 72

252

Subject Index

vernacular cosmopolitanism see cosmopolitanism victim/victimhood hereditary v., 138f., 141ff. v. nationalism, 138–59 Vietnam War, 11, 80ff. war massacre, 19, 32f., 83f., 91, 111, 141, 151f., 159, 166–8 postwar military trials, 7 w. crimes trials, 7 w. crimes tribunal, 81, 169 World W. (Second World War), 12, 24, 33, 74, 80, 92, 97–100, 110–12, 141ff., 167, 174, 182

see also Balkan W., Cold W., Greater East Asian W., Jedwabne massacre, Nanjing massacre, Pacific W., Pearl Harbor, Vietnam W. Warsaw, 7, 150 Waseda University, 172 “We”, 45, 52 World Social Forum, 218 WTO, 3 Yishuv (Settlement of Jews in Palestine), 146 Yugoslavia, 32, 182, 194, 199 Zionism, 145–6, 210 Zivilisationsbruch, 105

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