On March 9, the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies co-sponsored a screening and discussion of Claude Lanzmann's new film The Last of the Unjust with the Art Theater Coop and the Champaign-Urbana Jewish Federation. You can also read Prof. Laurie Johnson's response to the screening here. By Brett Ashley Kaplan The title of Lanzmann’s newest film inverts the title of an important 1959 novel by André Schwartz-Bart, Le derniers des justes (The Last of the Just); it is the principal subject of the film, Benjamin Murmelstein (1905-1989), a Rabbi and Elder of the Jewish Community in Vienna (1938-1943) and Theresienstadt (1944-1945) who coins the title by telling us that he is not exactly the last of the unjust but rather the last of the guards. This tension between a self-representation as unjust and as a guardian of the imperiled Jews of Vienna and beyond marks Murmelstein’s testimony. Before seeing the film I had expected that Lanzmann would push Murmelstein more vociferously about the question that always arises in the context of the Jewish community leaders: the continuum between victimization and perpetration that structurally located them. Instead, Lanzmann frames the testimony of Murmelstein, which he filmed in Rome in 1975 but chose not to include in his vast Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985), within a larger narrative about Theresienstadt, about how place and memory work together and against each other, and about the masking practices of Nazi propaganda. Throughout the film, Lanzmann forever presses on the absence of the traces in the gritty landscapes on which his unwavering gaze falls; he “ruingazes” the lost past.[i] Lanzmann begins The Last of the Unjust by echoing Shoah. Having himself filmed on a train platform in Bohušovice, the stop for Theresienstadt, we are set up to be reminded of Shoah, not only because trains conjure deportations but also because he stylistically replicates the long pans of and sounds of trains and landscapes characteristic of the earlier film. When Lanzmann tells us that Theresienstadt had the “le pire” conditions he obviously knows exactly the enormous weight that this term carries; “le pire” (the worst) features in many, many French memoirs, novels, testimonies, and theory as shorthand for the extermination of European Jewry. The closing of the film makes a complete circle; whereas in the opening it is Lanzmann, alone, with memories of Shoah, by the close two middle aged survivors, Lanzmann, now joined by Murmelstein, whom he sympathetically terms a “tiger,” walk towards the camera with the Arch of Titus framing them, but then they turn and walk back towards the arch, which rises into the frame as they approach, thus structurally reversing Hitler’s triumphant take over of Paris with all its attendant scenes of Nazis marching through l’Arc de Triomphe. The triumph over forgetting, Lanzmann seems to be arguing here, may not take the bombastic form one might expect; it may be a talking cure. Der Führer Schenkt den Juden eine Stadt Theresienstadt was an idyllic spot which then became an “apocalyptic vision;” in order to convey this apocalypse, and in stark contrast to Shoah, Lanzmann here uses archival footage: several stills and also long excerpts from the Nazi propaganda film made inside Terezin in order to “fool” the Red Cross and therefore the world into believing that the Jews of Europe were merely being held in lovely, music and art filled conditions and not exterminated. Theresienstadt was indeed a model ghetto; but when using the archival footage from the propaganda film Lanzmann inserts “mise-en-scène Nazie” over the left-hand of each frame thus foregrounding the fakeness of the film and never once letting us be sucked into the propaganda about the ghetto. Lanzmann shows images from some of the many artists incarcerated in Theresienstadt including Bedrich Fritta, who was born in Višnová, Bohemia in 1906 and killed at Auschwitz in 1944. From 17 May until 29 September, 2013, Fritta’s drawings were on display at the Jewish Museum, Berlin. In describing the exhibit, the Museum locates subterfuge as the center of Fritta’s deportation from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. Along with Leo Haas and others, these artists, “secretly used the studio materials to record the misery of everyday ghetto life” and for this they were deported. Haas survived and after the war adopted Fritta’s son Thomáš.[ii] Later in the film when Lanzmann is in Prague at the Pinkas Synagogue he gazes at the memorial there—a memorial designed between 1954 and 1959 but closed for several years due to the poor physical state of the building. The memorial lists the names of the 77, 297 victims from Bohemia and Moravia.[iii] While the camera pans these names Lanzmann tells us that they are so crowded together as to resist legibility; but then the camera settles on the name of Bedrich Fritta thus bringing us back to the images at the beginning and reminding us of the aesthetic revolution that lead to Fritta’s death. He focuses on an image of Fritta’s name to hone in on one person and to combat the sense of the endless, endless wash of the undifferentiated dead. The Back of Murmelstein’s Head The first image of Murmelstein is an extremely uncomfortable, odd, prolonged close up of the back of his head; throughout the course of the interviews Lanzmann’s camera man will focus in closely on Murmelstein’s face—especially during the scenes filmed in a small room as opposed to those shot in the open on Murmelstein’s pleasant balcony; in many of these close-ups Lanzmann and/or the camera man are clearly visibly reflected in Murmelstein’s coke-bottle glasses thus always reminding us of the constructed nature even of documentaries. As Lilya Kaganovsky argues, this is Lanzmann’s “way of trying to get ‘in’ to understand Benjamin Murmelstein, and in the end that fails; the glasses work the same way, instead of offering us a 'window to the soul' (as eyes are supposed to do), his glasses just reflect back ourselves.”[iv] Murmelstein tells us his field is mythology and indeed throughout the film he compares himself to a number of literary and mythological figures—beginning with Orpheus—and tells us that like his mythological forbear he did not want to look back into the past but felt compelled to do so; he also compares himself to Scheherazade from A Thousand and One Nights in that they are both compelled to ceaselessly tell stories. He had been silent for thirty years and when Lanzmann asks him why that was the case he replies, “other people talked too much.” In 1961 Murmelstein published Terezin; il ghetto-modello di Eichmann (Bologna: Capelli) but had not spoken about Theresienstadt publicly until his 1975 interview with Lanzmann. Murmelstein is the only Jewish Elder of Theresienstadt to have survived the war. When he first gave testimony—and he volunteered to do so as he stresses that he had been issued a diplomatic Red Cross passport and thus could, at the end of the war, have escaped but instead he decided to stay in Czechoslovakia and face trial—when he first testified he was asked, abruptly, “how did you survive?” Murmelstein compares himself to other elders, including Chaim Rumkowski ([1877-1944], Chairman of the Judenrat in the Lodz ghetto) who, according to Murmelstein, understood himself as a tragio-comic figure. He felt mocked by the Nazis, and, from the Nazi perspective all the Jewish leaders were marionettes in their games. Rumkowski portrayed himself as a marionette but Murmelstein does not want to see himself this way. Murmelstein was the third and final Elder of Theresienstadt, after Jacob Edelstein (1903-1944) and Paul Epstein (1902-1944).[v] Murmelstein was faced with an impossible choice between taking advantage of the betterments offered by the very project—ultimately to serve Nazi propaganda--of the embellishment of the ghetto for the film or being shot like Edelstein or hung like Eppstein. Murmelstein insists that his choice to work with the Nazis ultimately helped many of those incarcerated. At one point, Murmelstein discovers lice and typhus and he decides that the only effective way to get the population of Theresienstadt to agree to be inoculated would be to only issue daily rations of food to those who had a stamped inoculation card; on the one hand, this could be read as refusing food to the hungry, but on the other hand this could be read as saving the population of the ghetto from the epidemic. After the war, Murmelstein was accused of attempting to starve the inhabitants; he defended himself by stating that he was trying to save them through these harsh measures and describes himself several times as someone who chose pragmatic if harsh measures. He sees himself as having always made the best choices in an impossible situation; the film does not close down our opinion but rather leaves open the decision as to whether we agree with this self-assessment. One of the important historical contributions to the film is that Murmelstein discounts Arendt’s famous theory of the “banality of evil” by finding from his first-hand experience that, rather than an automaton-bureaucrat pushing papers that murdered hundreds of thousands of people, Eichmann was there on Kristallnacht (10 November 1938), with a crowbar, smashing synagogues. Lanzmann, a little incredulous, presses Murmelstein to clarify that Eichmann himself had a crowbar and Murmelstein emphatically confirms. Murmelstein insists that “demon” would be a much more appropriate word for Eichmann than “banal.” Landscapes The international scope of the genocide and those who are left to remember is underscored by the landscape switching between Bohušovice, Rome, Jerusalem, Vienna, Prague, Theresienstadt, Nisko, Zarzcezce. Quite abruptly and without any explanation the scenes often shift while the testimony of Murmelstein continues; for example, just after explaining that the Nazis saw the Jewish leaders as marionettes, Lanzmann moves to contemporary Jerusalem and features a long series of shots from a car driving down a picturesque road with iconic Israeli landscapes unfurling behind. Then, again abruptly, there is way too much lush, green to be in Israel and after several seconds of panning over all this lushness a caption appears explaining that these are the vineyards outside Vienna. Testimony from 1975 plays over the landscape of 2013. In the opening text of the film Lanzmann tells us that Murmelstein has a “pure love” for Israel but has never gone there; at the close of the film Lanzmann asks why he has never traveled there and Murmelstein replies that the Israelis could not try him properly. Israel appears then, as “pure love” as a series of landscapes shot from a moving car, as the place that did not try Eichmann properly, and as the natural response when presented with evidence of genocide. This last point happens when Lanzmann, regarding one of the memorial plaques entitled the Gedenkweg [path of memory/chemin de la pensée] in Vienna happens upon six non-Jewish Viennese who are taking the memory walk and who, once they have read the plaque, unfurl an Israeli flag.[vi] Murmelstein tells us that he was issued two certificates for Israel in 1939 which he gave to a student instead of taking his wife and child to Palestine because he informs us that he needed to stay and the student and his wife did emigrate; Murmelstein wonders whether he did the right thing in giving the certificates away and forever forgoing this landscape of pure, unrequited, love. Lanzmann lingers over a long take of a cantor singing first the Kol Nidre and then the Kaddish for all the Jews killed during the war. This is the only music in the entire film. The cantor himself then becomes another landscape over which Lanzmann projects his discourse; in this case he describes a memorial for the 65,000 names of the Viennese Jews murdered in the war which evokes Maya Lin’s Vietnam War memorial even though the practice of the listing of the names long predated this sculpture. Lanzmann then opens a new chapter; it is almost a reprisal of the beginning because he again focuses in on a train station, a place, a landscape but now instead of Bohušovice it is Nisko and Lanzmann has his own argument to make about the progress of the transformation from Nisko to Auschwitz; throughout this section Lanzmann reads from white sheaves of paper that we must assume are his narrative about how places figure in the history of genocide. Nisko was a space where, in competition with Madagascar, there was going to be a Jewish reservation—and the subtitles call this space a “reservation” which of course cannot help but recall the American Indian Reservations. There is a landscape that we see over and over again of a river shadowed by a glorious sunset; this seems to be somewhere in or near Nisko which Lanzmann has told us is between the Bug and San rivers so this river is likely one of these; but at the same time there is a deliberate confusion between Madagascar and Nisko as examples of Nazi masking of extermination as deportations, relocations, and protectorates. Lanzmann pointedly lists “Madagascar, Nisko, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz” and thus argues that an initial drive towards expulsion turns into genocide. Murmelstein insists that Madagascar was all along “camouflage” for the final solution. It was a mask says Lanzmann, yes, a mask Murmelstein agrees. Zarcezce is a place where 13 rudimentary huts were built which were to be the beginning of this Jewish reservation but obviously this never materialized in full; Lanzmann tells us that there are ordinary things in this town, even a nightclub. Indeed, the next shot lingers on two words separated by two different awnings the one on the right says “Night” and the other on the left “Club.” In English. All of a sudden we are in Prague, it’s the iconic shot of the Charles Bridge, tourists and people walking over it; a long take of an upright church contrasted sharply with the tumbled down cemetery in Prague. The Golem Synagogue is, Lanzmann tells us, a “bijou absolut.” Unforgettable Beauty Lanzmann reminds us that people wanted to believe that Theresienstadt could be a place that was not like the rest of the death camps. Then we are suddenly inside the remains of the ghetto, on the very spot where the events Murmelstein has been testifying about unfolded. And then Lanzmann describes a long scene of hanging. At one point it was decided by the Nazi administration that anyone who committed a tiny infraction would be hung. Edelstein was then the Jewish Elder in charge and he was given a choice: if you do not find a hangman, you will be hung. And so, Edelstein, who Lanzmann describes as a “brave Zionist” set out to find a hangman. First, he asked three butchers who all said no; and then he found a certain Fischer who worked in a morgue and he decided that he would offer himself as the hangman. Lanzmann stands there in the space where the people were hung and he looks up at the sky, which is visible through the decaying remains of the corrugated ceiling, he looks down at the weeds and he describes it as a “lieu de mort.” It is also a place of “inoubliable beauté,” unforgettable beauty. [i] For more on ruingazing see: Julia Hell, "Katechon: Carl Schmitt's Imperial Theology and the Ruins of the Future." Germanic Review 84:4 (Fall 2009), 283-326.
[ii] http://www.jmberlin.de/fritta/en/biographie.php [iii] http://www.jewishmuseum.cz/en/a-ex-pinkas.htm [iv] Personal email, 11 March 2014. [v] http://www.bterezin.org.il/120869/Ghetto-Leadership [vi] http://www.viennareview.net/news/special-report/path-of-memory
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By Laurie Johnson On March 9, the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies co-sponsored a screening and discussion of Claude Lanzmann's new film The Last of the Unjust with the Art Theater Co-op and the Champaign-Urbana Jewish Federation. Here is a response to the film and discussion by Prof. Laurie Johnson. Another response to the film by Prof. Brett Kaplan will appear in a few days. Claude Lanzmann is not known for avoiding filmmaking challenges, but at the beginning of The Last of the Unjust he states that he “backed away from the difficulties” of integrating footage from extensive interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein into the documentary tour de force Shoah (1985). The March 9 screening of Unjust at the Art Theater in Champaign, Illinois prompted the question of just why Lanzmann might have found this particular footage difficult to use as part of Shoah: was Murmelstein, a Viennese rabbi who became the third and final Jewish Elder in Theresienstadt/Terezín, too ambiguous of a figure, positioned between victims and perpetrators in a way the earlier film would have found tough to address? The interviews Lanzmann conducted with Murmelstein in Rome in 1975 (when Murmelstein was 70), lengthy segments of which are reproduced in Unjust, do not make that impression. While Murmelstein does not portray himself as a victim, he also never blurs the line between himself and Nazi officials such as Adolf Eichmann, who ordered Murmelstein to research “methods of emigration” beginning in Vienna in 1938, and with whom Murmelstein was forced to work for seven years. Murmelstein’s lengthy descriptions of Eichmann provide a more nuanced and chilling picture than is available even in the most recent scholarship on Nazi perpetrators. Murmelstein’s characterization of Eichmann as a “demon” is fleshed out with too much specific detail to seem melodramatic. Lanzmann challenges Murmelstein frequently during their Rome discussions, accusing him at one point of a strange lack of emotion, given the nature of his testimony. But Lanzmann never substantially questions Murmelstein’s depiction of Eichmann, though he does press for details, particularly about Eichmann’s involvement in Kristallnacht. By enabling a clear and sharp distinction between Murmelstein and Eichmann, Lanzmann renders the lines between victim and perpetrator more rather than less distinct. While Murmelstein indeed does not seem emotionally vulnerable in the interviews, he is passionate and energetic, an affect that matches his vibrant descriptive phrases. His characterization of eastern Europe, and Poland in particular, as a place of “absolute indeterminacy” starkly conveys a sense of why the Nazis could capitalize on Western ignorance about this area in order to do whatever they wanted, without witnesses or investigations. While listening to this description, we see present-day images of spaces in Poland and the Czech Republic where camps were erected, now empty again—their present emptiness again “hides” the fact of what happened there. For instance, Lanzmann visits Nisko (Poland, then part of the German Generalgouvernement), where Eichmann had deported over 3,000 Jews, a significant moment in the trajectory that culminated in the Final Solution, but today empty and largely forgotten. It is not the images of the deserted spaces, but rather Lanzmann’s and Murmelstein’s narration, that reveals the truth—a truth that often has left no physical trace. In the first Rome interview segment shown in Unjust, Murmelstein emphasizes the fact that the absence of Jews in Europe has enormous consequences for substantial parts of the globe. In segments shot in the present, Lanzmann visits the Memorial to the 80,000 Jewish Victims of the Holocaust from Bohemia and Moravia at the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, as well the Old Jewish Cemetery in the same city. The thousands of names inscribed on the synagogue walls, and the crowded stones in the cemetery may initially make an anonymous and overwhelming impression, but it is precisely then that we can access something like a feeling for the absence Murmelstein invokes. The walls filled with names and the jumble of stones do not impel us (at least not when viewed all at once, as a whole) to remember specific people or moments—they are not markers of lost presences so much as of an utter absence. Similarly, the deserted streets of Theresienstadt, the “Kleine Festung” prison on the opposite side of the Ohre River from the ghetto, and other sites Lanzmann visits, empty now again, underscore the collective absence of all who could have been. There is no escape from this absence, even in anti-Semitic fantasy: when Murmelstein speaks about the plan concocted at the 1936 Diet of Warsaw to deport Jews to Madagascar, he emphasizes that for the Nazis Madagascar was a trick, a double-mask that hid the truth of Theresienstadt, even as Theresienstadt in turn hid the fact of Auschwitz. Murmelstein casts himself as a modern-day Scheherazade, who survived the Shoah in part due to his ability to tell stories—and who, he implies, still survives (in 1975) in order to continue storytelling. Telling his own story is part of this as well. When explaining why he did not leave Vienna in the late 1930s when he had the chance (he in fact returned from London voluntarily), Murmelstein acknowledges a certain “thirst for adventure” and sense of mission. He reminds Lanzmann that he was also young and healthy then, and simply felt less vulnerable. Murmelstein also relays part of the story of his own relationship to power, saying: “Everyone picked to do something has the feeling he is the right one to do it.” Near the end of the film he asserts that an “Elder of the Jews can be condemned. In fact, he must be condemned. But he can’t be judged, because one cannot take his place.” Of course, Murmelstein did take the place of not one but two previous, murdered Jewish Elders, Jacob Edelstein and Paul Eppstein (and Eppstein had taken the place of Edelstein). Yet Murmelstein convincingly asserts his unique place in a world that counted on his replaceability. In the present-day sequences in Unjust, Lanzmann implicitly supports Murmelstein’s insistence that no one can take the place of a Jewish Elder: when the filmmaker stands in places Murmelstein has been, from Vienna to Theresienstadt, he is representing Murmelstein’s stories in the present and thereby paradoxically reaffirming his own inability to take the last Elder’s place. Lanzmann describes himself as “haunted” by Murmelstein, but when he returns to the Kleine Festung or to Nisko, he haunts these spaces himself—while he is there, they cannot mask the past; while he is filming, Murmelstein’s stories will be told, and the “unjust” will receive a kind of justice. The screening of Unjust at the Art Theater on March 9 was followed by a panel and general discussion. Michael Rothberg (English, Illinois) remarked that although the film is much shorter than Shoah, its length (approx. 220 minutes) is nevertheless reminiscent of the earlier film; the viewer needs to make a substantial time commitment and really go through an experience with the filmmaker. However, Rothberg noted that Unjust uses filmic time differently than Shoah: Lanzmann narrates for about twenty minutes in the present (in French) before cutting back to the 1975 interviews (in German); although we saw Lanzmann age throughout the twelve-year period in which Shoah was filmed, the discrepancy in his age between 1975 and 2013 is of course considerably greater. While Shoah was “always in the present tense” (Rothberg quoting Lanzmann), emphasizing the speech of the living and eschewing footage and archival images from the past, Unjust makes use not only of the 1975 interviews, but of drawings and film from the 1940s. For instance, there is an extended sequence from the Nazi propaganda film made in Theresienstadt. As a sharp contrast, we see drawings made by inhabitants of the ghetto, most of whom perished. In addition to delineating differences between the two Lanzmann films, Rothberg also reminded the audience of the differences between Lanzmann’s persona as a filmmaker as opposed to as a public figure. When interviewing and filming other scenes in his documentaries, Lanzmann tends to be very focused on detail and on the minutiae of history. But when he speaks as a public figure, he addresses the Holocaust in a mode perhaps more sacral than historiographic. Brett Kaplan (Comparative and World Literature, Illinois) also considered similarities and differences between The Last of the Unjust and Shoah, remarking on Lanzmann’s use of train and railroad images and sounds in both films. She then wondered what Lanzmann’s reliance on images of landscapes and spaces in the present reveals or conceals about what happened there—spaces where, as mentioned above, events related to the Shoah took place, but which are now largely empty and silent. While the spaces themselves do not signify the specific past events, in the film they become invested with the meaning Lanzmann assigns to them. Kaplan also remarked on the use of names, monuments, and signs in the film (markers in the present), and found these as noteworthy as Lanzmann’s deployment of images from the past. And, she emphasized the differences in how Murmelstein spoke in interview footage filmed on an outdoor balcony in Rome as opposed to his somewhat more intense affect in conversations with Lanzmann in a small interior space. Although Unjust consists in large part of verbal interactions, Kaplan focused on the way visual cues transmit meaning. Lilya Kaganovsky (Comparative and World Literature and Slavic, Illinois) returned to the question of why the Murmelstein interviews were not included in Shoah. She commented on the fact that Unjust in general breaks with many of the filmic strategies Lanzmann used in Shoah, introducing footage from very different time periods, using archival material and images of memorials, and including Lanzmann himself as a type of character, in the present-day scenes. Even though the Murmelstein interviews were conducted during the making of Shoah, they end up contributing to a very different kind of film. But both are documentaries, and Kaganovsky remarked that the documentary’s “pursuit of truth” permits all kinds of strategies: interviews, re-enactments, the use of archival images, and the re-inhabiting of spaces that no longer signify what happened there in the past. Audience members joined in the discussion, observing that the text shown at the beginning of the film is essentially Lanzmann’s way of telling us what to think, as it assures us that Murmelstein does not lie. Perhaps, though, Lanzmann means that Murmelstein himself does not think of what he is saying as a lie. Some wondered if the fact that Murmelstein had been through these memories so many times (albeit never on camera, prior to 1975) meant that he necessarily lost a certain degree of emotional reactivity. Others thought that while Hannah Arendt’s assessment of Adolf Eichmann has been considered outdated for some time, Murmelstein’s pointed, detailed recollections will make it difficult to rely on the phrase “banality of evil” in an unquestioning way in the future. The past is indeed gone—and, as one audience member pointed out, what use is memory? since, implicitly, memories often cannot be verified definitively, and since remembering does not necessarily prevent atrocities. The word “last” in the title The Last of the Unjust may indicate that the specific history that Benjamin Murmelstein represents is really over. But the documentary, while signaling memory’s end, also preserves its ghostly traces. This film ensures that although the last person who remembers what really happened is gone, the haunting will continue. A. Dirk Moses and Michael Rothberg This dialogue is excerpted from the forthcoming volume The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders, edited by Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson (Berlin: de Gruyter, March 2014). It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher and editors. This blog post is comprised of the second half of the exchange between Moses and Rothberg; you can find the first part here. We hope you will join the conversation and leave a comment. A. Dirk Moses:
Michael Rothberg’s points are so well made that I don’t need to elaborate further on them. What I would like to explore is the relationship between a politics of memory that leads to differentiated solidarity – the attractive ethical vision also advocated by Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson – and an investigation of the remembering subjects’ material conditions. The latter is a socio-anthropological exercise, a scholarly undertaking animated by an analytical rather than activist or political ethos. It is a precondition to a politics of memory with ethical potential. At the same time, it is also a transcultural praxis, because ideally it engages empathetically with all ‘sides’ of memory conflicts. Transcultural scholarship, as exemplified in this volume, manifests a choice to analyse memory conflicts for the sake of understanding them rather than participating in them in a partisan manner. Investigating the material conditions of memory in a transcultural spirit, as Michael Rothberg suggests, then, is in itself an engagement in the politics of memory with ethical effect. If successfully executed, actors in memory conflicts could gain some critical distance to their memory commitments after confrontation with scholarly accounts of their activism; they would understand better what they are doing when advancing specific arguments and making certain claims. It allows the scholar to challenge the politician’s manipulation of memory, whether in the “bloodlands” or the Middle East. It is no accident that universities – as institutionalized sites of rationality – and academics are routinely attacked by nationalists for selling out the country’s narcissistic narrative – whether apologetic or self-congratulatory – by empirically challenging its claims and by exhibiting the transcultural ethics implicit in its praxis. As an example of contestable partisan memory, take the entreaty, in 2009, of Asaf Shariv, Israel’s consul general in New York, that Holocaust education in Gaza would solve the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Condemning Hamas’s refusal to allow the Holocaust to be included in an UN-sponsored human rights eighth-grade module, he declared that “To deny history and the humanity of victims of genocide is to prepare for future atrocities”. Without mentioning the blockade of Gaza that oppresses its population, or the civilian casualties that Israeli forces inflicted there, let alone the fact that most Gazans are refugees from Zionist forces’ ethnic cleansing campaigns in 1948, he noted that, in contrast to the Palestinian indoctrination of hate, “The first word that every Israeli child is taught in school is shalom, peace. I know that when peace is a word that is taught to every child in Gaza and the West Bank, then peace will be around the corner”. What the consul was asking his readers to believe was that Holocaust education would end the regional conflict, though he did not provide details, nor give any indication of agreeing with the proposition that ending the occupation would be part of a just peace. A transcultural analysis that attends to the material conditions of the conflict might observe that the consul was in fact arguing, or hoping, that Palestinians renounce their national claims, consent to the annexation of the West Bank and subservience within Israel, or even leave Palestine, once they understand the Jewish Holocaust experience, and that the consequent claim of Jews, as the universal victim, trump those of the aggressor, the Palestinian. This is memory invoked to deny the history and humanity of Palestinian victims in Gaza and elsewhere. Given this agenda, who could be surprised that Palestinians are wary of Holocaust education? Not that I think that learning about the Holocaust is a bad idea for Palestinians – or indeed anyone. I don’t. But in this mode, it represents the far end of the banalization-sacred spectrum mentioned by Michael Rothberg, perhaps even joining both ends. The transcultural analysis would continue by challenging the consul’s lazy culturalist assumption that hasbara – simply changing narratives – will resolve major geopolitical and national conflicts. Instead, one might study the production of memory in the subject’s body and how this body is affected by its material conditions, whether those of war, occupation, exile, rape or incarceration. Powerful affects are experienced in all these cases, and the psychological literature tells us how they are literally inscribed into the brains and mental processes of its victims.[1] Resistance and revenge narratives are the ineluctable cultural responses to these experiences, constructed to invest the exiled or occupied subject with the dignity that his and her humiliating material conditions have stripped from them.[2] It is hard to see realization of transcultural memory’s ethical potential while those conditions obtain. Just as hard is it to see the transformation of those conditions when its masters feel terrorized by history, a legacy of previous trauma whose effects are transmitted through the generations in stories of suffering that convince them that they are actually victims, or potential victims, vulnerable to the same fate as their ancestors. Analysing paranoia and the cultural sources of its self-automatization belongs to a material analysis as well. Michael Rothberg: Dirk Moses has advanced this dialogue on transcultural memory in important ways. On the one hand, he has deepened our reflections on the ethics, politics, and analysis of acts of memory. On the other hand, he has supplemented our discussion of one geo-political hotspot – the Eastern European “bloodlands” – with another unavoidable and even more tension-filled site: the Middle East. As his contribution demonstrates, a theory of transcultural memory has the greatest chance of developing when dialogue is established between methodological questions and case studies of cultural exchange and conflict. Let me start with the methodological question of the relation between analysis, activism and the politics of memory. Dirk Moses usefully distinguishes different social arenas in which struggles over the past play out – from educational institutions such as the university and the school to the more properly political realm of diplomacy and on to the trauma-marked bodies of victims of extreme violence. Such distinctions are necessary both for understanding the dynamics of memory and for preserving a space of critique outside immediate ideological demands. Yet I would also emphasize the permeability of these different realms to each other: conflicts over the ethics and politics of memory often take place in the interstices of various public and private spaces. In particular, I would point to the intertwined production of knowledge and memory about the past by activists and scholars. Academics can also be activists, while activists outside the academy often contribute insight into events that have remained taboo among more institutionally bound scholars. The most powerful example of the former type would be the late Edward Said, not only a paradigm-changing literary and cultural historian, but someone who worked tirelessly to reshape the public narratives about the Palestinian past and present and who had a distinctly transcultural approach to the intersecting memories of all the players in the Middle East conflict. The French activist-scholar Jean-Luc Einaudi would provide an example of the second type; his basic research on the 17 October 1961 massacre of peacefully demonstrating Algerians in Paris not only preceded academic scholarship on this “forgotten” event, but has also helped stimulate the public, transnational and transcultural memory work around October 17.[3] This transcultural and “trans-disciplinary” bleeding into each other of different realms was especially dramatic during Einaudi’s powerful testimony about the 1961 massacre of Algerians at Maurice Papon’s trial for crimes against humanity pertaining to the Nazi genocide of European Jews. I am certain that Dirk Moses would agree with me about the transit between different realms of memory work, but there still may be a slight difference in emphasis here between the two of us because of disciplinary assumptions about the relation between memory and history. That is, as a historian, he emphasizes the power of empirical historical research to interrupt nationalist narratives and check the memory manipulation of overt ideologues, although in a recent article he has speculated on the reasons for resistance to this mode of reality checking in the Middle Eastern case. Coming from literary and cultural studies, where there is a greater skepticism about the status of empiricist claims, I am less likely to see a clean break between memory and history, and I am rather less sanguine that humanist scholars are always quite so objective and distanced as he implies. We all know about the university positions held, for instance, by perpetrators of recent atrocities in the Balkans. But even beyond such dramatic cases, ideology – say, neoliberal ideology—shapes scholarship in more banal ways every day as well. Even here, however, I suspect we are largely in agreement. I would readily admit, for instance, that an important part of Einaudi’s intervention with respect to the October 17 massacre was his uncovering of hard facts about the past, while Dirk Moses ends his last remarks with the very astute suggestion – which is indeed central to his own work—that psychological states and cultural contexts shape actions in the present as well as practices of remembrance. Discussion of the subjective and objective conditions of memory brings us back around to the question of conflict and the possibilities of transcultural memory. On the topic of Holocaust memory and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I think we have another case of a large degree of overlap and a divergence of emphasis. Dirk Moses’s example of the consul general’s offensive attempt to instrumentalize memory of the Shoah is a powerful one, and I can only concur with his analysis of its implications. At the same time, and despite the existence of many more such outrages (really, on all sides), I maintain a degree of optimism about the possibilities that transcultural memory practices can offer, even for seemingly unresolvable conflicts such as the one in the Middle East. I think of Edward Said’s writings about the “bases of coexistence” in overlapping narratives of remembrance by Jews and Palestinians, or the photography/video work of the Israeli-British artist Alan Schechner that establishes solidarity between iconic victims of the Holocaust and Israeli occupation.[4] My point could also be put in slightly less rosy terms, though, closer to those of Dirk Moses: I don’t see how we can have any optimism about the situation in the Middle East at all without a belief that some form of transcultural exchange – including, but not limited to exchange about the past—can evolve between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians living under occupation as well as in Israel and the diaspora. To be sure, such an evolution has to be accompanied – or, more likely, preceded—by radical change in the basic political conditions of Palestinian life, by an end to the occupation and blockade. Ultimate reconciliation will only be possible, however, when cultural change joins political transformation – and cultural change will have to include a painful, but unavoidable transcultural memory work. This is true for other hotspots of remembrance, too, such as Turkey, where rabid genocide denial continues, while, simultaneously, tens of thousands of citizens march in memory of an assassinated Armenian-Turkish journalist and carry signs that read “We are all Hrant Dink. We are all Armenians”.[5] Such a dynamic of denial, conflict and solidarity represents the current dialectic of transcultural memory. This volume helps us make our way through the contradictions, constraints, and possibilities of the transcultural turn. [1] I briefly discuss the literature in “Genocide and the Terror of History” (2011, 90-108). [2] Exemplary is Ghassan Hage, “‘Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm’: Understanding Palestinian Suicide Bombers in Times of Exighophobia” (2003, 65-89). [3] See, among other works, Jean-Luc Einaudi, La bataille de Paris: 17 octobre 1961 (1991). [4] On Schechner and Said, see my attempt to work out a transcultural ethics of memory in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory” (2011, 523-48). A comparison between this essay and Dirk Moses’s “Genocide and the Terror of History” (2011) provides an illuminating picture of the commonalities and differences of emphasis in our approaches to transcultural memory. Both of these essays were presented as lectures at the ‘Transcultural Memory’ conference organized by Lucy Bond, Rick Crownshaw and Jessica Rapson in London in February 2010. [5] See Sebnem Arsu, “Thousands in Turkey Protest Verdict in Journalist’s Murder” (2012). A. Dirk Moses and Michael Rothberg
This dialogue is excerpted from the forthcoming volume The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders, edited by Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson (Berlin: de Gruyter, March 2014). It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher and editors. This blog post is comprised of the first half of the exchange between Moses and Rothberg; you can find the second part here. In the meantime, we hope you will join the conversation and leave a comment. A. Dirk Moses: This is a timely book. Memory studies, so long focused on “the nation” as the master unit of analysis, has joined the trend in the humanities and social sciences to study its chosen phenomena in a globalised and transnational – or, rather, transcultural – mode. We are not talking about intercultural encounters between distinct traditions that otherwise bear no relation to one another. This book goes further, making “transculturality” its object of inquiry rather than solely discrete ideas or memories whose circulation can be traced or boundary crossing analysed. That is, the very constitution of local memories, especially those pertaining to war and occupation, are shot through with references to other cultures and nations, and not only of oppressive ones. Traumatic memory is necessarily analogical: we did not just suffer; we suffered like this or that, or we suffered more than or differently from them. Even claims to unique suffering are implicitly comparative, that is, transcultural. Without analogues, it is difficult to successfully bid for recognition, because the common sense of a public sphere will ascribe significance to certain types of suffering and not to others. As a number of chapters here note, the Holocaust has been held up as representing the West’s common sense standard of suffering. How and why it has come been constructed as the “gold standard” in the Western memory regime is being investigated by scholars, Michael Rothberg among them. His notion of “multidirectionality” brilliantly captures the spatial quality of memory. Transculturality gestures to the temporal dimension of memory’s analogical aspect. Contemporary memories are not only interpolated by other cultures but incorporate within them an archive about their relations in the past, whether stories of victory and exultation, defeat and humiliation, or relative coexistence, if with an emphatic sense of hierarchy. The editors and some authors here plead for an ethics of transcultural memory; consciousness of implication in others’ mnemonic archive makes subjects “acknowledge our implication in each other’s suffering and loss, and to begin to imagine a more equitable future in which such violence might be minimized through an acknowledgement of our common humanity, grounded by the awareness of our mutual experience of histories of destruction”. Just as I applaud this cosmopolitan ethic, I ponder its challenges. Consider the ugly debate transpiring today about the ‘double genocide’ thesis in Eastern Europe and particularly in Lithuania. Since the independence of the former Soviet Baltic republic, which chafed under Soviet rule for generations, ultra-nationalist political forces have insisted on describing the Lithuanian experience as genocide, and indeed the country’s parliament has passed a law broadening the United Nations definition to include deportations and attacks on cultural (“spiritual”) genocide. Not for nothing is the institution dedicated to the Soviet occupation called the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania. By contrast, the Holocaust is marginalized in Lithuanian official memory, not least, say critics, because heroes of the resistance – nationalists – were co-perpetrators of the Holocaust of Lithuanian Jewry, of whom only 5% survived. The same memory constellation is apparent across east-central and northern Europe, that is, where relatively smaller countries were occupied by the Soviets: “the Russians”. The “double genocide” thesis, which posits that Baltic and Slavic peoples were subject to Soviet genocide just as Jews were victims of the Nazi genocide, is of course a species of totalitarianism theory. Its point is to replace the hierarchy of genocide apparent in the West’s memory regime – with the Holocaust at its apex, as in the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in 2000 – with an equalized memory field. That is why the new states of east-central and northern Europe prodded the European Union to pass the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism in 2008, and establish the Platform of European Memory and Conscience in 2011; they are dedicated to researching and memorializing the crimes of totalitarianism. As in Lithuania, Poland’s bearers of this memory project are also those dedicated to national(ist) memory and resistance against Russian imperialism, in this case, the Institute of National Remembrance and the Warsaw Rising Museum. These developments represent a full frontal assault on the Western memory regime. It is certainly transcultural, but hardly cosmopolitan. Regrettably, the canard that Jews in this region – called the “bloodlands” by Timothy Snyder in his recent book on Stalinist and Nazi crimes in the 1930s and 1940s – supported the Soviet Union and were therefore attacked by their Christian neighbours when the Nazis passed through, is apparent in this debate. Also unfortunate is the zero-sum game structure of these rival memories; to isolate the Holocaust – or more concretely, say, the Jews of Vilnius – as an object of memory is experienced by Lithuanian nationalists as an unbearable effacement of their nation’s travails under communism. It is “Jewish memory” rather than Baltic memory, indeed a form of Western domination. Likewise, for many others, the double genocide thesis, while not denying the actual killings, though soft-pedalling local collaboration, is an unbearable flattening out of distinct forms and intensities of violence (see http://defendinghistory.com/). What are the ethics of transculturality in this situation? Michael Rothberg: The Transcultural Turn is dedicated to exploring new tendencies in memory studies from a tri-focal perspective that suggests the need for attention to theoretical definitions of actually existing transcultural and transnational connections; the ethical and political problems that attend the circulation of memories; and the possibilities for counter-narratives and new forms of solidarity that sometimes emerge when practices of remembrance are recognized as implicated in each other. The rich essays collected here offer just that mix of interventions: they trace diasporic networks, delve into dispiriting conflicts about the past, and chart constellations of unexpected relationality. Such a multi-levelled approach to collective memory is necessary in our dynamic, globalizing world. Yet, as Dirk Moses argues pointedly in his remarks above, the actually existing realm of transcultural memory often seems primarily to be a place of bitter contestation, competitive claims, and righteous victims. How, he asks, can we actualize truly cosmopolitan attitudes and transcultural ethics in such treacherous terrain? Before returning to this critical question, let me step back for a moment and consider the framing of this book in terms of transcultural memory. The category “transcultural” operates in the vicinity of other adjectival qualifiers that have recently emerged in the rapidly growing field of memory studies – most prominently “transnational” and “global”, as the editors of this volume suggest. Within that constellation of terms, the term transcultural does a particular kind of conceptual work. It points us toward the fact that the founding texts of collective memory studies are not simply or uniquely embedded in the assumption that remembrance can only be understood in national and local frameworks – an assumption thus in need of transnational and global methodological innovations. At an even deeper conceptual level, these theories have reproduced assumptions about what constitutes a culture that are no longer tenable; they have assumed that only discrete and homogenous cultures and social groups can become bearers of memory. Astrid Erll has usefully traced this assumption back to a conception of ‘container-culture’ inherited from the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (among other sources), a conception that persists in much recent work on collective memory. In the foundational theories in the field, “cultures […] remain relatively clear-cut social formations, usually coinciding with the contours of regions, kingdoms and nation-states”; there is, in other words, “an isomorphy between territory, social formation, mentalities, and memories” that blocks recognition of transcultural dynamics. Even as we have begun to acquire a usable history of memory studies – for example, through Erll’s own work as well as the creation of valuable new source books such as The Collective Memory Reader—we need to turn a critical eye on the background assumptions of the field. Thinking of memory as transcultural means seeking to break through the isomorphic imagination that underpins – still valuable – models such as Maurice Halbwachs’s “collective memory”, Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire, Jan and Aleida Assmann’s “cultural memory”, and Avishai Margalit’s “ethics of memory”. In contrast to these models, which risk inadvertently instituting “ethnified” notions of memory, the wager of a theory of transcultural memory is that other collective agents of memory exist who are not indebted to the Herderian notion of discrete cultures. Transcultural memory also offers a vision that cuts across the different scales evoked by the frameworks of transnational or global memory. That is, there is nothing inherently transcultural about transnational or global dynamics and nothing inherently monocultural about the local. A transnational formation such as Europe may be tendentially monocutural in its ideology or effects – note the attempted construction of a common “Judeo-Christian” culture in contemporary Europe that excludes Islam—and globalization has long been recognized as having homogenizing effects as well as being a force for heterogeneity. Meanwhile, most locales are deeply transcultural – not only cities (like the Berlin discussed in the essays of Tomsky and Meyer) but also the villages whose assumed homogeneity served as Nora’s nostalgic model for the idealized milieu de mémoire that preexisted the intrusion of modernity. The transcultural turn offers a necessary intervention into the study of memory at all these levels: it draws attention to the palimpsestic overlays, the hybrid assemblages, the non-linear interactions, and the fuzzy edges of group belonging. But if the focus on the transcultural is a valuable methodological intervention – directing us toward heteromorphic constellations instead of isomorphic territories of memory – how does it help us to evaluate the plateaus, problems, and possibilities offered by the disparate practices of memory discussed by the contributors to this book? What, indeed, are the ethics and politics of such an approach? Dirk Moses draws our attention to one of the “hottest” zones of memory conflict: that unfolding in the territories of the former Soviet bloc where multiple legacies of extreme violence coexist in explosive constellations. In describing the current conflict over the “double genocide” thesis, he already suggests some important parameters for the ethics of memory. When transcultural analogies and comparisons emerge, they often fall into two extremes: an “isolation” of histories from each other and a “flattening out” of differences between histories. These extremes represent the far ends of a continuum that runs between what we could call equation and differentiation and that constitutes one of the important axes of a transcultural ethics of memory. At the extremes of this axis of comparison we find attitudes represented in the current double genocide debate and much of the worldwide discourse about the Holocaust: relativization, on the one hand, and sacralization, on the other. This distinction is recognized by many scholars but I now believe we need a more nuanced approach. In formulating an ethics of memory, we need to supplement the axis of comparison with an axis of political affect. The affective axis asks to what ends the comparison is being made; here a continuum runs from competition to solidarity. Thus, for instance, the discourse of double genocide often represents more than a thesis about historical comparison: it represents a competitive assertion that seeks to seize the ground of recognition from people with other experiences of suffering. So, for that matter, do sacralizing discourses of the Holocaust’s uniqueness. Mapping practices of memory across these two axes of comparison and affect establishes four larger categories with distinct political valences and opens up the possibility of degrees, gradations, and tendencies within those categories (competitive equation, competitive differentiation, and so on). An ethics of transcultural memory, in other words, would ask both how and why histories are imagined in relation to each other. Whether we equate or differentiate histories and whether we do so for reasons of solidarity or competitive antagonism matters. That doesn’t mean such an ethics can always give us the ‘right’ answers to the kinds of dilemmas Dirk Moses describes, however. My personal predilection is for visions of history that opt for a differentiated solidarity – that is, that allow us to distinguish different histories of violence while still understanding them as implicated in each other and as making moral demands for recognition that deserve consideration. But the notion that we as scholars can ‘choose’ how collective memory should be articulated is false. Here we need to move, I think, from the ethics of memory to the politics of memory. We need to ask: what are the material conditions – social, economic, political – that lead to memory conflict and what are the material conditions in which ethical approaches to the past become possible? Read the second part of this exchange here. By Matthew Nelson A central question that occupied discussion at the Diasporic Memories, Comparative Methodologies conference regarded our object of study – what exactly is a transnational memory? Bracketing the question of memory, what does it mean for it to be transnational? Aleida Assman played off a familiar dichotomy and highlighted prescriptive and descriptive approaches to the term. Whereas the former gets at the normative potentials of a transnationalism that might be (which provides, e.g., a way of escaping the statist strangle-hold on national memory), the latter takes already-existing global flows as its starting point. But we might add a third term – already present in Assmann’s discussion, but brought out more forcefully in a paper presented by Ann Rigney – namely, the imaginative. Rigney suggested we think in terms of the “articulation” of groups, in its double sense of putting into words and of joining. Such a term sees the joining of cultures as a poetic act, a way of imagining the future. It goes without saying that the descriptive, prescriptive, and imaginative are all aspects of a single system/field of inquiry, but they nonetheless also represent distinct impulses and directions. Whereas prescriptive and descriptive transnationalism might be said to exist in the definite space of memories, imaginative transnationalism exists in the still inchoate realm of remembrance, where space is given the shape, contour, and meaning that is taken for granted in prescriptive and descriptive modes of analysis. Approaches to imaginative transnationalism thus insist on the dynamism of memory’s terrain. The emergence of categories and experiences of distance and proximity forms the locus of its interest. Where we fall in this constellation of terms is going to both determine and be determined by what we take as our objects of analysis. The circulation of texts or the movement of migrants, for example, are empirical questions and hence firmly on the descriptive side of the triad. But the question of how people’s understanding of their location in the world comes into being leans more toward the imaginative. As scholars, we fall in different points at different times. None of us is likely so foolish as to cling statically to one side or the other. The productivity of our discussion, in fact, and many of its tensions seem to come from trying to navigate a way of engaging all three. Given that we are academics, this navigation is taking place primarily in the realm of language – of vocabulary. And indeed we were treated to a wealth of wonderful distinctions and terminological possibilities in the papers and discussion that followed. Part of the difficulty we faced, though, in developing this vocabulary is inherent in the very notion that framed the conference: diasporic memories, a term that seamlessly blends space and time. Contemplating this has reminded us of something we know well by now: that space and time are inextricable. But whether it’s the phenomenologist or the physicist telling us this, it does not make it easier for us to talk about them in a meaningfully unified way – to articulate them, as it were. For her part, Jessica Young offered the metaphor of the virus as one entry into a discourse about transnational/diasporic memory. The virus, after all, has the curious ability to both move and not move, to be transmitted without leaving the host. The virus exposes unseen connections across time and space at the same time that it acts as gatekeepers of a community, through collective immunity that may not be shared by intruders. Later in the day, Hapsatou Wane offered other metaphors, such as the womb and Edouard Glissant’s “point of entanglement.” This proved quite resonant, and the language of entanglement and knots, whether from Glissant or elsewhere, recurred in comments and presentations throughout the day. But while these terms (and others that came up over the course of the conference) opened up intriguing possibilities and facilitated great discussion, they also encountered resistance when the metaphorical was returned to the literal. We are rightfully hesitant of mining trapped or suffering bodies for metaphors, particularly when the practical connections between the body and the metaphor remain unclear. Questioning a too-quick turn to the “trans-,” Peter Fritzsche reminded us of the continuing vitality of the nation-state, both in terms of its relevance in the formation of memory and its usefulness for achieving concrete political goals. It is a useful reminder that imagination does not work in a vacuum. New affiliations may articulate themselves, but they do so within a world that is structured by (among other things) national politics and imaginaries. Fritzsche also raised another of the conference’s major sets of themes, namely new media. But discussion about the new and unprecedented, about technology and the media, also could not escape the terminological questions that I have been discussing. We saw this above in Jessica Young’s example of the computer virus, but Fritzsche’s linking of language, brain structures, and the new media is perhaps a more striking instance. Suggesting that there are no universal structures to the brain and that it is the grammar of media such as language that structures our thought, Fritzsche posed the question of what structures of the past new media do and will offer. Although not a metaphor for memory in the same sense as contagion or the womb, Fritzsche’s invocation of new media is nonetheless tied explicitly to spatial and temporal imaginaries and their creation/elaboration in language. I don’t want to suggest that we are searching for a vocabulary that will exist at some privileged point among the three modes. Rather, I think it is about navigation and finding ways for unimpeded movement between them. Astrid Erll’s comment that the graduate student papers tried to think genealogical memory beyond postmemory and Ann Rigney’s point that diasporic memory moves in realms not limited to the communicative can be taken as suggestions in this direction of openness and movement rather than toward a closed vocabulary or definite site of inquiry. Matthew Nelson is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois. His work draws on memory and translation studies in an effort to rethink theories of place in the postcolonial context, particularly as articulated in Modern Sanskrit and Indian English poetry. By Jonathan Druker, Illinois State University.
We are pleased to welcome you to Days and Memory, the blog of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. HGMS provides a platform for cutting-edge, comparative research, teaching, and public engagement related to genocide, trauma, and collective memory. We hope that this blog will serve as an opportunity to publicize and report on our local activities and to provide space for wide-ranging, open discussion of issues pertinent to genocide, trauma, and memory studies. The title of the blog is drawn from the brilliant Holocaust survivor and writer, Charlotte Delbo, whose book Days and Memory remains an innovative cornerstone of Holocaust literature.
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Illinois Jewish Studieswww.facebook.com/IllinoisJewishStudies/The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studiesis an interdisciplinary program based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Founded in 2009 and located within the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, HGMS provides a platform for cutting-edge, comparative research, teaching, and public engagement related to genocide, trauma, and collective memory.
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