Category Archives: Heritage Politics

A response to Jan Grabowski’s ‘Whitewash: Poland and the Jews’

25 Monday Nov 2024

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Above: Entry for the Polish town of Jedwabne in a 1968 Polish government tourist guidebook. Contemporary research has, in the face of current Polish government institutions, found that Jews were murdered by townspeople, with little (if any) involvement of the SS.

The Polish scholar Jan Grabowski has been treated with enormous disrespect and even cruelty by the Polish government and Polish society. The legal action in which he and Barbara Engelking were bound up in at the behest of a government-proxy thinktank/pressure group was unjust, persecutory, and ill-founded. The chilling effect this treatment may have on Polish academia in general, and Holocaust studies in particular, may be long-lasting. He has earned, many times over, the right to complain loudly about his treatment and warn against further abuses. Even if this were not the case, the depth and breadth of his research over decades would be reason enough to listen.

At the same time, his special issue of Jewish Quarterly, Whitewash, raises some questions. I hope Professor Grabowski will read this, and in the spirit in which it is intended; to get to the bottom not just of what happened, but why. For there is a gap in explanation as to why Poland, the recipient of huge resources for Holocaust education and commemoration since the early 1990s, should have gone down this route. My answer to this question structures my response.

Firstly, there is a strange gap in this publication where the years 1945-1990 should be. Many Polish voices, along with others in Central and Eastern Europe, have been vocal in arguing that it is time to treat this region beyond its postcommunist legacy. I couldn’t agree more on one level: the history of Poland did not begin in 1939, or 1945, and it will not end today. Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła/Kiedy my żyjemy (Poland has not perished as long as we still live). In discussing the legacy of the Holocaust, it seems slightly odd not to give more focused consideration to the social, political and ideological parameters within which memory developed. The 1968 anti-Jewish campaign appears, as do the pogroms in Rzeszów, Kraków, and Kielce. But the way in which the communist regime insisted on obscuring the identity of the victims as “citizens of occupied Europe” is important to understand, as are the links between Holocaust history and Polish history in general. Grabowski is right to complain about the arbitrary claim that three million non-Jewish Poles died, but he does not talk about the difficulties posed by those victims who were defined by the Nazis as Jews despite strong Polish and Catholic identities. The numbers are fuzzy in both directions, though the version Grabowski cites is certainly the stronger.

But the reader of the diaries by Adam Czerniaków (the Chairman of the Warsaw Ghetto) and the historian Emanuel Ringelblum will notice frequent references to the Christians of the ghetto, just as surely as readers of Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War Against the Jews will notice her invective against “apostates” and their role in the administration of ghettos. These were not homogenous and pre-existing communities trying to simply carry on the shtetl, but complex and heterogenous sites where people who often had little in common except their designation under Nazi ideology were forced to survive. In the camps, there were Jews who were “hidden” by assuming Polish identities, sometimes with the connivance of prisoner functionaries. Dividing a complex and interrelated past into two makes understanding the whole harder.

It is also important to explain to the casual reader that Polish nationalism evolved in a particular place and time. The messianic fervour of nineteenth century nationalism, asserting its particular suffering as a “Christ among nations” is an inheritance that cannot be ignored (especially in the Polish diaspora, where much older visions of Polishness have sometimes held sway). That the Polish answer to building national consciousness while enduring territorial dispossession resembles that of Jewish history is probably not a coincidence. It took a Polish Jew, Alfred Korzybski, to state succinctly that “the map is not the territory” in the 1930s. The Polish lament by Mickiewicz – “Lithuania, my country, thou art like health; how much thou shouldst be prized only he can learn who has lost thee. To-day thy beauty in all its splendour I see and describe, for I yearn for thee” – has a clear relationship to and resonance with the lament of Jeremiah:

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill, [6] May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. [7] Remember, O LORD, against the sons of Edom the day of Jerusalem’s fall, those who said: “Tear it down! (Psalm 137)

It is similarly significant that one particularly quixotic response to nineteenth century nationalism – the language of Esperanto – should be the invention of Ludwik Zamenhof (1859-1917) whose grave can be found in the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. The street that bears his name was part of the Warsaw Ghetto. The predicament of being Polish and Jewish was an extremely complex one, informed by a very long history that Grabowski does not really explain. The leader of the Oneg Shabbat archive, Emanuel Ringelblum, was a product of both societies and cultures, though he died (and was betrayed) as a Jew. Other famous contributors to the archive also wrote in Polish. Henryka Łazowertówna (1909-1942) wrote her famous poem describing children struggling to survive, ‘The Little Smuggler’, in Polish, in which its relentless, searching rhythm can be truly understood:

Przez mury, przez dziury, przez warty
Przez druty, przez gruzy, przez płot
Zgłodniały, zuchwały, uparty
Przemykam, przebiegam jak kot. (Virtual Shtetl)

At Yad Vashem, and in many places besides, however, the source language is frequently omitted. There is a universal version in English, and a Hebrew text, but the source text does not appear – or at least it did not when I last looked. As James Young has written, all memory is local, but the complexity of locality needs to be fully understood.

This leads to the most sensitive part of my disagreement with Grabowski, that he has to some extent dismissed a legitimate narrative of Polish wartime suffering, as well as a submersion of the Polish experience in both communist-era and post-communist formations of memory.

To be clear, I agree that the “Righteous Defence” is overused, and that “Anti-polonism” is an accusation with a rather problematic theoretical basis. Grabowski’s point that the reasons why so few Poles (relative to population) engaged in rescue activity is both trenchant and important: “In Poland, during the war, hiding Jews was so dangerous precisely because there was no social permission to engage in it.” (p.84) If you’ve seen the residents of Jedwabne who did provide help to their friends and neighbours explain in Agnieszka Arnold’s film Sąsiedzi (2001) how they were ostracised after the war, this will come as no surprise.

As for the question of anti-Polonism, I have been in receipt of emails and messages from Poles with offended amour propre which have barely concealed their prejudice under indignation. I think many fellow researchers will understand this point without further argument. The use of the phrase “Polish death camps”, however, which in many ways is the fons et origio of this argument, is both factually inaccurate (they were not Polish-run or built on Polish advice) and insensitive to the fact that there are many Poles alive today whose ancestors endured the camps or who were killed by the occupier and collaborators. The Auschwitz tattoo, etched on the arms of those selected for forced labour in the camp, is a symbol of both Polish and Jewish suffering. That there is a much higher number of Jews who were so marked should not blind us to this.

The historian Alex Kay, in his pathbreaking Empire of Destruction (Yale, 2021) has identified seven campaigns of mass killing engaged in by the Nazi/German regime. He argues that his definition of mass killing (“the intentional killing of a significant number of the members of any group (as defined by the perpetrator) of non-combatants” p.4) is “less emotive, less politically contentious, and less dependent on specific legal interpretations” than the term genocide. As we have seen repeatedly (and continue to see) wrangling over the definition of genocide can prevent us from addressing the reality of mass killing. Genocide is a historical term which has been crowbarred into serving as a legal one, and for this reason is most useful after the fact – the least useful moment for victims.

Kay includes the murders of 100,000 members of the “Polish ruling classes and elites” and 185,000 civilians in Warsaw in his (empirical and conservative) tabulation of the number of victims of Nazi mass killing, which he puts at 12,885,000. As Kay, with David Stahel, has written, the focus on the murder of Jews has pushed the consideration of other kinds of criminality into the background. The challenge is twofold: firstly, to recognise that the massacre of European Jews was part of a “wider process of demographic reconstruction and racial purification pursued by the Nazi regime […] in each and every one of the territories occupied by German forces.” (Kay, p.3) But, secondly, we have to remember that the campaign against the Jews was the most completely realised and the second (after the disabled) to be put on a “systematic” basis. In short, the tragedy of the Jews deserves to be remembered as the priority for Nazi murderousness. As I often comment to students, 140,000 non-Jewish Poles were registered in Auschwitz, and half of them perished: in any other context, these are large numbers. That the Polish suffering is dwarfed by the huge preponderance of Jewish suffering should engender a certain humility in anyone who seeks to put them side by side.

There is a final aspect to the idea of legitimate grievance. The Nuremberg Tribunal of the “major perpetrators” began in November 1945, just six months after the end of WW2. Though it was inadequate, the indictment identified that “Since 1 September 1939, the persecution of the Jews was redoubled: millions of Jews from Germany and from the occupied Western Countries were sent to the Eastern Countries for extermination.” Simultaneously, on the insistence of the Soviet Union, the same indictment charged the that “In September 1941, 11,000 Polish officers who were prisoners of war were killed in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk” – though all present were aware that they had been killed by the NKVD, not the SS. Eighty years later, the present Russian government still insists that this was not a Russian crime, despite a guarded admission to the contrary in the 1990s. The struggle for Poles to talk sensibly about their past has been – and continues to be – difficult: it is not surprising (though not excusable) that Polish antisemitism in this era should be difficult to frame. The Russian position is gaslighting of an order comparable to the triumphant British claim to have “abolished slavery”, rather than having cashed out a failing concern in human suffering to the benefit of its perpetrators.

Finally, there is the issue of context. Grabowski talks about other nations which experienced Nazi occupation briefly and in passing. This is understandable, since the essay’s focus is on Poland and the Jews. Grabowski describes the Polish reaction to remarks by James Comey in 2015 when he observed that “In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil.” Grabowski’s commentary on the response by Polish museums notes that “Comey could have extended the list of culprits further, adding to it the French, Belgians, Dutch, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Balts” and that nothing was taken away from the validity of the argument by their absence. I accept this, but it needs to be pointed out that Comey didn’t: because the nations of western Europe are generally understood as helpless victims or Résistants, while the nations in the east are dismissed as primitive, bloodthirsty, and antisemitic. That I know many people in Poland who have spent considerable time and energy teaching their fellow countrymen the facts perhaps colours my response: this is not, and has not been, easy. Nor will it be in the future.

But the past is never simple, however we might wish otherwise. A few weeks ago, the violence surrounding the football match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv had many commentators making earnest noises about “the city of Anne Frank”, as though an offence to the memory of her diary were the ultimate transgression.

But Amsterdam was the city of Anne Frank in a very complex way. She was forced into hiding by German occupation and then helped by a group which was bound together by allegiance to the family rather than national ideals. Miep Gies, the primary individual remembered in this context, was born in Austria. If this was the city where the Franks hid it was also the city where they were betrayed, arrested, and deported – like a third of Jews in hiding in the Netherlands. There were 325,000 Dutch citizens in hiding, just 25,000 of them were Jews: the majority were evading recruitment for forced labour, and historians see the real crystallisation of the Dutch resistance around forced labour, not the Holocaust. Jewish deaths in the Holocaust comprise 40% of all Dutch loss of life in WW2. And accounts from those rescued often put their rescuers in a very critical light, with attempts at conversion, as well as exploitation and abuse, commonplace. Andre Stein interviewed many Dutch rescuers living in Canada in the 1980s in his book Quiet Heroes (1988), and found that social pressure on those who rescued was very hard to manage. Dienke Hondius and Conny Kristel have described the appalling ways in which returning Jews were deceived and abused on their return, leading many to leave by the 1950s. And Dutch claims of ignorance or misunderstanding of events during the war are powerfully challenged by Anne Frank herself, who wrote on 9 October 1942 that “We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed.” The resistance veterans’ celebration of the Radio Oranje call sign in The World at War sits (retrospectively) uncomfortably with their equivocation about what they knew: were they not listening to the same broadcasts as Anne? The Dutch historian Bart van den Boom has tried to shift the goalposts toward “subjective certainty” being required before Dutch citizens could be expected to act, in a manner that is as archly problematic as the efforts of many Polish historians and pressure groups.

Grabowski is of course right: nothing Comey said is changed or invalidated by his not mentioning the Dutch experience. But as social scientists and historians we can also acknowledge that it is significant that he did not mention them, while bracketing Poland and Hungary with the Germans as shorthand. Europe has dealt very incompletely with wartime collaboration, particularly as it concerns the persecution of the Jews. To an extent, Poland has carried the can for other nations with histories just as questionable or damming, and that is an important site of future research. It would be another whitewash for that not to be the case, in fact.

As I said at the beginning of this piece, Jan Grabowski is a superb scholar who has been treated very unjustly for trying to tell the truth – however complex and challenging it may be. He has done so at significant personal cost, and he deserves our admiration and our thanks for sticking to his insistence that academic research cannot be challenged on the grounds of sentiment or offended pride. I hope tonight, in his lecture in London, to hear a fuller account of his thinking.

Languages of the Holocaust

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Exodus 23:9, ““No sojourner shall you oppress, for you know the sojourner’s heart, since you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” Photo and montage, Jaime Ashworth, 2021.

I’ve spent the last two days at a conference organised by the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), exploring the challenges of generational relationships to the events of the Nazi era. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last couple of years working with Generation2Generation, which trains speakers from the  second and third generations to present their family stories, and the experience has been extremely thought-provoking. I was hoping for a space in which I would be able to think three-dimensionally about the work I do with G2g and how that relates to the broader scope of Holocaust Studies and especially Holocaust Education. In an intriguing hybrid format (Day 1 online and Day 2 both online and in person at Chelsea Football Club), it did not disappoint.

Firstly, it made clear why it is so important to work with subsequent generations. AJR Chief Executive Michael Newman opened Day 2 by noting that the organisation has recently reached the point where the numbers of “first generation” members is matched by second- and third-generations. The conference was a part of a shift in orientation to ensure that the organisation remained relevant to all of its membership. 

A number of organisations are either making that shift or have been established to meet that need. G2g is joined by the Manchester-based Northern Holocaust Education Group (NHEG) and the Scottish organisation Gathering the Voices. The ‘45 Aid Society, established around the postwar child refugees known as ‘The Boys’ has also developed its generational offering with a fascinating website describing these remarkable life stories: as their video emphasised, in many cases produced by their descendants. The presentations by representatives made clear how busy all these bodies are. The post-survivor era is not here yet – though there is broad acceptance that it is nearing – but when it comes they can rest assured that their descendants (and allies) will carry their legacy forward bravely.

Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg addresses the conference. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2021.

What that will look like, however, is very much in flux – and should remain so. Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg spoke movingly of how he realised that his upbringing was an unusual one: “I thought I grew up in North London. I didn’t: I grew up in a German-Jewish enclave in North London.” He spoke of his wife’s hilarity when they first met that he couldn’t name the Beatles, so used was he to the sophisticated, cultured milieu of the family dinner table. But he underlined that this led him to look outward, remembering the Biblical admonition “No sojourner shall you oppress, for you know the sojourner’s heart, since you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23: 9) In a more mundane, but possibly even more powerful moment, Hannah Goldstone of NHEG spoke of taking her daughter shopping to buy sanitary supplies for refugees. Why are we doing this, her daughter asked? “Because we know refugees. Because we’re from refugees” was the answer.

Listening to many different stories of exile and rescue over the two days, I was struck by the way that the legacy is part of British society in unpredictable ways. Many of the Kindertransport passengers, like the mother and uncle of G2g speaker Tim Locke, did not identify as Jews – in fact his mother rejected that label as an imposition of the Nuremberg Laws. The legacy of the Holocaust thus stretches well beyond what is sometimes called “the Jewish world”: to the leafiest parts of the Home Counties, even. It is therefore vital to look to the next challenge, the relationship of the past to our present and future. In conversation with Stephen Smith, Elisha Wiesel noted that his father, Elie Wiesel, viewed the genocide in Rwanda as equal in importance and uniqueness to the Holocaust – or any other genocide. 

Uniqueness is a problematic word in the context of Holocaust Studies. It implies a “preferential” view of the Holocaust that seems to jockey for a spotlight. But there is no necessary contradiction: the Holocaust had its unique elements – its singularity – just as Rwanda did (just as Yugoslavia did, just as…, just as…) but it is in its belonging to a class of events – genocides – which makes it of universal relevance. To look outside and meet the eyes of other groups recovering from (or experiencing) atrocity is a route to healing, and also a way to ensure the continuing relevance of this history to the world. 

Though for many the past will never be exactly history, but who they are. The American storyteller Lisa Lipkin took listeners on an amazing inner journey through her family’s Holocaust legacy. There were a lot of good jokes, but my abiding impression was of the sadness in her eyes, and the catch in her voice as she described encountering her aunt’s blue kerchief from Auschwitz in a USHMM warehouse. I wondered if, in the many sessions she has run, that gaze has been truly held and returned. It’s a look I see at the back of the eyes of many of the second-generation, and why (I suspect) so many of them are driven to talk, and teach, and try to express that pain that is both theirs and not theirs. The search is for language above all: this may be “postmemory”, but it is not post-pain. And pain, as Jean Amery famously wrote, cannot be communicated, only inflicted.

The issue of language dominated a discussion between Bea Lewkowicz of the AJR’s Refugee Voices project and two second-generation. All the voices (some recorded) noted the way that the language of their families was a crucial marker.  The daughter of Valerie Klimt, in a recorded interview, noted that German constituted a “secret code” for the family – which prompted a ripple of knowing giggles from the audience. But equally Ed Skrein, a Game of Thrones actor, was shown saying that the Holocaust was always present in his family (his grandparents came from Vienna), but that “They would never speak of it in personal terms.” I reflected that perhaps the belief that the Holocaust is beyond representation – or Unspeakable, as an Imperial War Museum exhibition once described it – comes partly from the strained silence in many families: unable to speak of it, but unable as a result to speak of little else. 

A session with the sociologist and journalist Anne Karpf crystallised these thoughts. She described the challenges of writing and revisiting her memoir The War After, she spoke of how she resisted the task of writing initially: “Why do I have to do it?” she says she sobbed to her partner. And then she questioned the way writing the book “sort of froze me…into being the child of Holocaust survivors.” But then she spoke of how the idea of intersectionality helped her see the past as one component of a kaleidoscopic range of identities. One definition, perhaps, but not necessarily defining.

Dr Anne Karpf speaks to the conference: “I want to retain the right to contest my previous narrative.” Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2021.

But it was her thoughts on Holocaust memory that really struck home. She raised the idea (following Dominick LaCapra) of “archival fetishism” and the sacralisation of the Holocaust – even her unease at the “second-generation” label. She suggested that there needs to be a clearer distinction between the remembered self and the remembering self, a sharper choice between the overwhelming of memory and the rootlessness of forgetting. “I want,” she said proudly but also slightly plaintively, “to retain the right to contest my previous narrative.”

At this, I remembered the value of in-person conferences: the chance to sit quietly, and listen, and think among the like-minded and curious. How do we balance the demands of remembering for the future while forgetting for the present? The answer, I suggest, lies in language. I often return to the concept of mythology as framed by Roland Barthes (the language in which we speak of other things) as a central part of my academic life and approach. What if we saw “The Holocaust” as a language? As anyone who has learned a language knows, vocabulary and grammar act to both enable and circumscribe expression, and to transmit knowledge and values – the ingredients of what might be termed “usable” remembering. And as the people around me demonstrated, languages can be moved between: we do not always have to “speak Holocaust”, any more than we have to speak French, or German, or Italian, or Polish, however useful or integral to our selves they may be at moments. We always have a choice to rewrite – or re-speak – ourselves. 

The poet Michael Rosen spoke in the morning to AJR’s Alex Maws about his journey to find and attempt to understand his family’s past – to fill in the strange gap where his great-uncles in particular should have been. As someone whose early literacy was heavily influenced by his poems, it was a treat just to be in the room: the chance to have books signed was not one I was going to miss. Looking through his volume of poems about migration, On the Move, I was struck by the importance of language: the Yiddish words his parents use are a recurring theme. “Mum can speak two languages/and sometimes mixes them up” begins one poem. And in the introduction, he notes the power of poetry – the music of language – as “a way of thinking [which gives me a space to talk about things that are personal to me, but it also lets me leave things hanging in the air… To ask questions without giving too-neat answers.” What better mode of remembrance could there be? 

Links to the various organisations mentioned are included in the text: any and all them are appreciative of support. The two-line quotation in the final paragraph is from the poem “Two Languages” in Michael Rosen, On the Move: Poems about Migration (Walker Books, 2020. RRP £9.99). The lines from Exodus are from Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004).

An Argument that Must Not Abate

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Anti-lockdown sticker, Camden, 2021. Photo: Jaime Ashworth.

The debate over Dirk Moses’s German Catechism has led to a vigorous and interesting debate online in the last few weeks. The New Fascism Syllabus website has hosted a range of perspectives and responses, and scholars such as Neil Gregor have posted responses on their own blog sites. Doubtless someone, somewhere, is securing a book contract for the edited volume. And of course Twitter has lent itself to pithy and witty interventions, whether or not anyone was listening.

In which spirit, this is, as billed, the intervention in the German Catechism debate for which nobody has been waiting – but that in itself perhaps undermines the argument that the “gatekeepers” which Moses talks about are as effective as he suggests. The problem with which all of the world grapples, after all, is that the right to free speech creates neither a duty to publish nor an obligation to listen. Though as Jennifer Evans and Tiffany Florvil have pointed out, the debate has been conducted largely between and among white men of a certain age and socioeconomic status, ignoring the work of women and people of colour (and often both) in establishing, maintaining and hosting the debates themselves, while also employing arguments that have been currency outside that bubble for some time. The work of Anna Hajkova and Zoe Waxman, for example, in addressing challenging areas of research to do with sexual identities and sexual violence in the Holocaust, illustrates the difficulty of overcoming (in Waxman’s words) “opposition to feminist scholarship and thus to the very study of gender and the Holocaust itself rather than on any meaningful dialogue with the content of the research.” One might perhaps suggest that the debate at least began as a scrap among the gatekeepers themselves rather than those trying to get in.

(Disclaimer: I am hardly a break from the norm in several of the personal respects listed above, though as an independent scholar I do not have the status of many interlocutors. I will however, rigorously and professionally conduct meaningful Holocaust Education for your synagogue, community centre, youth movement, wedding or bar mitzvah.)

My own position is fairly straightforward. Moses is right to call out and protest unreflexive and inauthentic commemoration and research which does not take seriously the continuities and intersectionalities in the Holocaust. The fact that the Holocaust constituted the implementation of colonial warfare and ethnic cleansing against Europeans is an important and vital part of understanding the events. David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen (in The Kaiser’s Holocaust) used the figure of Heinrich Goering (father of the more famous Hermann) to illustrate this, noting that “While the father, whose prospective victims were black Africans, fits our view of a colonialist, the son does not. Yet the Nazis’ war in the East was one of imperial expansion, settler colonialism and racial genocide.”

Hitler himself in Mein Kampf set his purpose as “[drawing] a line under the foreign policy of pre-war Germany” and “putting a stop to the colonial and trade policy of the pre-war period and passing over to the territorial policy of the future” – by which he meant “the East”. What has been missing is the voices and likeness of the victims from which Hitler turned away. David Olusoga further illustrated – through the figure of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck – in The World’s War (2014) how the First World War in Africa “far from being a meaningless side show in Europe’s war […] became the last phase of the Scramble for Africa.”

Nonetheless, Michael Berkowitz, in his introductions to the recently republished pamphlets by Alfred Wiener, The Fatherland and the Jews, passes over reference to “the Educational Service of the Lettow-Vorbeck Brigade”, noting that they “expressly advocated pogroms and public hangings of Jews” to buttress his claim that Wiener was “completely reasonable in leaving Hitler out of the picture”. Lettow-Vorbeck was (as Olusoga puts it) a “colonial specialist” having participated in the suppression of the ‘Boxer’ rebellion in China and the genocide of the Nama in South West Africa. The existence of a brigade named after him tells us much about the role of colonial mentalities in 1920s ex-soldier communities, yet here it is barely a footnote. The parallel debate about whether the recent “apology” for genocide in Namibia is sufficient or even genuine has perhaps been rather drowned out by the disputes about attitudes to memorialising the Holocaust.

At the same time, the fact that this debate is even taking place represents progress. A characteristically trenchant and engaging intervention from Neil Gregor is also right to remind readers that progress has been made, a point reinforced by Bill Niven. Historical understanding, by its nature, has to proceed at its own pace. There was, after all, a time in which Raul Hilberg was marginalised for pursuing research into the “machinery of destruction” which was set up to annihilate European Jewry. That European scholars have preferred to research topics in which they could retain some clear moral standing is understandable, though the work of scholars to recover and link this to the repression of colonial peoples and patriarchal attitudes to the history of gender and sexual identity should of course be encouraged. There is in some quarters possibly a desire to keep the debate on territory which the interlocutors are comfortable – though both Gregor and Niven have clear track records in both conducting and encouraging research “against the grain”.

The core problem here is the acceptance that time moves in one direction and that historical understanding is highly contingent. The literary scholar Lawrence Langer has recently published a collection of articles under the title The Afterdeath of the Holocaust. As well as commenting on core texts in Holocaust Studies, the articles also explore Langer’s own engagement with the subject of the Holocaust since the 1950s. He returns frequently – one might say almost obsessively – to his desire to avoid “redemptive” memory of the Holocaust. He insists that the Holocaust must be “a landscape of the imagination we never inhabited where solace perished along with the victims whose remnants lie scattered beneath its surface” and reiterates his opposition to “misguided” attempts “to find ways of coping with such desolation by striving to wrest some minimal meaning from the atrocity of mass murder.”

I am set to review Langer in more detail elsewhere, and I will use that space to detail the contradictions he entangles himself in there. But what comes through his writing is twofold: firstly, a profound sense of the lasting shock he experienced in his first encounters with the Holocaust; and secondly his clear frustration that the Holocaust has become normalised, in some important regards through his own work. The influence of his work on Holocaust testimony has been profound, as described by Noah Shenker in Reframing Holocaust Testimony (2015). Shenker notes that the Fortunoff Archive (informed in large part by Langer) has an “aversion to redemptive closure in testimonies” which means it can “miss those moments when a witness actually expresses some semblance of redemption.” It feels a lot like Langer is opposed to any kind of recovery or coping. Which is a heavy burden to live with, if true, for both survivors and subsequent generations.

Art Spiegelman, MAUS.

In Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, “Artie” asks his survivor therapist to explain how Auschwitz was. “BOO!” he replies “It felt a little like that. But ALWAYS.” For the individual encountering the Holocaust for the first time, it is still a lot like that, but it is also part of a “Holocaust metanarrative”. As Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner put it, “the bundle of ideas and preconceptions handed down under the label ‘Holocaust’ that shapes the contours and parameters of our understanding of the subject.” There is no going back – and as Robert Jan van Pelt realised when starting his expert report in defence of Deborah Lipstadt against David Irving, that is a good thing. Deniers have to work against the Holocaust as historical and social fact: nobody really comes to it with an open mind in the sense of doubting it happened. As can be seen from the COVID conspiracy theory sticker which illustrates this post, the premise of the Holocaust has been very widely accepted. But this must not be allowed to solidify completely into slogans and parrot-like repetitions of formulaic ideas. As Moses reminds us, there is a duty on us to ensure that the contours and parameters of the subject mentioned by Bloxham and Kushner are debated, expanded and made more complex by the arrival of new and challenging research, and in a complex and diverse social milieu.

Ultimately, however, the tendency will always be to simplicity. Jay Winter and Antoine Prost have described how in the aftermath of World War 1, there was a conviction that the experience of combat could not be communicated, and could only be understood by those who were there. Yet a century later, the memory of the conflict is conducted largely through symbols which are easily recognised and understood: the poppy, some key photographs, pieces of poetry and other writing. If we tried to remember every crime committed by Europe in the modern age, we would have no space for any other activity, so we create ways of accessing the appropriate feeling when it is appropriate. Following Barthes, events become languages in which we speak of other things as well as themselves. Yet, as the work of David Olusoga, Santanu Das and many others illustrates, these moments of accessing the symbols of memory can also be occasions on which fresh thinking and energy can invest them with new meaning. In 2014-15 I was teaching an A-level class about India in the First World War and was able to use Olusoga and Das to talk about the conflict in a way which empowered students as agents of memory and change. The challenge of doing so for the Holocaust is the next stage: arguments such as these will recur, cynics may wonder (as Ian Kershaw noted of the 1980s Historikerstreit) whether they generate more heat than light. But as long as we strive to include as many voices as we can, and incorporate as many conflicting and challenging histories as possible, they will not abate – thank goodness.

On Holocaust Memorial Day 2020: Stand Together

24 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in Heritage Politics, The Holocaust: Representations and Meanings, Uncategorized

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The Book of Names in Block 27 at Auschwitz. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2015.

Yesterday, at a ceremony hosted by the Association of Jewish Refugees at Belsize Square Synagogue, I listened to testimony from Frank Bright, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Aged 91 and frail, he began by asking the room “Can you hear me?” The plaintive yet essential nature of his question took me aback for a moment.

The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day asks us to #StandTogether, but what does this mean? Are we listening?

In the last year, I have spent a lot of time working on the aboutholocaust.org project for the World Jewish Congress and UNESCO. The website contains a range of questions and answers which aim to explain key concepts and key events, and which illustrate them through the life stories of individuals.

As part of this, individuals who have been familiar names have also been developed into full personalities: the humanisation of the Holocaust is more than knowing a name, it is becoming aware of who that person was. The American science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card has many views which I profoundly reject, but his description in the novel Speaker for the Dead of how we should understand the people of the past continues to be something I try and live up to:

…to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story – what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That’s the story that we never know, the story that we never can know – and yet, at the time of death, it’s the only story truly worth telling.

To fulfil this task for the victims of the Holocaust would take centuries. The Book of Names produced by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, and kept in the Jewish Exhibition at Auschwitz, contains four million names of victims. Speaking to students, I point out that it actually commemorates three groups: those who died and whose names are recorded (Yad Vashem is taken from the Book of Isaiah and means “a monument and a name”); the space at its front where the other two million names we may never know, or even be able to guess at, should go; and the surviving family members whose pages of testimony are condensed into this vast artefact. And these are the barest of details: names, dates, place of birth, place of death (if this is even known). Their hopes, their fears, their aspirations and their regrets all went up, quite literally, in smoke. Telling some of their stories is the only way I can stand with them.

Three of the questions I have answered this year for aboutholocaust have stuck in my mind as I’ve reflected upon the idea of standing together.

Firstly, “Did you know that thousands of Jewish children left Germany without their parents to escape Nazi persecution?” The story of the Kindertransport is well-known and often used to justify a narrative of British moral superiority. The footage of the late Sir Nicholas Winton on That’s Life! in the 1980s, surrounded by the adults he saved as children, is incredibly moving. But for every child who came, many more did not, to say nothing of the parents who were forced to accept separation, usually permanent, as the price of securing their children’s safety. This week, as I sat in a room with some of them in Belsize Square, another of those children, Lord Dubs, was definitively frustrated in his campaign to ensure the safety and security of child refugees separated from their families. We must ask with whom we are standing, and why, and whether the cause of unity for its own sake is worth it. I stand with the children.

Secondly, “Why were there more Jews in Albania in 1945 than before WW2?” in 1938, the Jewish population of Albania was around 200 people. At the end of the war, it was around 1800, as Jews from Germany, Austria, Serbia, Greece and Yugoslavia arrived, in transit to the Americas, Turkey and Mandate Palestine. They had been kept safe by a code of toleration and hospitality called Besa, which means “to keep the promise”. As Lime Balla, one of the rescuers, described it:

We were poor – we didn’t even have a dining table – but we never allowed them to pay for the food or shelter. I went into the forest to chop wood and haul water. We grew vegetables in our garden so we all had plenty to eat. The Jews were sheltered in our village for fifteen months. We dressed them all as farmers, like us. Even the local police knew that the villagers were sheltering Jews.

To stand together is not just a matter of symbolism. It is to act as well, whatever our circumstances, recognising the capacity that each of us has to do something.

Finally, the work on Rabbi Leo Baeck was inspiring. The leader of German Jewry in the 1930s, Baeck chose to stay with his community, as did Rabbi Regina Jonas, a pioneering female rabbi. Both were deported to Theresienstadt, from where Jonas was deported to Auschwitz and murdered in late 1944. I searched in vain for a statement of why they chose to stand together with their community, when in both cases they had options of hiding or escape. The closest I came was the prayer written by Baeck for Yom Kippur in 1935:

Our history is the history of the grandeur of the human soul and the dignity of human life. In this day of sorrow and pain, surrounded by infamy and shame, we will turn our eyes to the days of old. From generation to generation God redeemed our fathers, and he will redeem us in the days to come. We bow our heads before God and remain upright and erect before man. We know our way and we see the road to our goal.

In short, to stand together is sometimes all we can do, recognising that we do so on a road whose ultimate destination is impossible to know. So we must hold hands as we go.

Truth and Memory, 1914-2014

17 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by in Culture and Politics, Heritage Politics, Photography and Visual Culture

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IMGP1695 Detail from Paul Cummins, ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’, July – November 2014. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2014.

In The Missing of the Somme, his 1994 meditation on the legacy of the First World War, Geoff Dyer suggested that ‘in terms of remembrance the years 2014-2018 will represent the temporal equivalent of a total eclipse. By then no one who fought in the war will be alive to remember it.’ While the concrete prediction was unsurprisingly accurate (though Harry Patch, ‘The Last Fighting Tommy’ died only in 2009) the weight of coverage and number of memorials mean that it can hardly be considered an eclipse. Visiting the newly renovated Imperial War Museum London and its new First World War Galleries and the installation by Paul Cummins at the Tower of London, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, I have been struck not just by the sheer numbers (the IWM galleries have timed tickets to cope with demand) but the intensity with which people have engaged. For an event which has passed out of living memory (for combatants at least) it is remarkably emotive still. Even allowing for the degree to which media attention will amplify/produce/manufacture interest the response has been impressive. According to 1418Now, three million homes turned out their lights and lit candles to mark the centenary on 4 August.

photo The ‘Truth and Memory’ logo. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2014.

There is no shortage of pieces explaining/asking ‘What WW1 did for us’, nor is there any dearth of historical research exploring the origins and significance of the conflict. What I want to do here is look at the way this is happening in relation to the terms ‘Truth’ and ‘Memory’ – employed by the IWM as the title for an incredible exhibition of their First World War art collection.

The exhibition is in two parallel galleries separated by the chasm of the central atrium. The first contains works produced during or very shortly after the conflict while the second houses works produced after, incorporating the major works produced for the Hall of Remembrance project abandoned in 1919 by the British War Memorials Committee. The tensions in this division are acknowledged by the logo: ‘truth’ dissolving upward and ‘memory’ resolutely solid beneath. As the introductory panel notes, the ‘truth’ gallery contains works that ‘challenged established ideas of war and in turn redefined notions of the “truth”’. The gallery for ‘memory’ is intended to display evidence of ‘the central role envisioned for British art in commemorating the First World War’ – apparently underpinned by ‘the belief that art alone could convey the legitimacy of Britain’s cause and the nation’s sacrifice.’

Walking through the exhibition, my respect for the art itself was only slightly offset by disquiet at the ideas behind it. If there was a redefinition of ‘truth’ then how did that work? Did William Orpen’s use of biblical motifs redefine or reinforce them? Iconoclasm or even theodicy can be the sincerest forms of worship. Was the ‘grizzly truthfulness’ of Percy Delf Smith’s The Dance of Death a challenge to established ideas? Employing the medieval allegory of the Grim Reaper seems to emphasise continuity rather than challenge. Conversely, can anyone stand in front of John Singer Sargent’s Gassed and see ‘the legitimacy of Britain’s cause and the nation’s sacrifice’ without any hesitation or question? These questions, of course, are in the context of a breathtakingly thorough exhibition that needs to be seen and reflected upon.

The tensions between the concepts are nonetheless there, and unsurprisingly so. Truth will always require formulation and to that extent will be partial, at least in its expression. Memory presupposes that something is being remembered – which means that the scope of the imagination will come up against the facts of what happened. As Barthes put it, there is ‘stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered’ – the reality being the truth which can only be partially expressed.

IMG_0367 From the IWM London First World War Galleries. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2014.

Rather, therefore, than seeing a binary, on/off relationship between truth and memory, I see a spectrum of what I term mythology. Building on the work of Barthes, I see our engagement with the past as resulting from a tension that starts with an awareness that there is always ‘a language in which we speak of something’ which creates and defines the gap between what happened and how (or whether) we can speak of it – or if in fact we can sometimes stop speaking. This is about resonance and allusion, conscious or unconscious, of the period and/or anachronistic. Thus the title of William Roberts’s 1918 The Gas Chamber summons associations that are at once anachronistic and relevant. The chamber Roberts depicts is for training soldiers in the use of gas masks but at the same time the experience of gas attacks as both perpetrator and victim had a legacy in the death camps of the Third Reich, though it would be a mistake to join the concepts as though with a ruler. We need to remember Johan Huizinga’s injunction (quoted by Dyer) to ‘put ourselves at a point in the past at which the known factors seem to permit different outcomes’ and simultaneously know that it did happen a certain way and not another. In short, an awareness that we are not dealing with the object ‘memory’ but the act of remembering. Not mythology but mythologisation.

To achieve this, a museum needs to tread a path between explanation and play-acting that explains and illustrates the experience without confusing it with the reality that is being described. Not “I have been in a trench from the First World War” (which is patently false) but “I have enough insight to know what I can never experience”. The Blitz Experience and Trench Experience that used to occupy the parts of the building that are now the First World War Galleries used to fall into the trap of trying to recreate a reality which could not be recreated. The Dutch journalist Geert Mak wrote of sitting in a ‘fairy-tale air-raid shelter listening to the howl of the sirens and the thudding of the Heinkel bombers’.

More recent exhibitions such as the permanent Holocaust Exhibition and In Memoriam (commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the end of the First World War) have succeeded, however, in precisely the terms I am talking about, using installation and artful display spaces to suggest the experience of what is being described rather than indulging in theatrics that leave the visitor aware that it was just a fairground ride. In clearing out the ramshackle dioramas and glass cases of the First and Second World War exhibitions the challenge was to produce a space that provided information and experience in ways that are accessible and thought-provoking. The new galleries succeed in this with remarkable sophistication.

IMG_0290 Paper soldiers go to war. IWM London First World War Galleries. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2014.

A phenomenal array of exhibits and artefacts fill an exhibition space which crawls with explanations and questions, not asking you to imagine you are there but challenging you with the question; can you imagine this? Making your jagged way through the exhibition, the structure allegorises ‘The Trench’ while the lapidary scansion of the information panels constantly draws attention to the language in which they speak. One of the final panels reminds us that ‘Different generations/ have taken different standpoints/ as to what the war meant/ and we still grapple with its meaning today’. It is a brave choice to end a historical exhibition in such a significant location with questions about what is contained therein but this is what the IWM has done. In keeping with the awareness in its Corporate Plan that there is no end in sight to its role as ‘a global authority on conflict and its impact, from the First World War to the present day’ it offers questions. The present day is a moving target and answers are therefore provisional.

IMGP1551 A visitor to IWM London engages with ‘Queen and Country’ (Steve McQueen, 2006). Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2014.

And this is not isolated but clearly a strategy that the future will maintain. In the post-1945 galleries, bringing Queen and Country by Steve McQueen into the body of the museum does this: on the day I visited, two staff members were watching visitors explore the work and murmuring approvingly at the interaction – in contrast to its previous splendid isolation next to Sargent’s Gassed. On the same floor, Mark Neville’s Bolan Market – footage taken from inside an armoured vehicle on patrol in Afghanistan – puts the visitor uncomfortably into the shoes of an occupier, the scowls and fear-struck faces leaving you in no doubt of the relationship between watcher and watched. And all through the ‘temporary’ Galleries, the thoughts of curators, designers and historians emphasise the constructed nature of the museum, forcing a confrontation with the means by which the story has been spoken. There is always emphasis on the work of memory, returning the responsibility to find answers to the visitor.

IMGP1682 ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’ (Paul Cummins, 2014) at Tower Hill. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2014.

It is this kind of work that I missed when visiting Tower Hill to see the installation by Paul Cummins, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, which is slowly filling the moat of the Tower of London with 888, 246 ceramic poppies to remember ‘every death among the British and Commonwealth forces between 1914 and 1921’. No crowd of the size that was there will ever be silent – life, after all, goes on – but many individuals were. Many wiped away tears.

But the novelty will fade. The weather will be less conducive to standing and watching this creeping static tide. And at that point the questions come. For a start, British and Commonwealth? Surely you mean Empire? David Olusoga’s passionate and critical The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire has told the stories of some of those whose tomorrows were not ‘given for our freedom’ but rather mortgaged by their Imperial landlords. Talking of the Boys’ Own retelling of Paul Lettow-Vorbeck’s brutal campaign in Africa (entitled Heia-Safari!), Olusoga fixes the camera in the eye and says very clearly: “But I can’t see it like that. Because I was born here.” In the previous episode he was seen to physically recoil from some of the aggressive racism in propaganda about the colonial troops. It’s this kind of aggressive and visceral counter-narrative that installations like Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red negate in their scale and pure emotional appeal, smoothing away problems with a form that renders all casualties in one colour, blending all, servant and master, officer and soldier, ruler and ruled, into one egalitarian mass.

And over the road from the Tower, a memorial to the Merchant Navy of 1914-18 stands all but ignored by the crowds. Have you forgotten yet? This question begins Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Aftermath’, which goes directly on to describe how ‘the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,/ like traffic checked while at the crossing of city ways’.

Solid and reassuring answers are in many ways the best indicator of a problem. Like the mannequin in Colin Self’s 1966 The Nuclear Victim (Beach Girl), answers and questions should be textured and challenging rather than smooth and accommodating. The IWM renovation works because it demands engagement from the visitor: as I looked at the work by Self, I heard a boy (maybe twelve) ask ‘Dad, what’s happened to her? What’s happened?’ his alarm increasing with repetition. The other reason the IWM works (and why museums in general can work)  is because finding out demands from the boy and his father (and others just like them) an active enquiry.

The confrontation between those who favour ‘smooth’ interpretation and representation and those who reject such in favour of more ‘worked’ or ‘textured’ answers has been in the offing all year.  Michael Gove’s sniping contempt for ‘left-wing historians’ indulging in ‘misrepresentations which reflect an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this country’ can (for me) be detected in passive-aggressive form in many of the injunctions to ‘remember’ “all those who gave their lives for us to live free” which fill Twitter feeds and Facebook pages and newspapers and all the other ways that ‘public opinion’ asserts itself. I remember them. As brave men who were scared. As good men who did terrible things. For a good cause, for a bad cause, for no cause at all. Because they wanted to and because they were compelled or even forced to. But I try to do so in as many of these ways as possible, knowing that all (and none) are true. But in the trying, I remember.

IMG_0397 A detail from the IWM London First World War Galleries. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2014.

Forms of Memory

06 Thursday Jun 2013

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Image The Cenotaph, Whitehall, Sir Edwin Luteyns 1919-20. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2013.

The next two years are going to see a huge number of military anniversaries. Next year will be the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War and the 70th anniversary of D-Day. The ‘Twenty Years Crisis’ as E.H. Carr termed it is becoming history. There are already no living British veterans of the First World War and the number of Second World War veterans is decreasing. To paraphrase the Ode of Remembrance, the sun is going down and we can only remember them. The means by which we negotiate these events – what Susan Rubin Suleiman has termed ‘crises of memory’ – is likely to feature prominently in these posts.

This memory-work, though, will be done against a backdrop of the war in Afghanistan, projected for ‘drawdown’ by the end of 2014. After a meeting with Anders Fogh Rasmussen last month, President Obama has proposed a NATO summit to discuss the withdrawal – as he put it, to ‘underscore this final chapter in our Afghan operations’ – for 2014.

Counting the cost of the Afghan campaign is, however, well underway. A front-page story in The Guardian last week announced the publication of a book by Frank Ledwidge: Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War. The article outlines the book’s claims, including an estimated cost of ‘at least £37bn’, 444 British troops killed, 2600 wounded and more than 5000 he terms ‘psychologically injured’. In addition to which Ledwidge claims that more than 500 Afghan non-combatants have been killed. The article notes that half of these have been admitted by the British government. As to whether the war is winnable, Ledwidge is quoted as being dismissively derisive:

“Once the last British helicopter leaves a deserted and wrecked Camp Bastion, Helmand – to which Britain claimed it would bring ‘good governance’ – will be a fractious narco-state occasionally fought over by opium barons and their cronies.”

The article came to my attention via a Tweet from Owen Jones, who distilled the article in the following way:
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As someone who has engaged with various forms of memorial practice, I was struck by the way in which Jones had emphasised the number killed. With full respect for the fact that anyone’s death is a tragedy, there is an interesting shift in our response to Afghan casualties that deserves to be considered in the context of its historical evolution.

Looking at the BBC website for the casualties I was reminded of the 2007 project Queen and Country by the artist Steve McQueen, intended to remember those killed in Iraq through facsimile sheets of postage stamps bearing images of the dead. I viewed the work when it was at the Imperial War Museum and was struck by its patient dignity: the sheets are only visible one at a time, forcing the viewer to engage with each casualty as a discrete loss of life.

In one sense this is a continuation and modernisation of a memorial form that has endured throughout the twentieth century’s violent history: the list of names. The United Kingdom National Inventory of War Memorials (UKNIWM) has records of 64,000 of an estimated 100,000 war memorials in the UK, and many of them bear lists of those killed from a particular institution or locality. Entering the name of Godalming, the small Surrey town where I live, into the search engine produced results for the town, in the parish church and for a municipal roll of honour, as well as for the memorial cloister and plaque at Charterhouse School. Although the search only produces some of the individual names (those recorded at Charterhouse), the list of the fallen is central to the form of memory involved. This is a pattern replicated across the country – the Cenotaph at Southampton, for example, was inscribed with 1,997 names in 1922, though research by Tony Kushner of Southampton University apparently suggests that this excluded the names of members of the Jewish community.

The Southampton Cenotaph was designed by Sir Edwin Luteyns, the designer of the Cenotaph in Whitehall (and coincidentally a resident of Godalming). Originally commissioned in 1919 as a temporary monument in wood (the original was kept by the Imperial War Museum until its destruction in a WW2 air-raid), the stark simplicity of the design bears neither names of the fallen nor religious motto. Instead two stone wreaths and the words ‘The Glorious Dead’ invite the viewer or participant to think about its meaning. This blank quality opens the memorial to different meanings and has allowed it to transcend its origins in the aftermath of a specific conflict to act as a focus for the national act of remembrance of all conflicts.

At the core of these efforts to remember, however, is a dialectic between the event being remembered and the form in which this is done. In other words, what an event commemorates will determine the form of memorial that is most appropriate – and conversely, the form of memorial can tell us a great deal about what is being remembered.

ImageA useful example here is Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. which takes the list of names as its basis. The description on the artist’s website (click the quote for the link) brings out the three key elements: names, closure and geographical location at the heart of the national capital. The idea is that, as the National Parks Service puts it, it is a ‘Wall that heals’, by providing a place where those who served or lost friends and relatives can be reasonably certain of finding the name of the person they are remembering, a process facilitated by printed and online registries. So the form of the memorial tells us that this was a bloody war (there are currently 58,261 names) of long duration (the casualties are ordered over a period of fourteen years). The subdued quality of the memorial – with no heroic figures or waving flags, unlike the Marine Corps memorial in the same city – suggests that this was a defeat. But perhaps counting the cost in this very personal way turns even a victory into a defeat: perhaps the most striking of Luteyns’s memorials, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, has the names of more than 72,000 soldiers with no known graves inscribed into its fabric: a consequence of weapons which not only killed but obliterated.

So what does this mean for our forms of remembering our own war, here and now? It would be easy and inappropriate to simply suggest a glib contrast between the names on the Vietnam Memorial or at Thiepval and the 444 deaths recorded on the BBC (though Ledwidge’s comment above clearly invokes Vietnam as a comparison). To their families and friends, these deaths were and are shattering events: read the account by the Rev. Stuart Hallam of the death of 22 year-old Lieutenant John Thornton on 30th March 2008 in the collection of testimonies relating to Thornton’s death. After giving the last rites, Hallam writes:

I remembered that the lads were still waiting outside for news – but I was in bits, so before I went to see them I found a quiet room and wept… Then I went outside and told them that JT was dead.

As a political liberal who has concerned himself with the history of genocide, I have to concede the use of armed conflict in addressing certain kinds of situation at the same time as I deplore the loss of any life. In Rupert Smith’s intriguing book The Utility of Force, he sets out criteria for the successful use of military action:

To apply force with utility implies an understanding of the context in which one is acting, a clear definition of the result to be achieved, an identification of the point or target to which the force is being applied – and, as important as all the others, an understanding of the nature of the force being applied.

Smith’s set of tests can be applied with a little alteration to the critiquing of memorials. This may seem a frivolous exercise for the armchair peacenik but to me it seems that questioning the terms in which the last war is remembered is an essential part of preparing for – and perhaps avoiding – the next one. No one can make any certain pronouncements in the face of the individual tragedies created by such moments. And yet, I am moved to wonder whether this kind of very personal memorial would have been possible in other conflicts; whether our ability to pay personal homage to individual coffins arriving home does not reflect a kind of luxury that we should perhaps value more highly in asking questions about whether and how armed force is deployed. Because the marking of the individual death is a result of the economic, cultural, political and military power that allows us to make war in a fashion that is ‘asymmetric’, which is why our roll of honour can be contained within a single webpage or memorial. Which makes it no less honourable.

We have come a long way at great human cost since Wilfred Owen wrote Dulce et Decorum Est. We value individual suffering and deplore injustice in ways that many of those who fought a century ago would struggle to comprehend: there is, though, clearly some way to go. I honour the memory of those who die by trying to make my world better.

Frank Ledwidge’s Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War, was published last week by Yale University Press, RRP £18.99. The words of Rev. Stuart Hallam are taken from Helmand: Diaries from Front-Line Soldiers, Osprey, Oxford 2013.

The family of John Thornton set up a charity in his name, The John Thornton Young Achievers Foundation, www.jtyaf.org

Heritage Politics

17 Friday May 2013

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Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2013.

Seventy years ago last night, nineteen Lancaster bombers left RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire. 617 Squadron had been formed only a few weeks earlier, its mission a secret even from the pilots and crews. They had only been told of their objective – to break the dams of the Ruhr valley and thus disrupt German industry – earlier that day. The following morning, on 17 May, 1943, the surviving eleven crews returned – some all but crashing on the base perimeter – and a legend was born.

This is a story that will be told a lot today: the last few weeks have seen a wave of publications, supplements and television documentaries. BBC Radio 2 will spend the entire day commemorating the raid, its presenters broadcasting from Scampton and Biggin Hill before a concert in the evening. The trailers for this have been a regular feature on Radio 2, portraying the raid as a feat of courage and technical accomplishment: as Dan Snow puts it in an article for the BBC News website, a ‘combination of science, flying skill, grit and the obvious impact of the raids’. In short, the story as it has been told and retold since 1943, especially in the 1954 film starring Richard Todd (as Guy Gibson, the commander of the raid) and Michael Redgrave (as Barnes Wallis, the inventor of the bouncing bomb).

Like any operation by Bomber Command during World War 2, the Dambusters Raid has been the subject of intense debate, with no clear consensus on whether the raid achieved its short or long-term objectives. The authors of the official history of the Strategic Air Offensive, Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland (a veteran of Bomber Command and subsequently Director of the Imperial War Museum) dismissed the raid’s impact as overrated. And the civilian cost of the raid was huge: approximately 1650 people were killed in the towns and villages beneath the Möhne Dam. From their aircraft, the crews watched the impact of their breaching of the dam. Guy Gibson recounted:

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Guy Gibson (second from left) was 24 when he commanded the raid. He died in 1944 over Germany. IWM Photos.

It was the most amazing sight. The whole valley was beginning to fill with fog from the steam of the gushing water, and down in the foggy valley we saw cars speeding along the roads in front of this great wave of water, which was chasing them and going faster than they could ever hope to go. I saw their headlights burning and I saw water overtake them, wave by wave, and then the colour of the headlights underneath the water changing from light blue to green, from green to dark purple, until there was no longer anything except the water, bouncing down in great waves. The floods raced on, carrying with them as they went viaducts, railways, bridges and everything that stood in their path.

One survivor of the floods described what happened when the wave reached a labour camp where Ukrainian women were imprisoned.

Most were locked into their barracks and couldn’t get out. They were trapped inside the barracks as they were swept down until they came to the concrete bridge, where they were smashed to pieces. The terrible screams of the women trapped inside still rings in my ears.

Whatever the arguments about disruption of economic production – and Albert Speer made clear after the war that had the raid been exploited further it might have had serious consequences – the human cost was both immense and unavoidable. If the objective is to knock down a dam holding back millions of tons of water, the only way to do so without widespread and indiscriminate loss of life is to give a warning. Since the element of surprise was integral to the success of the operation, along with the necessity that water levels be at their highest, the civilian casualties have to be seen as at the very least an anticipated consequence of the mission. The moral questions about the raid mirror the broader questions around the Bomber Offensive, something which will certainly be revisited in the context of other forthcoming anniversaries, most notably (I suspect) that of the Dresden bombing in 1945. In that context, it is worth remembering as well that the Dams raid was codenamed Chastise.

In the meantime, though, a thought about the broader issues. In addition to the Dambusters and David Beckham, the news this week has focused on the progressive implosion of the Conservative Party over Europe, a process catalysed by the startling success of UKIP in the recent local elections. As entertaining as this is in terms of political theatre, I was struck by a tweet from Robert Eaglestone of Royal Holloway (@BobEaglestone if you’re on Twitter) who pointed out that ‘a problem with UKIP is that they believe the last thing to ‘happen’ in UK is WW2, so they create an odd ‘heritage’ politics.’ My response was this: surely the odd thing is that heritage politics are not perceived as strange?

The air war of World War Two has a particular and peculiar hold over us. The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight is a standard part of our pageantry: witness the role of the iconic aircraft as part of the 2012 Jubilee and the 2011 Royal Wedding. Perhaps for the Jubilee it was comprehensible – the Queen is after all the last surviving head of state to serve in uniform during the conflict. But for the wedding of two people born almost forty years after the war it is curious. We are in a Barthesian mythology, where the constraints of the metalanguage in which we speak make the contingent and strange appear natural. To illustrate the strangeness, look at the photo at the top of this post, taken last week in a pub in Guildford. And ask yourself what would be the reaction if there were a German beer called Messerschmitt?

Quotations from the crews and witnesses taken from Max Arthur, Dambusters: A Landmark Oral History, Virgin Books, London 2009. ‘Friday Night is Music Night presents The Dambusters 70 Years On’ is on Radio 2 at 8pm.