My post the other week about the use of AI to generate images purportedly of the Holocaust has had quite a lot of attention. Some of this has been derived from my posting a link alongside critiques of the images as they’ve appeared (and re-appeared) in my social media. I’ve had three basic responses to these comments:
Firstly, responses by people who are what used to be called “hard” Holocaust deniers. These claim that the images are no more fake than any other image of the Holocaust. This recalls David Irving’s rallying cry to fellow deniers to “Sink the Auschwitz!” Irving said that they had to “make it tasteless” to get attention: a strategy developed by the late (and unlamented) Ernst Zündel, who used publications such as “Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions” (1978) and “Hitler at the South Pole” (1979) to get himself invited into television studios to “defend” his views. He also doubtless tapped into the subculture of what we might term today credulous edgelords, many of whom probably went on to buy turquoise shell suits in emulation of David Icke.
(Icke, by the way, has dropped his New Age pretence of trying to create world peace in favour of screaming “Rothschild Zionist!” at pictures of people he disagrees with. No more shell suits either.)
Secondly, there have been comments espousing “soft” denial, especially minimisation. One response ran: “the reason they were running low on food was because the allies uS Great Britain Etc [sic.] were bombing the railways. Otherwise it was typhus killing those Jews.”
Both of these types of comment are to be expected. The effort to distort and deny the scale of the Holocaust started while the Holocaust was still happening, and hasn’t let up since. As Tony Kushner has described, this went alongside a “liberal” suspicion that Jews had brought their fate upon themselves – that there was (and this was an actual phrase used) “no smoke without fire”. Nothing has tortured a certain kind of antisemitic fantasist more than actual Jewish victimhood, often recorded by its perpetrators. That such people seek to muddy the historical waters is not surprising.
But other kinds of indignation have been less expected, and are much more worrying in strategic terms. I expect to draw the ire of deniers, but the people who’ve rejected my challenges to these fakes as an attack on Holocaust memory have been a shock. Particularly when they claim that the fakes reflect realities they’ve read about or even seen on site visits.
Mostly, those kinds of objections can be met with facts. Since the responder accepts the Holocaust as an item of knowledge, they are usually able to accept arguments based on factual information and evidence (even if this is time-consuming, especially as a volunteer.)
But the last kind of objection is the most difficult. These claim that any kind of Holocaust remembrance, however divorced from facts, is worthy of reverence. Since I treat fake images of real events (even if rarely referenced or even employing names) as fakes, I am guilty of (at best) carping or (at worst) challenging the reality of the Holocaust. Challenging Holocaust distortion is now (for some people) on a par with (or worse than) Holocaust distortion itself. We are not so much through the looking glass as picking the shards of critical discourse out of our eyes.
The use of these images is already blurring the boundaries between real and imagined. If it is allowed to go unchallenged it will rapidly become impossible to restrict their use. As we know from the success of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, the inadequacy of Holocaust representations is not disqualifying – in fact, it can even be a reason for their success. And there are -as Baudrillard warned – no originals to correct, no negatives to destroy. All we have is experience and expertise, challenges, and the exercise of choice.
The scholar Andy Pearce has done a lot of work on what he terms “Holocaust consciousness” – where the object is simply to create a rather numinous sense of the Holocaust’s reality rather than engage in rigorous education or discussion. We are reaping the fruit of this direction of work, and we need to ask ourselves if we can change course. It is not enough to be aware of the Holocaust; we must ensure that it is known.
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Image: one of the many coffees that have contributed to my productivity.
Reconciling passion and productivity is a challenge. My wife will tell you that I don’t take my task of teaching and learning about the Holocaust lightly. Everything I do is based on the most up-to-date, most solid, and most reliable scholarship I can find – as the state of my study can attest. This comes at a price. Academic publishing seems determined to ensure that the ivory tower is surrounded with searchlights and machine guns, and paywalls of such proportions that George R.R. Martin would think them implausible. Supportive friends can and do help out with discreet emails of particular articles, and I’m expert these days at sourcing second-hand. But there’s a cost.
But, as my recent post on AI and the Holocaust explored, the damage that can be done by shortcuts is immense: we are in danger of the truth of the Holocaust being diluted and debased by AI fabrication that can be produced at little or no cost to the producer. And once produced, it can spread quickly into distant corners of the internet. Meanwhile, those of us who take care and pride in what we do struggle to cover the cost of books, research…and daily life. My two year-old daughter needs nappies, and food, and all the other things that children need.
The internet age has made it easier to create and distribute what the world lumps together as “content”. But the very democracy of it makes it harder to turn a profit. In music, even small bands can produce merchandise like T-shirts and vinyl that can help to manage. But nobody needs a T-shirt with my face on it, let alone the subjects of my research. And publishing is still hard to break into: especially when some of my best ideas are available for free, because I want to communicate when the issue is important, not necessarily when an editor agrees.
I do paid work. The charity Generation 2 Generation uses me as a freelance historical consultant, and this month I’m going to work with the inspired and remarkable young people of HabonimDror UK. But my fees for these organisations are not sufficient to keep me going, since they reflect organisational needs and the willingness of funding organisations to support their work. That doesn’t affect in the slightest how seriously I take everything I do.
I don’t ever want to charge for engaging with my work on this site. In the event that I were to become an established academic, I would still keep this site free to use. But in the meantime, the last post I wrote has had 223 views. If everyone left the price of the coffee I drank while typing this, I wouldn’t be any nearer retirement – but I also might be a little less worried about what to do to keep my work and life together.
So from now on, all new posts will carry the notice that you can Buy Me a Coffee: https://coff.ee/jaimeashworth Please think about clicking and donating, and know you’re supporting the work of ensuring the Holocaust is taught and learned about (and commented upon) as accurately and completely as I can manage. Thank you.
I can only assume that whoever chose the theme for HMD this year, For a Better Future, had money on the US election. “Surely,” they must have said to themselves, “Harris will win. Educators and others can talk about the ways in which the world is and can be a better place, just a week after the inauguration.” Or perhaps, since I found myself addressing a school yesterday on this theme, this is more evidence that if history teaches us anything, it’s that historians don’t learn from history.
I realised in preparing the talk that honesty was essential. You can’t pretend that (for example) unprecedented wildfires are just the warm glow of the fire in the college library. They know things are bad; you know things are bad. So admit it.
As to culpability, if there’s any event that can be safely laid at the door of white European men, it’s the Holocaust. I didn’t expect Elon Musk to so quickly acknowledge the role of the Nazis in his intellectual hinterland (perhaps the Afrikaans veld would be more accurate), but making the Nazi salute twice just hours after the swearing in was nothing if not confirmation that I was right to suggest that insecure men of limited intelligence and even more limited scruples can’t be trusted. Aimé Cesaire would have immediately recognised the “cruelty, mendacity, baseness, and corruption” that have been the hallmarks of his project, and that of his permatanned puppet.
But, while interesting, the dead weight of European patriarchal intellectual history doesn’t provide a great deal of uplift. Nor, to be frank, does describing the mixture of emotions with which most survivors seem to have greeted liberation: numbness, doubt, and fear of the very future that the theme valorises. Primo Levi’s account of the numb incomprehension of his liberators does, however, resonate with the sense of helplessness that many have felt since November.
“They did not greet us, nor smile; they seemed oppressed, not only by pity but also by a confused restraint which sealed their mouths, and kept their eyes fastened on the funereal scene. It was the same shame which we knew so well, which submerged us after the selections, and every time we had to undergo or witness an outrage: the shame the Germans never knew, the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse by its existence, because of its having been introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a good defence.”
Moreover, even the little bit of good news at the moment, the fragile ceasefire in Israel/Gaza, came very late in the preparations. And I couldn’t bring myself to hold it up as an example, both because it comes after such horror and, superstitiously, I didn’t want to jinx it.
But as in the Greek myth, after the horrors had emptied out of the box, something remained. Not hope, but its more resilient cousin, faith.
Why more resilient? Because hope requires something to be grounded in, and accordingly can be disappointed or even crushed. Faith, however, is consciously not knowing and moving forward anyway. I’m always wary of quoting St. Paul (an antisemite as only a former Jew could be) but “The promise of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen” is a very good summary of faith.
As for the obvious question of what we put our faith in, I closed with one of the most basic and common prayers in Judaism: Shehecheyanu, the prayer for this moment. It translates as follows:
Blessed are You, Lord our G‑d, King of the Universe, who has granted us life, sustained us and brought us to this moment.
The whole talk is here as a download, but I leave you with my closing paragraph: please let it come to pass:
“I say this prayer with groups in Auschwitz, as a reminder that whatever may have happened in the past, we are here. Whatever the challenges, we shall overcome, given time, given faith. And whatever the future may hold, we will face it together.”
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A visitor to the Imperial War Museum London looks at portraits of Holocaust survivors, November 2021. Photo: Jaime Ashworth.
The theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is a vast one, going to the core of what is important about what happened in the Holocaust, and offering a sharp analytical tool to cut through what can sometimes be inaccurate, inappropriate, or simply inauthentic in Holocaust memorialisation. It also, if we choose, could be a rallying cry of hope for the world, but for the moment let me stick to what I know.
Like any historical event, the Holocaust has to be understood from the specifics up, and “lessons” must be drawn advisedly. If, in the solemn words of a 1968 anthology of Holocaust literature, we claim that “A whirlwind cannot be taught; it must be experienced” we cut ourselves off from what is important. Because if it cannot be taught, nor can it be learned from. For the learning to be done from a storm is limited, and we know there will be others: at some point, all we can do is take shelter and pray to be spared. But the Holocaust was not a natural disaster. It was the product of human actions on the basis of human decisions. We do violence to history if we paint its victims automatically as saints or its perpetrators as monsters.
Adam Czerniaków was an engineer and a Senator in the interwar Polish parliament. After occupation of the city, he was appointed Chairman of the Jewish council, responsible for the second-largest community of Jews in the world. The 300,000 Jews of Warsaw were outnumbered only by the Jews of New York, and during the twenty months Czerniaków was Chairman, Warsaw Jewry swelled to 450,000. In his endless attempts to square the demands of the Germans with the meagre resources the community had to help itself he won few friends, though his diaries show little of either the ego or subservience his critics accused him of. In July 1942, confronted with the request to organise the deportation of children from the ghetto, he committed suicide. Was this a final act of cowardice (as the great Polish-Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum claimed) or just the exhausted response of a man who had on more than one occasion gone from being beaten to a meeting to discuss how the ghetto managed its affairs? And who had endured both the hatred of those he tried to protect and the contempt of those he tried to placate. While the order sealing the ghetto came from the German governor of Warsaw, the final orders for the destruction of the ghetto were delivered by a junior officer. The final notice required no more explanation or debate; nothing more than a delivery man.
In Łódź, the Chairman of the Council – the self-styled “Elder of the Jews” – was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. A not very successful and not very well known businessman, he was appointed at around the same time as Czerniakow. When confronted in 1942 with the order to deport the children and the elderly, he complied, haranguing the ghetto that he would cut off the limbs to save the body, and making clear that only those who worked would survive. His ego, love of the limelight, and disturbing claims about his behaviour with the ghetto’s children, all fit him for the villain’s costume. And yet, as Yehuda Bauer has pointed out, the Łódź ghetto was finally liquidated in August 1944: had the Russian army advanced just a little quicker, we might now be talking of him as a pragmatic survivor.
The survivors knew – and, in their ever-smaller numbers, know – how frail and difficult such judgments are. Primo Levi, in his most heartfelt (and final) book, The Drowned and the Saved, acknowledged that “We, the survivors, are an anomalous minority. Those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are […] the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose depositions would have general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception.”
There comes a moment in every testimony, however professionally delivered, where the survivor once again encounters the slimness of the margin that brought them through their experiences safely but not others. Considerable scholarly energy has been directed at this. Initially survivors were thought to be racked by guilt. But guilt implies a charge which can be reversed or appealed in light of evidence. If we believe ourselves to be guilty, we usually have a basis for this, rightly or wrongly. We are ashamed, however, if we feel ourselves helpless in the face of wrongdoing. As Levi wrote of his liberators, arriving out of the mist 78 years ago today:
“They did not greet us, nor smile; they seemed oppressed, not only by pity but also by a confused restraint which sealed their mouths, and kept their eyes fastened on the funereal scene. It was the same shame which we knew so well, which submerged us after the selections, and every time we had to undergo or witness an outrage: the shame the Germans never knew, the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse by its existence, because of its having been introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a good defence.”
Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish survivor of Auschwitz whose narrative persona in his Auschwitz stories was at odds with the generous and kind man his contemporaries remembered, observed that the key to the Nazi system was in reducing everyone and everything to its level.
“The first duty of Auschwitzers is to make clear just what a camp is…but let them not forget that the reader will unfalteringly ask: But how did it happen that you survived? […] Tell, then, how you bought places in the hospital, easy posts, how you shoved [them] into the oven, how you bought women, men, what you did in the barracks, unloading the transports, at the gypsy camp; tell about the daily life of the camp, about the hierarchy of fear, about the loneliness of every man. But write that you, you were the ones that did this. That a portion of the sad fame of Auschwitz belongs to you as well.“
You could not survive without being implicated in the death of another. Another survivor, Jean Amery, argued that “a man, once tortured, remains tortured” – perhaps chiefly by Amery’s own awareness that the only way to fully communicate pain is to inflict it. Levi’s first book was called “If this is a man”: I suspect the key to understanding all of these men, and other survivors besides, is to see that title as a question: directed firstly and most uncompromisingly at themselves. In undermining their core belief in their personhood – that they were and remained ordinary people – we see the evil of the totalitarian mindset which divides us all: into important or not, deserving or not, ordinary or not, and ultimately alive or not.
It is those categories which drove the killers. Demanding first that the individual be quantified, held to some fantastic genetic account was the first step. In the first years of the Nazi regime, the individual became required – by custom rather than laws in most cases – to give an account of their family history. A thriving industry sprang up, with genealogical researchers advertising their services, and different companies offering easy-to-carry versions of the Ahnenpass (ancestors’ record) detailing ancestry as far back as a given institution or organisation wished. It was partly to help resolve the myriad complications thrown up by this process that the Nuremberg Laws were introduced in 1935. First came the elimination of doubt and then came the elimination of the people who embodied those doubts.
It is comforting at this point to imagine that the killers believed their victims to be something other than ordinary people. There were certainly efforts to portray Jews as vermin, and the degraded communities of the ghettos seemed to confirm the propaganda. For some, by the time they encountered actual Jews, they saw only the phantasm of “The Jew”. Alfred Rosenberg, the ideologue of the Third Reich, commented after visiting Warsaw: “If there are any people left who still somehow have sympathy with the Jews then they ought to be recommended to have a look at such a ghetto. Seeing this race en masse, which is decaying, decomposing, and rotten to the core will banish any sentimental humanitarianism.” A Polish government report in May 1942 described how “Every day large coaches come to the ghetto; they take soldiers through as if it was a zoo. It is the thing to do to provoke the wild animals.”
For others, however, there is a more disturbing picture. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were not impressionable youths whose views had been moulded by Nazi propaganda since childhood. They were middle-aged, and stolid. Nor, from Protestant North Germany, were they entirely typical Nazi voters in 1933. And yet, when offered the chance in July 1942 to be excused the actual killing if they wished, just one man stepped out of line. The battalion went on to be prolific and proficient – but only in a relatively few cases enthusiastic – killers. They were neither the supernatural horror of a B-movie special effects department nor the rigid-armed automata of early textbooks. They were, far more terrifyingly, ordinary people too. And they killed just like the others, whose extremity makes them more accommodating fixtures in the mental landscape. Once, while teaching a session, I asked the very wise man Steven Frank, whose childhood in Terezin I have heard him describe many times, how many monsters he met. He hesitated and I could see his genial nature strip back for a moment, before conceding, “Not many, actually.”
Of course there were monsters. Josef Mengele and Carl Clauberg, in their blank disregard for those on whom they performed medical “experiments” in Auschwitz. Heinrich Himmler, with his prim insistence that carrying out the extermination had made the SS hard but at no moral cost as long as they did not enrich themselves. The men around the table at Wannsee, calmly discussing the progress, scope, and implementation of mass murder before proceeding to lunch. There were sadists, sociopaths, and others. But even here we cannot know for sure that they were born wanting to do these things.
These challenges are the tests of the efforts this week to memorialise the Holocaust. Do they ask you to find complex and challenging answers to uncomfortable questions? Or do they you offer you reassurance that no, it could not happen here, not now, not by us.
Because it could. The full complexity of the debate on trans rights is not my field of expertise, nor is the plight of refugees. As ever, find a voice of experience, and listen, taking as your starting-point the idea that the person you encounter is ordinary, like you. But when a small minority becomes enlarged into an omnipresent and omnipotent threat out of all proportion to its size? That is my field. What happens when the self-identification of individuals becomes the business of everyone with half an opinion, that is my field. And what happens when the demand to police an illusory certainty acquires lethal momentum, that is very much my field. The elimination of doubt about what people are will always end in the elimination of people themselves if it is not checked by rigour, by empathy, and by compassion. Otherwise, the only way to eliminate the doubt is to eliminate the people. And that happens symbolically first, as we move them from those we deem “ordinary” and entitled to consideration and rights, and into another category, where maybe the rules of humanity do not fully apply. Every other step is a commentary on that first one.
Primo Levi died shortly after completing The Drowned and the Saved. He fell down a lift shaft in his Turin apartment building. Some have argued that it was not suicide since there was no note. But a cursory reading of his work reveals a man only desperately kept from the final discharge of his life by the writing of its explanation. In his essay ‘The Gray Zone’ in which he discussed Rumkowski among others, he concluded that “we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.”
On one level, it is a tragic measure of how far this good, wise, brave man felt trapped by his experience. On another, it is a warning: of how far we may fall when we are not prepared to face the consequences of knowing the Holocaust was perpetrated by and on ordinary people. Before you call for the walls to be higher, for the lords of death to be more particular in their judgment, ask for whom the train is waiting. It could be you, it could be me: we are, after all, ordinary people.
The Book of Lamentations inscribed on the Holocaust Memorial in Hyde Park. Photo: Jaime Ashworth
How we connect the history and meaning of the Holocaust to other events and processes is in many ways the defining argument in the field today. Whether in academic circles – witness the German Catechism debate last year – or in the hurly-burly of Twitter, how far the Holocaust can act as a comparison or analogue to other things is constantly under review. In the latter environment, amid a stream of careless allusion and under-considered rhetoric, the devaluation of Holocaust imagery and symbols by those opposed to vaccinations and lockdowns has led many people to the adamantine belief that the only thing to which the Holocaust can be compared to is itself. Others meanwhile insist that the Holocaust is losing relevance or significance and should be spoken of in relation to other things: for example, to the crimes committed by colonial empires.
When working with students on dissertation projects, I often compare the process of research to selecting a lens in photography. Do I wish to look at the Holocaust in the fine grain of detail, requiring a narrow and intense focus? Or do I wish to situate the Holocaust in the context of other genocides and abuses of human rights, requiring a wide-angle lens? The problem of course being that either course has advantages and disadvantages. We might speak of a kind of uncertainty principle, in which the specific quality of the Holocaust appears most clearly when it occludes the broader significance, and vice versa: some of the texture of the Holocaust’s singularity is smoothed out by distance when thinking about how it relates to other things.
Keeping these things in balance is a constant challenge, and a worthy kind of memorial in itself. An event as complex and challenging should not be reduced to bromides or platitudes. Passionate argument and discussion about the best and most fitting way to remember this event indicates that it is still relevant. The challenge of relating it to the terrible colonial legacies of European civilisation in a way that preserves the significance of both. The challenge of recognising how ways of thinking about gender and sexuality were part of the poisonous brew of festering assumptions that boiled over in 1930s Germany. The challenge of recognising that attitudes to Roma and Travellers have barely evolved since the 1930s. Above all, perhaps, the challenge of seeing that the Holocaust was only possible because the countries of Europe all, to varying degrees, facilitated, encouraged, or even just tolerated the persecution of Jews because of an underlying antisemitism that seems less dormant with each passing day. The attack on Congregation Beth El in Colleyville, Texas, remember, was carried out by a man from Britain. Just last night, two Jewish men in Stamford Hill were attacked, out of the blue. The Community Security Trust recorded more antisemitic incidents in the first six months of 2021 than in any comparable period since 2013.
Wiseacres on social media might suggest that it’s a little churlish of me to raise this kind of argument on Holocaust Memorial Day. They might disingenuously imply that Holocaust Memorial Day places the genocide of Jews on a pedestal, drawing the gaze from present-day situations that they see as equivalent. Of course, they would have to ignore the way in which from its inception HMD has sought to provide knowledge and understanding of subsequent genocides. Across the country, survivors from Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Darfur and many other places share their stories and experiences with those who will listen. There are events tonight with representatives of the Uyghur, who are being persecuted in terrible ways in China.
And the survivors of the Holocaust know that their lesson is general, not particular. I had the privilege today to facilitate (on behalf of the Holocaust Educational Trust) the testimony of Freddy Berdach, who escaped Austria in 1938 with his parents. He spoke of how the atmosphere was filled with fear after the Anschluss as crowds of jeering, laughing, spitting Viennese dragged men and women onto the streets. He described how, aged just eight, he became expert in the intricacies of immigration to particular countries – though he still believed that they were safe the moment they stepped on a train to Switzerland, an impression corrected when a fellow passenger revealed his party badge and insisted on strip-searching him. Yet he ended on a note of hope, with an appeal to the general, not the particular. “The Holocaust,” he said, “must become a cultural code for education towards human rights and democracy, for tolerance, and opposition to racism.” It was decided in 2000 to call the day Holocaust Memorial Day over the objections of survivors, who were concerned that they might be accused of demanding special consideration: organsisers argued that the popular recognition of the Holocaust as a paradigmatic genocide would ensure that audiences were given an accessible cognitive framework for learning about other events, in different places and at different times. For survivors, it is always a balance between telling their story – as Lamentations puts it, “[to] weep streams of tears […] because of the destruction of my people” and the knowledge that there is nothing to be done about the past, only the future. As Primo Levi said, “It happened, therefore it can happen again. This is the essence of what we have to say.”
The theme for HMD 2022, “One Day” is a challenging one in this regard, since it seems to draw the gaze to the particular. For the Holocaust was so much more than one day. Taking place across Europe and North Africa and over a period of twelve years, it encompassed days and moments beyond counting. The crux of the problem is that no “One Day” was quite like another, even for those who shared it. For some it was a day of survival, for others it was the end. To return to the metaphor of the camera, however; by thinking about one person on one day we can bring the meaning of the destruction into focus more clearly. For me, it will always be the faces of Israel and Zelig Jacob, photographed on their arrival in Birkenau, which will encapsulate the tragedy more sharply than any other. That one day was their last day – this photograph the only known image of them.
Israel and Zelig Jacob, on the ramp in Birkenau, May 1944. USHMM #77218
The real danger of memorial days is that they do all the work. Jacob Rees-Mogg today told the Commons that there would be no statement today on the report into Downing Street parties during lockdown since the government wanted to “devote the whole time to debating Holocaust Memorial Day.” I am sure I speak for many others when I say that while the memory of the Holocaust is something MPs should be concerned with, it should not be used as a way of blocking MPs from doing their jobs by holding the government to account. To use the memory of the Holocaust as a filibuster cheapens the democracy Freddy Berdach prizes so highly, as well as the experiences of those who survived.
This is because Holocaust Memorial Day is not – or should not be – a moment for navel-gazing. The Year 10 students listening to Freddy Berdach asked how they and others can continue to remember the Holocaust. As I explained to them, I chose not to ask Freddy this question. Not because I don’t think he would have an answer – I’m sure his remarkable mind and soul would have something to say – but because I don’t think the question of what the Holocaust will mean is really his problem any more – it’s ours. The students spent the last half hour before the end of the day writing to Freddy about how they are going to take what they have heard forward. For it is not today that is most important, nor yesterday, but tomorrow. That is the one day that really counts. For joy cometh in the morning, if only we are there to see it.
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).
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.
Auschwitz-II Birkenau, July 2015. Photo: Jaime Ashworth.
Among the most compelling of the exhibits at the Auschwitz Museum are the aerial photographs of the Auschwitz, Birkenau and Monowitz Camps taken by Allied reconnaissance in 1944 and early 1945. The images show the camps during some of their busiest – and bloodiest – periods of operation. If sufficiently magnified, it is possible to see groups of people walking from the trains to the crematoria and gas chambers. We can count the openings in the ceilings of the gas chambers of Crematoria II and III through which pellets of Zyklon-B were introduced. Visitors often leave, encouraged by their guides, with the sense that the world knew what was happening and remained silent.
A detail from an aerial photograph taken in August 1944. The red circle highlights the opening in the roof of the gas chamber of Crematorium II. The blue circle shows a group of deportees approaching the crematorium compound.
In fact, the truth is more complex. The images were taken using film cameras set to take constant exposures over many miles. The “target” of the surveillance was the chemical factory at Monowitz: built by prisoners in the adjoining Auschwitz III camp, the factory was built by the chemical combine IG Farben to produce synthetic rubber. At the confluence of the Vistula and Sola rivers, and located in a coal-mining region, the site was tailor-made for such a plant. The availability of cheap labour – the SS charged a fee to use prisoner labour – meant that the project could be completed relatively quickly and on a short budget. Although the Bunawerke factory never produced any Buna (synthetic rubber) it was a strategic target. In fact, it was bombed four times: twice in August 1944, once in September, and once in December.
The bombing of Monowitz is one of the most contentious episodes in the history of WW2. Why, critics ask, could the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps not have been bombed as well? In fact, stray bombs from one of the raids did fall on Birkenau, as recorded by survivor testimonies. A conference was organised at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in the late 1990s, with a volume of proceedings published in 2000. A short summary of a complex debate breaks down as follows:
Firstly, knowledge of Auschwitz was both plentiful and of questionable accuracy. Reports by escaped prisoners such as Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler made clear that mass murder was being carried out. But rumours of death by electrocution or burning were not accurate, and their estimates of numbers were (understandably) excessive. To prisoners caught up in hell, the constant stream of arrivals and the smoking chimneys must have made it impossible to say for certain more than that a very large number of people were being killed. Even perpetrators were unsure of the numbers. At Nuremberg, Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, estimated that the dead in the camp totalled around 3,000,000. Research conducted in Poland in the early 1990s, however, demonstrated conclusively that approximately 1,500,000 people were deported to the camp, and of those around 1,100,000 were killed. But in 1944, at the closing stages of the war, the facts were unclear and resources at a premium. Auschwitz was at the very edge of operational range, and required a dangerous mission back and forth across Germany.
Secondly, there is the question of technological capability. The key idea here is Circular Error Probable: the likelihood of a given bomb hitting within a reasonable range of its target. Accustomed to footage of munitions that can virtually turn corners to match traffic lights, we forget that in 1944 a bomb was simply explosives set to blow up when it completed its vertical drop. To hit the crematoria, or the railway lines, or any other target, was difficult. The controversial Allied strategy of bombing German cities was employed because the technology made precision difficult unless flying by day – which increased the risk to aircrew. And this is before any thought is given to the likely cost in prisoner lives of any full-scale raids on the camp. Survivors may say that they would have welcomed it – but I am glad they are here to tell the story, rather than blown to smithereens by Allied bombs.
Thirdly, the intellectual framework did not exist to really comprehend what was in the images, even if someone had looked. It had not, as Primo Levi wrote, yet “been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist”. There was plentiful information about the Holocaust in both the popular press and the corridors of power, but it was not acted upon in the most basic way. It was not accepted as fact that the German intention was to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Assertions that it was, in the minds of decision-makers, belonged in newspaper headlines and lurid magazine articles, not the formulation of policy. A significant measure of antisemitism also contributed. Surely, some argued, this was just Jewish imagination at work, a persecution complex caught up in the war? In August 1942, Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress sent a telegram to Sidney Silverman MP, the WJC representative in London:
The Riegner Telegram (UK National Archives FO371/30917)
The ensuing five-day correspondence among officials acknowledged “numerous reports of large scale massacres of Jews” but focused on attempting to verify Riegner’s identity (“Eastern Dept. have no knowledge of Mr Riegner”) and ended with the following remark:
I do not see how we can hold up this message much longer, although I fear it may provoke embarrassing repercussions. Naturally we have no information bearing on this story.
Later in 1942, the activist Rev. James Parkes despaired that “The continued silence of the government in relation to the massacres is evidence of the strength in places of power of reactionary forces – from whom we have nothing to hope.”
But how then can we explain the pictures? Surely these images show that we knew exactly what was happening? There it is, in black and white, neatly labelled.
In fact, this is misleading. As I said above, the photographs were taken on huge rolls of film, covering many miles. The images of Auschwitz and Birkenau were at the end of these reels, after the “target” images of Monowitz. During the war, they were overlooked because analysts were not detailed to look. The images we are familiar with were only produced in the 1970s, when two CIA analysts named Dino A. Brugioni and Robert G. Poirier examined the images and conducted a retrospective analysis, uncovering many of the details that strike the visitor or viewer today. As they said in their report:
Extract from Dino A. Brugioni and Robert G. Poirier, “The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex” (CIA, 1979)
In a variety of ways therefore, both technical and historical, not only were the images not looked at until the 1970s, they could not have been looked at earlier. The report also served another purpose than historical reconstruction. The pointed reference to the CIA’s photo-reconnaissance capability was meant to be understood most directly in Moscow: the clear message being that Russian military installations could be spotted, analysed and potentially destroyed.
Why is this important today? A BuzzFeed article prompted these reflections: an article about the treatment of the Uighurs in China. BuzzFeed used commercial technology to identify 268 sites, and was able to confirm that 92 of these are detention centres using documents, eyewitness testimony and academic research. Authorities in the region termed the claims of persecution as “a groundless lie”: “the issue concerning Xinjiang is by no means about human rights, religion or ethnicity, but about combating violent terrorism and separatism”. Some of these sites are sufficient to hold 10,000 people. The testimonies of those who have emerged from the camps to tell the tale are horrendous.
One of the detention sites identified by BuzzFeed.
This month, an open letter was sent to the government by more than 70 faith leaders, calling on the UK government “to investigate these crimes, hold those responsible to account and establish a path towards the restoration of human dignity.” The letter invoked the Holocaust, once more demanding that “Never Again” finally – this time – have some meaning.
In 1945, Primo Levi wrote that his liberators were oppressed by the evidence of the crime, “the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man feels at another man’s crime.” But this crime in many ways had only just been introduced into the “world of things that exist”. The legal measures of the late 1940s, the Genocide Convention and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, were landmarks, acknowledging for the first time that rights are human and transnational, that mass death is wrong, and that leaders cannot hide behind the state to evade responsibility. James Fawcett, one of the British contributors to these laws (and grandfather of our current Prime Minister), said in 1961 that their purpose was to ensure that “Sharpeville, Angola, Tibet, are all matters of international concern, though they happen within the jurisdiction of a particular state.” That these lessons were learnt while mired in the hypocrisy and crime of Empire does not detract from the imaginative, moral, ethical and philosophical leap they were.
But that leap was made for us. Now we know. Now, it is other words from Primo Levi that we must remember, before we once more say “Never Again”: “It happened, therefore it can happen again.” It is happening again: once more, as Levi wrote, the lords of death are waiting by the trains. It is our job to try and stop them leaving the station. Knowing is not enough: now we must act.
Albert Camus wrote The Plague in 1947, as an allegory of French society under German occupation. Reading from 2020, however, it also describes with some accuracy the social impact of an actual epidemic. The sense of time suspended, of activity deferred, of relationships interrupted: “As it was a case of marking time, many hundreds of thousands of people were still kicking their heels for endless weeks […] nothing more important happened than this great marking of time.”
And into this space come comparisons, analogies and theories, to fill the empty time and make sense of the chaos and disruption, invented by the mendacious to manipulate the confused. Camus lists the different types and it is impossible not to recognise the stories in the newspapers that blow down our streets, their relevance superseded by new developments.
Some predictions were based on bizarre calculations involving the number of the year, the number of deaths and the number of months already spent under the plague. Others established comparisons with the great plagues of history, bringing out the similarities (which these prophecies called ‘constants’) and, by means of no less peculiar calculations, claimed to extract information relative to the present outbreak. But the ones that the public liked best were undoubtedly those which, in apocalyptic language, announced a series of events, any one of which might be the one that the town was currently enduring, their complexity allowing for any interpretation. Nostradamus and Saint Odile were thus consulted daily and never in vain. What remained common to all the prophecies was that, in the last resort, they were reassuring. The plague, however, was not.
I wrote a while ago about the parallel infodemic coursing through society, as we all struggle to make sense of the senseless, to order the chaotic. Graphs, charts, dashboards, bulletins, maps, timelines: every manner of device intended to help synthesise and distill the rush of events into orderly narrative and discrete data sets. And as Camus said, these are reassuring: not because of their content but because of their form. A viral contagion can be truly controlled only on the page or the screen: every graphic contributes to our sense that because the situation can be described, it can be (or is being) managed. Every rumour, false hope or faked accusation contributes to a sense that the sky is falling.
For this reason, it is unsurprising that conspiracy theories have been part of the year. In March and April, telephone engineers were assaulted and mobile masts set on fire by people who believed the virus was connected to the 5G network upgrade. Paradoxically, they also think that the electronic media is a good place to promote this: I suspect these people are (because things are their opposite) the most fevered users of electronic devices. They seem to patrol the virtual world as they might have once walked the streets, howling about Armageddon and inveighing against the shadows.
I have seen the low-tech versions too, though. Walking through a locked-down Kentish Town, I saw a flyer pushed through the letterbox of a charity shop, its quality print daring the reader to dismiss it for the ravings it contained. I have seen other slogans and warnings, scrawled on signs and bus shelters, painted on doors. They are the inevitable detritus spawned by confusion and despair. And just as surely as the maps of where the virus has taken the greatest toll, they are indicators of deprivation: warnings and fears given venom by resentment. They are the signs (as in Camus) of “those who are looking for reasons and who are afraid.”
In such a context, it was inevitable that antisemitic conspiracy theories should have a resurgence. The Community Security Trust has published a report on the antisemitic tropes and canards revivified by the pandemic. From positing a Jewish conspiracy behind the virus, to using the virus to celebrating Jewish deaths, to using the virus to kill Jews, all the classic elements of the oldest hatred are present. Whether from the right (QAnon) or the left (AntiVaxx) the elements are tiresomely predictable, and make it hard to tell one from the other. As Robert Eaglestone has observed about varieties of Holocaust denial: “these distinctions are rarely fixed, as they demand too much consistency from the world of bigotry and false argument that these people inhabit.”
A survey of the Twitter feed of Piers Corbyn, a notable member of the conspiratorial elite, shows the usual distinctions of politics breaking down. Combining the family pastimes of preaching to the choir and never changing his mind, he at once quotes Toby Young and his band of right-wing “Lockdown Sceptics”, argues that Black Lives Matter is a conspiracy funded by big business, claims that man-made climate change is a myth, and that vaccines are designed to control us; and that George Soros, “Rockefeller” or Bill Gates is behind it all.
The left-wing “commentator” Kerry-Anne Mendoza yesterday peddled a more belt-and-braces version of the way the Holocaust can be folded into these discourses of hatred. Not as a conspiracy theory, but just as a lazy juxtaposition. As though the death camps were a punchline rather than an atrocity.
Similarly, the mural Freedom for Humanity by the artist Mear One has been doing the rounds in meme form. This is an image even Piers Corbyn’s brother Jeremy belatedly acknowledged as “deeply disturbing and anti-Semitic” – some years after invoking “Rockerfeller’s” [sic] attack on Diego de Rivera in its defence. Like Mein Kampf, (a major source text for Jewish conspiracy theories) these ideas always find Jews responsible for the evils of the day, placing grimly-eroticised spectres and fantasies of “Jewish influence” where the facts should go.
Into this volatile mixture of paranoia, half-truth and pure fantasy, the FBI yesterday decided to publish its records on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the antisemitic conspiracy ur-text, without commentary or qualification. When I last checked, the material had been retweeted 16,700 times. By comparison, its belated clarifications (below) had barely been noticed. A lie is, as ever, twice round the world before the truth gets its boots on.
The resurgence of conspiracy theories and panic in a period of intense anxiety and confusion is not a surprise. If you want a funny and informative introduction to why this is the case, follow Marlon Solomon (@supergutman) whose monologue “A Lizard’s Tale” is a chilling and hilarious primer in the back-and forth between claim and counter-claim. Dave Rich (@daverich1) noted in an article published earlier this year that “if it is true that Jews play a central role in conspiracy theories, it is also true that the concept of a conspiracy plays a central role in the history of antisemitism”. Conspiracies and antisemitism are linked by methodology, purpose and personnel.
But nor, it should be underlined, do these theories and fantasies restrict themselves to antisemitism. As documented by the charity TellMama, COVID-19 has prompted attacks and libels on Muslim communities. Stonewall documents the impact of the pandemic on LGBT individuals and communities. As so often, the events of this year show that hatred knows few distinctions and appeals to no logic other than the belief that since the individual is powerless in the face of events, those events must be controlled by the powerful. And since there is nothing more powerful than that which provokes fear, the two must be identical. “It is very tiring to be a plague victim,” wrote Camus, “but it is still more tiring not to want to be one.” And given time to brood, the most illogical solutions acquire the clarity of mathematical proofs. But for the conspiracist, as for their cousin, the perfect Orwellian product of totalitarianism, if the right person says it, 2+2=5.
So what can we do against this tide of reckless hate and thoughtless invective? As Camus recognised, the purpose of these ravings is to provide reassurance against the unpredictable and invisible workings of fate. And like his hero (and unreliable narrator) Rieux, we have to recognise that the answers are not glamorous: “this whole thing is not about heroism. It’s about decency. It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.” We carry on, we do our best, we remember that common humanity and common confusion are often the same thing, and we do our jobs, however small, to make the world better.
The era of COVID-19 has seen two processes of contagion. The first is, of course, the disease itself, with its terrible toll on individuals, communities and nations. The second, however, is what the WHO and others have termed an infodemic: defined very precisely a couple of weeks ago by a working group.
An infodemic is an overabundance of information—some accurate and some not—that occurs during an epidemic. In a similar manner to an epidemic, it spreads between humans via digital and physical information systems. It makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it. (Tangcharoensathien et al., 2020)
I’m working on a more detailed piece about the infodemic, to go alongside a collection of my photos from this year. In the meantime, however, I’ve been looking at the memes shared in my social media echo chambers. Sometimes they make me laugh but as a class of discourse they make me profoundly uneasy.
Memes are directly compared to viruses by the epidemiologist Adam Kucharski in his book, The Rules of Contagion (2020). He notes the problems posed by “simplistic anecdotes and ineffective solutions” for disease control and begins the book with an account of how he (accidentally) caused “a small outbreak of misinformation.”
The irony is that memes are simplistic anecdotes masquerading as panaceas. Like viruses, memes have no function but their own reproduction with no regard for the health of the host. Matters are further complicated by the fact that social media offer a perfect environment for them to thrive. Back in the day, “Frankie Says” was a meme, but it’s harder to edit a t-shirt than it is to share something online. One meme in particular recently caught my eye.
This meme is part of longer and bigger debates about education, race and identity. I do not claim any priority for this meme’s importance other than the fact I’ve spent my adult life teaching and learning about the Holocaust and for that reason find it deeply problematic, educationally and philosophically. My experience allows me to locate the sources of my ire because I have expertise: itself a suggestion that the reduction of history to lessons without content is not very practical. But I digress.
Firstly, the idea that the second and third parts of the statement can be accomplished without the first is problematic. Without the murder of six million Jews being remembered, the second statement makes no sense: what is the “it” that was required? And in the third statement, the “history repeating itself” is the murder of six million Jews that apparently the author thinks is optional to remember.
Second, and much more problematic, is the weasel formulation of the first statement. If the word “only” or “just” were added, the sentiment might make more sense (though as I’ve just explained I don’t think it really does). But as written it comes very close not to suggesting that education cannot be reduced to simply memorising (which of course is true and something that all good teachers work hard to ensure) but that education equals not remembering the murder of six million Jews.
This ambiguity is difficult because with a negative reading of an oddly formed sentence, the meme seems to be suggesting that instead of anchoring our understanding of the world to historical facts and debates, it should instead come from belief in an unstated mechanism that led “ordinary Germans” to be “convinced that it was required”. Setting aside the complex historical debate about degrees of knowledge, cooperation, acceptance and resistance this dismisses (the author of the meme can’t be bothered so why should I?), the implication is that children should be “educated” in some unstated monocausal view. Another word for this is indoctrination.
One of the key aspects of indoctrination is ignoring facts in the interests of clarity: such as, for example, downplaying the importance of the victim group of “what happened”. The sleight-of-hand with which this example severs meaning from content (thus rendering it meaningless) is the primary source of my anger.
Ironically, the indoctrinated have historically been very bad at spotting the writing on the wall because, well, they were indoctrinated to believe it wasn’t important. Such a process seems to have taken place very imperfectly in Nazi Germany, chiefly because the Third Reich only lasted twelve years. The debate about why and how this happened, which the author of this meme either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about, is ongoing. But the desire to present children with “lessons” without evidence is certainly among the phenomena involved: along with ensuring that the benefits of oppression and murder were widely shared, and that perpetrators were placed in stressful, confusing situations with alcohol to dull the senses when reality could no longer be explained but simply avoided. But reiterating the nature of that reality is crucial, educationally, because without it, the question “Why is this important?” is hard to really answer.
Because, finally, let’s not forget that forgetting victims is only in the interests of the perpetrators. Himmler termed the murder of European Jewry “a glorious page in our history that can never be written”. Hitler asked “Who now remembers the Armenians?” This meme asks us to forget the Jews and replace them with an amorphous “victim” group that makes the “lessons” meaningless. The Nazis oppressed and murdered a whole range of groups and individuals, but to try and remove their primary victim group is an assault on memory and an abuse of education. Subject (the Nazis) verb (murdered) and object (six million Jews) are all required for any conclusions to have any relevance. This is true, by the way, in teaching anybody about anything. The nature of the offence is a fundamental part of teaching to understand the past and (hopefully) avoid its repetition.
This is just one meme in an ocean of memes. As in Hamlet’s soliloquy, it is tempting to think we can “take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them.” But this is a metaphor for futility. We are adrift and lost: what we can do (all we can do, perhaps) is sound out the ideas beneath the surface of individual examples in the hope we will find solid ground underneath.
framingthequestion 