UBC: The Unmasterable Past
Feb. 4th, 2009 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyMaier, Charles S. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
When I say that The Unmasterable Past is a thought-provoking book, I mean it quite literally: it provoked a great many thoughts. It's been a long time since I engaged in active, critical reading, marking passages and making marginal notes and arguments, but this book demanded it. Even the endnotes made me think.
The Unmasterable Past was published in 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall came down, and it was strange reading it and remembering, Oh yeah, this is what the Cold War felt like. Not the anxiety about nuclear war, but that feeling that the countries behind the Iron Curtain weren't just foreign countries, they were like another planet. I was not quite fourteen when the Wall came down, so the mentality evoked isn't a sophisticated or rational one (i.e., it's memory, not history), but it's all still there in my head.
Which is appropriate, since one of the things The Unmasterable Past is about is precisely the intersection between memory and history.
The Unmasterable Past is historiography about historiography: an account and analysis of the Historikerstreit, the controversy among West German historians (and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas) about . . . well, about a lot of things. The specific question is about the acceptable parameters of (West) Germany's relationship to the Holocaust fifty years later, but Maier shows how that specific question is part of larger debates both about how historians write history and about what human cultures can and should use history for. And about the the relationship, both individual and societal, between identity and the past, and particularly between present identity and past atrocity both on the perpetrators' side and, although this is more of a counterpoint than part of the book's main argument, on the victims'.
The core of the controversy, the bone of contention, is whether or not West Germany should be allowed/should allow itself to "move on," whether Germans who weren't even born before the end of World War II have to continue to accept responsibility for the Holocaust. There are two obvious answers to this question, "yes" and "no," and they're both wrong. I disagree emphatically with Habermas's claim:
Given the highly utopianist cast of Habermas's other arguments, this insistence on irredeemability--a kind of secularized Original Sin--is quite ironic, and I think, wrong. Because Germans born after World War II didn't grow up in a context of life in which "that" was possible--they grew up in a context of life that arose after and because "that" had been possible. Their personal potential for Nazism is no greater than anyone else's.
But at the same time, it's also wrong to say that Germans, even those born after World War II, bear no continuing responsibility (not "responsible" in the sense of having caused--"Dorian is responsible for the nuclear leak that caused the three-eyed mutant badgers"--but "responsible" in the sense of having obligations--"Dorian is responsible for the three-eyed mutant badgers and will gladly accept your donations of socks") that they can simply cast off the past and be done with it; this responsibility is part, Maier argues, of having a national identity, something that endures beyond the lifespan of any individual member. Maier uses the metaphor of radioactive half-life: it diminishes and diminishes, but like Zeno's Paradox, you never reach zero.
But he also argues that this responsibility is two-sided: perpetrators on one side, victims on the other. And not in the "blame the victim" way that some disputants in the Historikerstreit seemed to be edging toward suggesting (the idea put forward by Ernst Nolte that "it can hardly be denied that Hitler had good reasons to be convinced of his enemies' determination to annihilate him much earlier than when the first information about Auschwitz came to the knowledge of the world" (qtd in Maier, p. 29))-Maier in fact provides a beautifully clear refutation of "blame the victim" thinking, which, he says, "confuses the formal, logical dependence of victim and victimizer (there can by definition exist no perpetrator without a victim), with a shared responsibility for the wrong committed" (14). Instead, he argues that, where non-victims have the responsibilty not to dismiss or trivialize or deny the Holocaust, Jews have the responsibility not to claim "an exclusive property right in suffering" (164), not to make the Holocaust what Israeli theologian Adi Ophir describes as:
"The obligations of memory," Maier says, "thus remain asymmetrical" (166). The greatest weight still, and always, rests on the perpetrators: to acknowledge the wrong done, to make what reparations are possible, and to prevent the atrocity from being reinscribed, either literally or by being forgotten (or "forgotten"). But the victims also have a responsibility to other victims, a responsibility not to claim that their suffering is unique.
Much of the argument of the book, in fact, is about the question of uniqueness vs. comparatives, and what comparatives should be used for. A similar question is asked about Alltagsgeschichte, the history of everyday life, and in both cases the answer turns out to be very much the same: it depends on the historian's agenda. Comparing the Holocaust with, for instance, the Stalinist gulags provides some powerful insights into both, and Maier does just that:
This is a comparison that tells you something about both sides, and can lead to other insights, such as my note in the margin that Hitler's aim (up to a point) was to protect German citizens. They were the Volk, after all, and in Hitler's view, they were endangered (by Jews and Bolsheviks and other "deviants"). He turned on them in the end, when it appeared to him that they were failing to live up to his ideal (the idea, paraphrased, that if they lost the war, they deserved whatever happened to them; the scorched earth policy that Speer and others undermined), but the driving force of Nazi ideology is the idea that the Volk had to be protected; "good Germans" were to be cherished and rewarded (hence also Hitler's obsessive insistence that food not be rationed, or rationed as little as possible, in civilian Germany). Stalin felt no such constraint about the peoples of the Soviet Union.
Likewise, emphasizing the uniqueness of the Holocaust also provides a better understanding of it: "nowhere else but in German-occupied Europe from 1941 to 1945 was there an apparatus so single-mindedly established to carry out mass murder as a process in its own right" (82). And nowhere, I added in the margin, did that apparatus have such close to complete power to carry out its aims. It isn't merely that the Holocaust was genocide for the sake of genocide (for there are, sadly, plenty of twentieth-century examples of that); it's that genocide was a state apparatus.
This same even-handedness applies to Alltagsgeschichte, bottum-up history, vs. top-down history, whether that be politics or economics or another -ics of your choice. Alltagsgeschichte can give a much more nuanced picture of the Third Reich, of the ways in which Germans and conquered peoples might cooperate with, collaborate with, dissent from, and resist the Nazi regime. And more nuance is a good thing; it prevents demonization and creates a much clearer understanding of how the line between ordinary life and ordinary Nazi life could blur. The problem is in the politics behind it.
That's the crucial matter in all these questions of methodology: what is the question the historian is asking? Are the comparisons being applied in order to understand the Holocaust better, or in order to make German guilt seem less particular? Is the point of the Alltagsgeschichte to excavate the smaller truths or is it to attempt to exculpate "ordinary Germans" by proving that the Holocaust did not impinge on their lives? Are we trying to practice Wertfreiheit (my new favorite German word, which means "freedom from prejudicial assumptions and values"(13)), or are we trying to further a particular political agenda? (A practice, Maier makes clear, that neither Left nor Right is innocent of.) And this question ties back in to the idea of responsibility to the past, because the historian's responsibility is to the truth, not to politics:
The truth, in other words, is something we can only approach by approximations; it's the historian's job to make his/her approximation as close as possible.
I did have some problems with this book (some of which, I think, are symptomatic of twenty years' worth of history and postcolonial theory between me and it--as for example the idea that any Western nation can be "at ease with [its] own history" (147)). The two principal ones are points where I am suspicious of idealism. The first is the teleological construction of history, the idea that human history progresses towards perfection (or transcendence, or, you know, the Singularity). This idea is mostly Habermas's, but Maier seems to fall prey to it himself in places, and I think this idea, like the bad Darwinian theory it echoes (species don't become more perfect; they become better adapted to their environment), is highly suspect. Particularly in a discussion of the human capacity for atrocity.
My other problem is with the idea of "national identity." The Historikerstreit and therefore Maier spend a lot of time on the question of German national identity and how it's constructed, and Maier acknowledges that, based on it is with analogy to psychological identity, it's a problematic concept. But he, like everyone else involves, assumes that (a.) such a thing exists and (b.) it's a desideratum, something we should desire. And I'm not sure that either of those statements are true, much less that they can be accepted as givens. I think "national identity" bleeds too easily into "racial identity." (Kogon actually provides a good example when he says, for instance, "By virtue of their temperament and their generally smaller physical resistance, the French suffered more from the hardships of camp life than other groups" (Kogon 204)--the line between nationality and race is not at all clear, and it's not far enough from there to the Nazi idea that the "Nordic race" is superior to all and the "Slavic race" is subhuman.) And if it doesn't, it becomes increasingly chimerical, impossible to define, or pin down, or even see. I'm not saying there isn't such a thing (certainly, the perception of national identity is endemic--fully half or more of Due South, to pick a random and innocuous example, is based on the idea that there is an intrinsic difference between Canadians and Americans), just that I think it's an even more problematic concept than Maier articulates, and I'm very uneasy about any intellectual pursuit involving the active attempts to enhance same.
Of course, even my dissatisfactions with The Unmasterable Past were thought-provoking; this is a very carefully reasoned and articulated work on a very difficult subject (both emotionally and intellectually), and I found it tremendously rewarding.
When I say that The Unmasterable Past is a thought-provoking book, I mean it quite literally: it provoked a great many thoughts. It's been a long time since I engaged in active, critical reading, marking passages and making marginal notes and arguments, but this book demanded it. Even the endnotes made me think.
The Unmasterable Past was published in 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall came down, and it was strange reading it and remembering, Oh yeah, this is what the Cold War felt like. Not the anxiety about nuclear war, but that feeling that the countries behind the Iron Curtain weren't just foreign countries, they were like another planet. I was not quite fourteen when the Wall came down, so the mentality evoked isn't a sophisticated or rational one (i.e., it's memory, not history), but it's all still there in my head.
Which is appropriate, since one of the things The Unmasterable Past is about is precisely the intersection between memory and history.
The Unmasterable Past is historiography about historiography: an account and analysis of the Historikerstreit, the controversy among West German historians (and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas) about . . . well, about a lot of things. The specific question is about the acceptable parameters of (West) Germany's relationship to the Holocaust fifty years later, but Maier shows how that specific question is part of larger debates both about how historians write history and about what human cultures can and should use history for. And about the the relationship, both individual and societal, between identity and the past, and particularly between present identity and past atrocity both on the perpetrators' side and, although this is more of a counterpoint than part of the book's main argument, on the victims'.
The core of the controversy, the bone of contention, is whether or not West Germany should be allowed/should allow itself to "move on," whether Germans who weren't even born before the end of World War II have to continue to accept responsibility for the Holocaust. There are two obvious answers to this question, "yes" and "no," and they're both wrong. I disagree emphatically with Habermas's claim:
The simple fact is that even those born later have grown up in a context of life [Lebensform] in which that was possible." An inextricable mesh of family, and of local, political, and intellectual traditions provided even the youngest Germans with a historical legacy. "None of us can escape that milieu, because our identity as individuals and as Germans is indissolubly woven into it." Because all Germans grew up in a psychological and institutional framework that had once succumbed to barbarism, they were apparently still potential perpetrators.
(Maier 57)
Given the highly utopianist cast of Habermas's other arguments, this insistence on irredeemability--a kind of secularized Original Sin--is quite ironic, and I think, wrong. Because Germans born after World War II didn't grow up in a context of life in which "that" was possible--they grew up in a context of life that arose after and because "that" had been possible. Their personal potential for Nazism is no greater than anyone else's.
But at the same time, it's also wrong to say that Germans, even those born after World War II, bear no continuing responsibility (not "responsible" in the sense of having caused--"Dorian is responsible for the nuclear leak that caused the three-eyed mutant badgers"--but "responsible" in the sense of having obligations--"Dorian is responsible for the three-eyed mutant badgers and will gladly accept your donations of socks") that they can simply cast off the past and be done with it; this responsibility is part, Maier argues, of having a national identity, something that endures beyond the lifespan of any individual member. Maier uses the metaphor of radioactive half-life: it diminishes and diminishes, but like Zeno's Paradox, you never reach zero.
But he also argues that this responsibility is two-sided: perpetrators on one side, victims on the other. And not in the "blame the victim" way that some disputants in the Historikerstreit seemed to be edging toward suggesting (the idea put forward by Ernst Nolte that "it can hardly be denied that Hitler had good reasons to be convinced of his enemies' determination to annihilate him much earlier than when the first information about Auschwitz came to the knowledge of the world" (qtd in Maier, p. 29))-Maier in fact provides a beautifully clear refutation of "blame the victim" thinking, which, he says, "confuses the formal, logical dependence of victim and victimizer (there can by definition exist no perpetrator without a victim), with a shared responsibility for the wrong committed" (14). Instead, he argues that, where non-victims have the responsibilty not to dismiss or trivialize or deny the Holocaust, Jews have the responsibility not to claim "an exclusive property right in suffering" (164), not to make the Holocaust what Israeli theologian Adi Ophir describes as:
a new Holocaust religion that refuses to credit other genocides as equally authentic: 'Biafra was only hunger, Cambodia was only a civil war; death in the Gulag lacked national identification marks [...]' But in fact, the author [Ophir] argues, 'the Jewishness of the Holocaust (like its Germanness) is only one aspect of its horror, the most crucial aspect from our point of view but by no means exclusive.' The only response must be to understand the Holocaust as a human possibility that arises from the discourse of exclusion, and not just as the basis for a new Jewish national religion. The difference between this perverted Holocaust myth and the appropriate one 'is essentially political: It is the difference in the use which the living make of the memory of the dead, the present of its history.'
(166)
"The obligations of memory," Maier says, "thus remain asymmetrical" (166). The greatest weight still, and always, rests on the perpetrators: to acknowledge the wrong done, to make what reparations are possible, and to prevent the atrocity from being reinscribed, either literally or by being forgotten (or "forgotten"). But the victims also have a responsibility to other victims, a responsibility not to claim that their suffering is unique.
Much of the argument of the book, in fact, is about the question of uniqueness vs. comparatives, and what comparatives should be used for. A similar question is asked about Alltagsgeschichte, the history of everyday life, and in both cases the answer turns out to be very much the same: it depends on the historian's agenda. Comparing the Holocaust with, for instance, the Stalinist gulags provides some powerful insights into both, and Maier does just that:
The principle of German terror (when practiced inside Germany) was to enforce an iron law of predictable consequences, any deviation from which was likely to consign the deviant (and Jews were deviants) to the realm of arbitrary power, torment, and dehumanization. The principle of Soviet terror was to enforce the arbitrary discipline of nonpredictability.
(81)
This is a comparison that tells you something about both sides, and can lead to other insights, such as my note in the margin that Hitler's aim (up to a point) was to protect German citizens. They were the Volk, after all, and in Hitler's view, they were endangered (by Jews and Bolsheviks and other "deviants"). He turned on them in the end, when it appeared to him that they were failing to live up to his ideal (the idea, paraphrased, that if they lost the war, they deserved whatever happened to them; the scorched earth policy that Speer and others undermined), but the driving force of Nazi ideology is the idea that the Volk had to be protected; "good Germans" were to be cherished and rewarded (hence also Hitler's obsessive insistence that food not be rationed, or rationed as little as possible, in civilian Germany). Stalin felt no such constraint about the peoples of the Soviet Union.
Likewise, emphasizing the uniqueness of the Holocaust also provides a better understanding of it: "nowhere else but in German-occupied Europe from 1941 to 1945 was there an apparatus so single-mindedly established to carry out mass murder as a process in its own right" (82). And nowhere, I added in the margin, did that apparatus have such close to complete power to carry out its aims. It isn't merely that the Holocaust was genocide for the sake of genocide (for there are, sadly, plenty of twentieth-century examples of that); it's that genocide was a state apparatus.
This same even-handedness applies to Alltagsgeschichte, bottum-up history, vs. top-down history, whether that be politics or economics or another -ics of your choice. Alltagsgeschichte can give a much more nuanced picture of the Third Reich, of the ways in which Germans and conquered peoples might cooperate with, collaborate with, dissent from, and resist the Nazi regime. And more nuance is a good thing; it prevents demonization and creates a much clearer understanding of how the line between ordinary life and ordinary Nazi life could blur. The problem is in the politics behind it.
That's the crucial matter in all these questions of methodology: what is the question the historian is asking? Are the comparisons being applied in order to understand the Holocaust better, or in order to make German guilt seem less particular? Is the point of the Alltagsgeschichte to excavate the smaller truths or is it to attempt to exculpate "ordinary Germans" by proving that the Holocaust did not impinge on their lives? Are we trying to practice Wertfreiheit (my new favorite German word, which means "freedom from prejudicial assumptions and values"(13)), or are we trying to further a particular political agenda? (A practice, Maier makes clear, that neither Left nor Right is innocent of.) And this question ties back in to the idea of responsibility to the past, because the historian's responsibility is to the truth, not to politics:
This does not mean that historians can find the Truth as if it were some grail retained at a scholarly Montserrat. Historical truths will be plural and they will be political; they are answers to questions posed differently by different individuals, ages, and communities. They emerge from the triangle of relationships between researcher, data, and reader.
(12)
The truth, in other words, is something we can only approach by approximations; it's the historian's job to make his/her approximation as close as possible.
I did have some problems with this book (some of which, I think, are symptomatic of twenty years' worth of history and postcolonial theory between me and it--as for example the idea that any Western nation can be "at ease with [its] own history" (147)). The two principal ones are points where I am suspicious of idealism. The first is the teleological construction of history, the idea that human history progresses towards perfection (or transcendence, or, you know, the Singularity). This idea is mostly Habermas's, but Maier seems to fall prey to it himself in places, and I think this idea, like the bad Darwinian theory it echoes (species don't become more perfect; they become better adapted to their environment), is highly suspect. Particularly in a discussion of the human capacity for atrocity.
My other problem is with the idea of "national identity." The Historikerstreit and therefore Maier spend a lot of time on the question of German national identity and how it's constructed, and Maier acknowledges that, based on it is with analogy to psychological identity, it's a problematic concept. But he, like everyone else involves, assumes that (a.) such a thing exists and (b.) it's a desideratum, something we should desire. And I'm not sure that either of those statements are true, much less that they can be accepted as givens. I think "national identity" bleeds too easily into "racial identity." (Kogon actually provides a good example when he says, for instance, "By virtue of their temperament and their generally smaller physical resistance, the French suffered more from the hardships of camp life than other groups" (Kogon 204)--the line between nationality and race is not at all clear, and it's not far enough from there to the Nazi idea that the "Nordic race" is superior to all and the "Slavic race" is subhuman.) And if it doesn't, it becomes increasingly chimerical, impossible to define, or pin down, or even see. I'm not saying there isn't such a thing (certainly, the perception of national identity is endemic--fully half or more of Due South, to pick a random and innocuous example, is based on the idea that there is an intrinsic difference between Canadians and Americans), just that I think it's an even more problematic concept than Maier articulates, and I'm very uneasy about any intellectual pursuit involving the active attempts to enhance same.
Of course, even my dissatisfactions with The Unmasterable Past were thought-provoking; this is a very carefully reasoned and articulated work on a very difficult subject (both emotionally and intellectually), and I found it tremendously rewarding.
