Nazi Victims As Witnesses After 1945 Annette Weinke
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Nazi Victims as Witnesses after 1945 Annette Weinke “I would love to live to see the moment in which Although historians occasionally emphasize the the great treasure will be dug up and shriek to novelty with which the phenomenon emerged in the world proclaiming the truth. So the world the late seventies “quite suddenly out of no- may know all. So the ones who did not live where”, 3 its lines of development reach back through it may be glad, and we may feel like significantly further in time. To disregard the veterans with medals on our chest. We would be precursors in ancient historiography for the the fathers, the teachers and educators of the time being, from the eighteenth century onward future. ... But no, we shall certainly never live to a distinction can be made between three ideal see it, and therefore do I write my last will. May types of witnesses that still dominate linguistic the treasure fall in good hands, may it last into usage today. In addition to the religious “witness better times, may it alarm and alert the world to to the faith” – who is more the guarantor of a what happened ... in the twentieth century. ... We present belief in God than a source of infor- may now die in peace. We fulfilled our mission. mation on past events – there are the judicial May history attest for us. ” “eyewitness” who appears before court, and the “witness” of historical scholarship. If in different Excerpt from David Graber’s will, written in 1943 1 ways, we count on the statements of the latter two to give us insights into past occurrences. 4 Despite the profound changes the processes of I. Introduction modernization brought about in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this early history is still The late twentieth / early twenty-first century a key to understanding the modern conception is often referred to as the “era of the witness”. 2 of witness-bearing. The latter, for its part, can This label is a direct reflection of the unprece- be traced back predominantly to the mid-twen- dented ubiquity attained by the figure of the wit- tieth century, while the specific context of its ness and the act of bearing testimony over the emergence goes back to World War II and the past three decades. The degree to which tele- National Socialists’ Europe-wide persecution vision documentaries, feature films, exhibitions, project. 5 interview projects, reports and memoirs have be- come established as vehicles of historical con- What are the reasons for the fact that the emer- sciousness and mediums for conveying history to gence of the “Zeitzeuge” (German for “contem- the public matches the immense increase in the porary witness”) and the experience of Nazi rule significance of the “contemporary witness”. The are so inextricably interlinked? This question latter has also been charged with new contents can perhaps best be answered by a roundabout and meanings within this period. Even experts route. Both the National Socialist “rupture in sometimes have difficulty determining what kind civilization” (Dan Diner) and the endeavours to of witnesses they are dealing with in various come to terms with it afterward contributed contexts, and knowing how to assess those to temporarily unsettling traditional forms of persons’ – real and fictive – stories and reports testimony, leading to a veritable crisis. The cred- about history experienced and suffered. ibility crisis of the witness was by no means a 1 Quoted in Joseph Kermish, ed., To Live with Honor and Die with Honor! Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O. S.” (Jerusalem, 1986), p. 66. 2 Annette Wieviorka, “The Witness in History”, trans. Jared Stark, Poetics Today 27 (2006), no. 2, pp. 385–97, here p. 386. 3 Martin Sabrow, “Der Zeitzeuge als Wanderer zwischen zwei Welten”, idem and Norbert Frei, eds., Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945 (Göttingen, 2012), pp. 13–32, here p. 13. 4 José Brunner, “Medikalisierte Zeugenschaft. Trauma, Institutionen, Nachträglichkeit”, ibid., pp. 93–110. 5 As Laura Jockusch has stated, many works on Nazi-victim witnesses and witnessing tend to overlook the specific Eastern European Jewish tradition of “Khurbn-Forshung” (“destruction research”) that emerged around the turn of the century in reaction to the pogroms in Russian Kishinev; see Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford, 2012), pp. 18–33. E S SAYS concomitant of Nazi race and nationhood policy, emphasis on the prominent status of the inter- but, quite to the contrary, one of the deliber- national working class and national inmate col- ately precipitated consequences of that policy. lectives in the antifascist liberation struggle. 8 To This was because the politics of the Nazi state be sure, in view of the National Socialist repres- differed from that of other repressive regimes sions – which were as comprehensive as they in that it endeavoured, firstly, to rid itself of all were heterogeneous in character – and the mul- undesirable population groups before, secondly, tiplicity of victim categories, it will hardly have also obliterating the memory of the abused and seemed conceivable that any kind of generally murdered victims. The persons directly affected valid and consistent persecution narrative would by this undertaking perceived its monstrosi- take shape after the end of the war. However, ty, lack of precedence and totality at an early recent research has clearly shown that, short- stage, and in many of them it triggered an im- ly after the war, there was still a heightened pulse to document the crimes for posterity. willingness in the majority of European post-war societies not only to concede compensation and Those among the victims of Nazi persecution reparation to the “political” victims of concen- in any way capable of bearing witness to their tration camp custody and deportation, but also own fates and those of other victims no longer to confirm the status they claimed for them- alive usually conceived of such testimony as selves as “survivor-witnesses”. 9 a means of preserving personal dignity and restoring integrity, and not least importantly as an expression of the will to survive. On the other II. Witness-bearing in the early post-war period hand, it was above all Polish-Jewish intellectu- and the incipient Cold War als who recognized, even before the war ended, that this extreme form of state-inspired National Although in the present-day perception the Socialist persecution would play into the hands Holocaust is considered the “key frame of ref- of the perpetrators. They correctly assumed, erence for witness-bearing” in the twentieth for example, that the Nazis would either claim century, 10 at the end of the war Jewish survivors ignorance of the facts or discredit the victims’ constituted only one of many victim groups. They reports across the board as exaggerations and sought to make themselves heard by various the products of a “Jewish” desire for revenge. 6 publics, often encountering rapidly changing The efforts to gather evidence and document interests in the process. Even if the conditions the events accordingly served the purpose of in the post-war European societies differed countering the – cognitively and emotionally – significantly, it can be said that, in general, there overwhelming language of the Nazi perpetrators. was a veritable boom of published memoirs and In connection with the Holocaust, a phenome- reports on experiences in the initial years. As non developed early on that the historian Laura Constantin Goschler has pointed out, however, Jockusch has referred to as the “moral impera- the impact and self-conception of this newly tive” to bear witness and the “collective duty to emerging genre was, on the whole, rather limit- testify on behalf of the dead”. 7 In the exercise of ed. After all, the primary concern was with the this duty, the boundaries between primary wit- public “verification of the persecution events nesses, i.e. those who experienced certain acts by the survivors, which was achieved primarily of violence first-hand, and secondary witnesses, through the claim to authenticity associated i.e. those endeavouring to preserve the fates of with contemporary testimony”. 11 their murdered fellow sufferers from oblivion, often grew hazy. To judge from the sizes of the respective edi- tions, Jewish voices were nothing more than a Members of the organized Communist resis- little-noted marginal phenomenon in this ini- tance in the camps and Europe’s leftist libera- tial phase. To be sure, the diary of Anne Frank, tion movements, on the other hand, had slightly published in 1950, became a world bestseller different motives. Already during their impris- practically overnight and by the early sixties onment in Nazi concentration and work camps, had reached more than 800,000 readers in the these persons undertook to draft the most Federal Republic of Germany alone. Otherwise, coherent possible historical narrative with an however, in a period in which myths of resis- 272 | 273 tance and self-victimizing legends attracted all information on the persecution practices of wide attention, descriptions of the fates of per- the German occupiers, but also described the secuted European Jews were extremely unpop- behaviour of the non-Jewish population as well ular. After 1945, despite a political and cultural as the Jewish community. A further aspect of climate ranging – in western and eastern Europe the collecting activities was directed towards alike – between latently defensive and down- compiling evidence for the Allied and national right hostile, Jewish relief organizations initially trials. Indeed, Jewish organizations in the United continued the efforts they had launched during States and Europe contributed substantially – the war to enlighten the public about the specif- both conceptually and materially – to making ic history of their own group’s persecution.