Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm? Rebecca Jinks Royal Holloway, University of London PhD January 2013 1 Declaration of Authorship I declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 2 Abstract This thesis addresses how far the Holocaust and its representation have influenced the representation of other genocides, focusing specifically on the Armenian, Cambodian, Bosnian, and Rwandan cases. At the same time, it also considers how western publics might interpret and respond to these representations, and with what effect. Using literature, film, photography, and memorialisation, the thesis argues that we can only understand the Holocaust’s status as a ‘benchmark’ for other genocides if we look at the deeper, structural resonances which subtly shape many representations of genocide – thereby countering much of the existing literature, whose focus is on explicit references to the Holocaust and the surrounding identity politics. The thesis is divided into five sections, which explore: how genocides are recognised as such by western publics; the representation of the origins and perpetrators of genocide; how western witnesses represent genocide; representations of the aftermath of genocide; and western responses to genocide. Throughout, it distinguishes between ‘mainstream’ and other, more nuanced and engaged, representations of genocide. It argues that these mainstream representations – the majority – largely replicate the representational framework of the Holocaust, including the way in which mainstream Holocaust representations resist recognising the rationality, instrumentality and normality of genocide, preferring instead to present it as an aberrant, exceptional event in human society. By contrast, the more engaged representations – often, but not always, originating from those who experienced genocide – tend to revolve around precisely genocide’s ordinariness, and the structures and situations common to human society which contribute to and become involved in the violence. 3 Acknowledgements First thanks were always due to Dan Stone, for being a brilliant supervisor. His support and guidance have always been a great help, but I value most the ways in which he has taught me to think about history and its writing. Many others have helped shape my work and have given me invaluable support in the academic arena – in particular Helen Graham, who always ups the ante, but also Rudolf Muhs, Daniel Beer, Robert Eaglestone, Andy Pearce, Zoë Waxman, Lars Waldorf, Justin Champion, Sarah Ansari, and James Connolly, who has been a friend, sounding board, and proof-reader since our undergraduate studies. I would also like to thank Marie-Christine Ockenden, otherwise known as The Oracle, for being a fantastic (and very human) postgraduate administrator. Friends have dealt with my general absenteeism in various ways, for which I thank them: Helen, Jess, Philly, Sam, Andy, James, Martina, Maddy, Rebecca, Doerte, and Millie. Various friends accompanied me to far-flung (or less so) destinations during my research, and deserve special thanks here. In particular is Sam Hardie, who has put up with extreme cold and extreme heat, multiple visits to the same museum, and tea deprivation, all while continuing to help me think about the places we visited. Asya Darbinyan was a friend and translator during my stay in Armenia, and both my parents and Helen Graham joined me on various trips to the former Yugoslavia. The final thanks are reserved for my parents, for their love and support, and their constant encouragement. 4 Table of Contents Introduction 6 Chapter 1. Recognising Genocide: The ‘Genocidal Imaginary’ 30 Chapter 2. Explaining Genocide: Representations of the Origins and Perpetrators of Genocide 67 Chapter 3. Witnessing Genocide: Western Protagonists in the Theatre of Genocide 105 Chapter 4. Resolving Genocide: Representing the Aftermath 140 Chapter 5. Responding to Genocide: Attitudes and Platitudes 182 Conclusion 222 Bibliography 225 5 Introduction ‘[T]he Holocaust has become the pre-eminent symbol of evil in the modern world, encouraging other groups to copy its vocabulary and imagery, while sometimes contesting its significance. … Representation of the past and present can thus become a contest … In so doing, they trivialise the Holocaust and the unique suffering of the group they represent.’ – David B. MacDonald1 ‘[F]ar from blocking other historical memories from view in a competitive struggle for recognition, the emergence of Holocaust memory on a global scale has contributed to the articulation of other histories … Ultimately, memory is not a zero-sum game.’ – Michael Rothberg2 A decade into the twenty-first century, the Holocaust appears as a cornerstone of contemporary western culture: ubiquitously memorialised in stone, film, and print, it occupies a central place in our consciousness of the past. Whether or not one agrees with Alon Confino that we are reaching the end of a stage in Holocaust consciousness stretching from the mid-1970s to the present, he is surely correct to observe that the (often moralising) battles over Holocaust memory make sense only within a memory culture that has accepted and internalised the essential place of the extermination of the Jews in European history.3 Although Confino is largely referring to the memory battles fought within the arena of Holocaust memory (over the ‘dangers of forgetting’, and what might constitute ‘sufficient memorialisation’), as my two epigraphs show, battle is also being done over the place of Holocaust memory within wider memory cultures, between those who make reference to the Holocaust when articulating their own histories of oppression and suffering, and those who jealously guard against this sort of plagiarism. While various scholars have speculated as to whether the Holocaust’s ubiquity and prominence might somehow dampen our responses to other atrocities,4 others, such as David B. MacDonald, have inventoried instances of groups ‘cloaking’ or ‘framing’ their own suffering in the ‘vestments of the Holocaust’ in order to seek 1 David B. MacDonald, Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical Representation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 15, 196. 2 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 6, 11. 3 Alon Confino, ‘A World Without Jews: Interpreting the Holocaust’, German History 27:4 (2009), 531- 59, especially 531-4. 4 For example, Scott L. Montgomery, ‘What Kind of Memory? Reflections on Images of the Holocaust’, Contention 5:1 (1995), 71-104; Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), especially chapters 6 & 7. 6 recognition or reparation – including Armenians, indigenous groups in Australia, America and New Zealand, and ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia.5 Often implicit within these inventories is a form of border patrol, an indignation at the ‘appropriation’ of the Holocaust in what is seen as a strategy of identity politics. Following the spirit of Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory, however, I instead want to operate a more open (and, pace Confino, less moralising) approach to the overlaps and intersections between representations of the Holocaust and of other genocides. While Rothberg’s book explores the interaction of memories of the Holocaust, decolonisation, and racism, I am primarily interested in representations of genocides other than the Holocaust. The last few decades have seen an outpouring of scholarly analyses of Holocaust memorialisation, literature, film, photography, graphic comics, and art, often with highly sophisticated analyses and theoretical considerations; few, though, have explored where and how these theories might also be applied to the representations of other genocides. Given the emotional charge attached to the word ‘genocide’, the similar representational difficulties often facing those attempting to represent other genocides, and that there often are congruences in representation, my aim is to explore how representations of other genocides have been constructed, and might be received, when the Holocaust is such a cultural benchmark. This thesis focuses on representations of the Armenian, Cambodian, Bosnian and Rwandan genocides, in film, literature, photography, and memorialisation, and how they respond to the ‘central’ or ‘paradigmatic’ place of the Holocaust in contemporary society. The key questions are: how do representations of genocide engage with, or borrow from, representations of the Holocaust, and when do they show entirely different concerns? How might westerners respond to these representations, given that, as Confino argues, western memory cultures have largely internalised the Holocaust as an essential part of European history? Of course, to speak of ‘westerners’ and ‘the west’ here is to include a vast number of people, infinitely divisible by nation, cultural background, religion, generation, education, politics, and so on. The very range of this divisibility shows that the national is not the only prism through which to view culture 5 MacDonald, Identity Politics, 17. MacDonald suggests an overly slippery slope when he draws a straight line from ‘invocations of the Holocaust’s vocabulary’ to Holocaust denial (6-7). Another example, although more sophisticated, is Angi Buettner,