Holocaust Heritage Inquiries into European Historical Cultures Karlsson, Klas-Göran; Zander, Ulf 2004 Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Karlsson, K-G., & Zander, U. (Eds.) (2004). Holocaust Heritage: Inquiries into European Historical Cultures. Sekel Bokförlag. 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LUND UNIVERSITY PO Box 117 221 00 Lund +46 46-222 00 00 Holocaust Heritage Inquiries inta European Historical Cultures Holocaust Heritage Inquiries into European Historical Cultures KLAS-GÖRAN KARLSSON & ULF ZANDER (EDS) SEKEL This volume has been published with financial support of the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. © Sekel Bokförlag and the authors, Malmö 2004 Cover and layout: Lotta Hansson Cover picture: Lotta Hansson Printed in Preses Nams, Riga 2004 ISBN 91-975222-r-x Contents Preface 7 Making Sense of the Holocaust after Sixty Years 9 An Introduction KLAS-GÖRAN KARLSSON Interpreting the Holocaust 35 Some Theoretical Issues ]ÖRN RUSEN Auschwitz and the Collective Memory Thoughts about a Place and its Usage CLAUS BRYLD Holocaust and the Dedine of European Values CECILIE FELICIA STOKHOLM BANKE Tormented Memories Jhe Holocaust Memory in Israel: A Case Study DALIA 0FER Austria's Reversed Holocaust Perception 127 The "Allied Occupation" and the Collective Memory ojAustrians after r945 OLIVER RATHKOLB The Road to Gh;boczyca 143 Polish Historical Culture at the Crossroads WLADYSLAW BULHAK Refl.ections of the Holocaust in Slovak Society and Literature 157 IVAN KAMENEC About the Authors Preface he conference Echoes ofthe Holocaustthat resulted in this volume T could not have been organised without the financial support of the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Therefore, we would like to acknowledge our sincere gratitude to the Foundation. The conference at the Bishop's House in Lund in May 2003 was hosted by the incomparable Karin Dahlgren. For the production of the book, we have also been granted fi­ nancial support from the Crafoord Foundation. Our thanks are also extended to all the contributors to the conference, the absolute ma­ jority of whom have participated in this volume, and our colleagues and friends in the research project 1he Holocaust and European His­ torical Culture: Pär Frohnert, K.ristian Gerner, Fredrik Lindström, Kerstin Nyström, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Tomas Sniegon, Mikael Tossavainen and Johan Öhman. The language has been checked with great skills by Mark Davies. Finally, we would like to extend our gratitude to our publisher at Sekel Bokförlag, Carsten ]inert, and the editor Lotta Hansson. Lund in November 2004 Klas-Giiran Karlsson & U!fZander PREFACE J KLAS-GÖRAN KARLSSON Making Sense of the Holocaust after Sixty Years An Introduction The burdens ofHolocaust history are immense because the Holocaust itself was immense. 1 This volume is produced within the scope of the research project 7he Holocaust and European Historical Culture, financed by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation since the autumn of 2001. The Foundation was also the main financial supporter of an international project conference called Echoes ojthe Holocaust, which took place at Lund University in May 2003. Most of the chapters included in this book are revised editions of papers presented at this conference. The organisers set the contributors the task of commenting upon articles written by schalars working within the research project and recendy published in the book Echoes ojthe Holocaust. Historical Cultures in Contemporary Europe. 2 Furthermore, the contributors to the confer­ ence were simultaneously asked to present an original piece of theo­ retical reflection and/or empirical research on the project topic, that is, on the position and the function of the Holocaust within various national historical cultures in Europe, including Israel. The confer­ ence participants originate from and are specialists on the national historical cultures of the countries they have written about, which, in addition to Israel, comprise Austria, Germany, Poland, the Scan­ dinavian countries and Slovakia. Only one of the contributors, the Danish historian Claus Bryld, did not take part in the conference. lnstead, he has submitted a revised version of a lecture that he deliv­ ered to the project members in the spring of 2003. MAKING SENSE OF THE HOLOCAUST 9 This brief description of the genesis of the present volume is suf­ ficient to indicate that it has not been conceived as a systematic, comparative history of how Holocaust history has been handled throughout post-war Europe. There are indeed same comparative gains to be made from a collective work like this on the aftermath of the Holocaust. The more modest intention of the book is to provide the reader with a few perspectives on how Holocaust history has been represented in various European countries, and why these particular representations have been made. The Holocaust and European Historical Culture The purpose of the entire research project The Holocaust and Europe­ an Historical Culture is to carry out a systematic, comprehensive and comparative study of the ways in which various European states and societies have confronted, and are still confronting, that part of twen­ tieth-century historywhich is perhaps the mast brutal and hardest to handle: the Nazi extermination of large segments of Europe's Jewish population and millions of others while the Second World War was in progress. The relevance of such a study to the contemporary situa­ tion is indisputable, and not only for those who have been personally affected by the genocide, as victims or as perpetrators. Today, issues involving culture, scholarship, morality, law, economics, and domes­ tic and foreign policy are intimately associated with the Holocaust in Europe and in large parts of the Western world. It goes without saying that the memory of the Holocaust has left a particularly strong imprint on Israel and Germany. The work of com­ ing to terms with this traumatic past, a process which in German has been coined Vergangenheitsbewältigung, has for decades had a special urgency in these states. As Dalia Ofer underlines in her contribu­ tion to this volume, Holocaust history is seminal in Israeli culture and politics. Basically, this probably stems from the conviction that Israeli Jews will never again be so defenceless and vulnerable as to be targeted for destruction. It should, however, be stressed that there was an ambiguous relationship to Holocaust memory in the early years of Israeli state-building. This ambiguity was due to a generally negative view on the Jewish diaspora experience among leading Israeli Zion­ ists such as David Ben-Gurion, and toa critical attitude towards the I0 HOLOCAUST HERITAGE lack ofJewish activism and resistance to the Nazi perpetrators in the Holocaust process. It was not until the arrest and trial ofAdolfEich­ mann in the early 1960s that the Holocaust started to receive con­ siderable public attention in Israel. From the Israeli side, Tim Cole has characterised the Eichmann trial as "a self-conscious attempt to bring awareness of the massacre of six million European Jews to both native-born Israeli youth and the wider world". 3 In Germany, questions ofboth the historical profundity and social breadth of the Nazi regime have stirred up much debate, not only in professional journals but also in the popular press and large-circula­ tion periodicals: Was the Nazi regime a historical aberration in inter­ war German history, or even a rather normal aspect ofa European civil war that was simultaneously acted out in Stalin's Soviet Union, or was it an integrated, yet until the interwar period mainly latent element in a German "special path" to modernity a Sonderweg? Was the Holo­ caust a result ofthe ideas and activities of a narrow circle ofmen in the Nazi party leadership and the criminal agencies of the regime, prima­ rily the SS and Gestapo, or was it rather the result of mass involve­ ment ofalso the rank and file ofthe mhrmacht? Was it, moreover, the result of a more or less primordial "eliminationist anti-Semitism" of large segments ofthe German population?4 Was the expulsion of mil­ lions of Germans from the east after the war just as monstrous a crime against humanity as the Nazi genocide against millions ofJews during thewar? 5 Many other states and societies have more recently, however, been engaged in working out a purposeful history-cultural relationship to the Holocaust. In countries that straddle the old iron curtain, coming to terms with the Nazi heritage goes hand in hand with a simultaneous settling of the score with the Communist heritage, a double emotional and intellectual mental operation in which victim and perpetrator roles are scrutinised anew in the light of a European future, far from the ideological certainties of the Cold War era. In this context, politicians, as other opinion-makers and schalars, while acknowledging the historical fact of the Holocaust, do not often miss the opportunity of giving prominence to the fact that Communists committed large-scale atrocities in the Soviet Union and its satellites for a much longer period than the Nazis perpetrated their genocide.