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Criticism
Volume 53
Issue 4 Transcultural Negotiations of Holocaust
Memory
Article 1
7-24-2012
Introduction: Transcultural Negotiations of
Holocaust Memory
Stef Craps
Ghent University,
Michael Rothberg
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
is Preface is brought to you for free and open access by the WSU Press at Digital Commons@Wayne State University. It has been accepted for
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Recommended Citation
Craps, Stef and Rothberg, Michael (2011) "Introduction: Transcultural Negotiations of Holocaust Memory," Criticism: Vol. 53: Iss. 4,
Article 1.
Available at: hp://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol53/iss4/1
517
Criticism Fall 2011, Vol. 53, No. 4, pp. 517–521. ISSN 0011-1589.
© 2011 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309
INTRODUCTION: TRANSCULTURAL
NEGOTIATIONS OF HOLOCAUST MEMORY
Stef Craps
Michael Rothberg
During the 1980s, memory emerged as an urgent topic of debate in the hu-
manities. By now, a great deal of research has been devoted to collective
memory, a term developed by Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s to denote
collectively shared representations of the past,1 or cultural memory, a related
concept coined by Jan Assmann in the 1980s that stresses the role of institu-
tionalized canons of culture in the formation and transmission of collective
memories.2 Early work in memory studies focused on the ways in which
memories are shared within particular communities and constitute or rein-
force group identity. Very often, most notably in Pierre Nora’s monumental
Lieux de mémoire project, the nation-state has been taken as paradigmatic
of such “mnemonic communities.”3 However, with the aid of mass cul-
tural technologies, it has become increasingly possible for people to take on
memories of events not “their own,” to which they have no familial, ethnic,
or national tie. In recent years, therefore, the transnational and even global
dissemination of memory has moved to the center of attention.
Arguments about the transnationalization or globalization of memory
typically reference the Holocaust, still the primary, archetypal topic in
memory studies. In the second half of the 1990s, for example, Alvin Rosen-
feld,4 Hilene Flanzbaum,5 and Peter Novick6 called attention to the so-
called Americanization of the Holocaust. While reaching back at least as
far as the theatrical and cinematic versions of the Anne Frank story in the
1950s, this process of Americanization began in earnest with the enormous
success of the 1978 television miniseries Holocaust, a media event that influ-
enced popular reception and memory of the Nazi genocide across national
and identitarian boundaries.7 The transnational resonance of the Holocaust
did not stop there, though. According to Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider,
the global spread of Holocaust discourse has generated a new form of mem-
ory: “cosmopolitan memory.”8 In their view, as in Jeffrey Alexander’s, the
Holocaust has escaped its spatial and temporal particularism to emerge as
518 STEF CRAPS AND MICHAEL ROTHBERG
a common moral touchstone in the wake of the Cold War, and can thus
provide the basis for an emergent universal human-rights regime.9 How-
ever, both Levy and Sznaider’s and Alexander’s studies display what Avi-
shai Margalit has called “the danger of biased salience” accompanying the
construction of a shared moral memory for humankind: because they are
generally better remembered, the atrocities of Europe are perceived as mor-
ally more significant than atrocities elsewhere.10
A common critical response to the privileging of the Holocaust is to
provide a counterclaim for the uniqueness or primacy of other histories
of suffering. However, what Michael Rothberg has identified as the zero-
sum logic structuring this debate—whereby remembering one thing
must come at the cost of forgetting another—is historically problematic,
as well as politically and ethically unproductive.11 Insisting on the distinc-
tiveness and difference of one’s own history can indicate a kind of blind-
ness, a refusal to recognize the larger historical processes of which that
history is a part. As Hannah Arendt,12 Aimé Césaire,13 Paul Gilroy,14 A.
Dirk Moses,15 and Dan Stone16 have argued, the Holocaust, slavery, and
colonial domination are in fact interconnected, and by refusing to think
them together (except in a competitive manner) we deprive ourselves of
an opportunity to gain greater insight into each of these different strands
of history and to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the
dark underside of modernity. Moreover, claims for the uniqueness of the
suffering of the particular victim group to which one belongs tend to deny
the capacity for, or the effectiveness of, transcultural empathy.
This is not to say, though, that a comparative approach to the study
of Holocaust memory is intrinsically more correct or beneficial than a
noncomparative one. As Andreas Huyssen17 and Miriam Hansen18 have
pointed out, Holocaust comparisons may work as screen memories—
meaning that the Holocaust is remembered in order to repress other in-
stances of historical oppression that are closer to home—or simply block
insight into specific local histories. Conversely, the comparative argument
may be exploited for revisionist ends and serve to relativize, dilute, or
erase the memory of the Holocaust, as in the Historikerstreit of the mid-
1980s. However, theorists of “postmemory” (Marianne Hirsch19), “pros-
thetic memory” (Alison Landsberg20), and “multidirectional memory”
(Michael Rothberg) insist on the ethical significance of remembering
traumatic histories across cultural boundaries. Allowing for the trans-
mission across society of empathy for the historical experience of others,
cross-communal remembrance has the potential, at least, to help people
understand past injustices, to generate social solidarity, and to produce
alliances between various marginalized groups.
INTRODUCTION 519
This special issue gathers a number of essays analyzing cultural arti-
facts—video testimonies, literary texts, historical accounts, and political
polemics—that thematize the problematic of transcultural Holocaust re-
membrance outlined here. They approach this topic from aesthetic, his-
torical, political, and ethical perspectives, examining the ways in which the
memory of the Holocaust is invoked, mobilized, and represented; explor-
ing the meaning of the new perspectives on the past that are opened up; and
studying the ethicopolitical stakes involved in the reconfiguration of cultur-
ally prevalent concepts and frameworks of memory. The overall objective
of this collection is to provide further insight into the value, limitations,
and pitfalls of the comparative study of Holocaust memory, with particular
attention to the central role the Holocaust has come to play in efforts to
conceptualize, legitimize, or marginalize experiences of suffering across the
globe.
Four of the five essays included in this issue have their roots in an
international collaborative research project on new directions in trauma
studies hosted and funded by the Flemish Academic Centre for Science
and the Arts (VLAC: Vlaams Academisch Centrum), a Brussels-based in-
stitute of advanced study, in the spring of 2009. We gratefully acknowl-
edge the support of VLAC, which provided an exciting and stimulating
research environment, and of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for
Science and the Arts (KVAB: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België
voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten), whose financial assistance helped to
make possible the conference (contactforum) in which the project culmi-
nated and at which preliminary versions of three of the essays gathered
here were presented as papers.
Stef Craps is a Research Professor in English Literature at Ghent University, where he directs
the Centre for Literature and Trauma. He is the author of Trauma and Ethics in the Novels
of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (Sussex Academic Press, 2005) and has served
as guest editor for a special double issue of Studies in the Novel devoted to postcolonial
trauma novels (2008; with Gert Buelens).
Michael Rothberg is Professor of English and Conrad Humanities Scholar at the University
of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he is also Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and
Memory Studies Initiative. His latest book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the
Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), published by Stanford University Press in its
Cultural Memory in the Present series.
520 STEF CRAPS AND MICHAEL ROTHBERG
NOTES
1. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser, Heritage of
Sociology Series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); French original La mé-
moire collective (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950).
2. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung, und Identität in den frühen
Hochkulturen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992).
3. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman,
trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–98);
French original Les lieux de mémoire, 7 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92).
4. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “The Americanization of the Holocaust,” Commentary 99, no. 6
(1995): 35–40.
5. Hilene Flanzbaum, ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999).
6. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
7. For an account of the impact of Holocaust in Germany, see Andreas Huyssen, “The Poli-
tics of Identification: ‘Holocaust’ and West German Drama,” in After the Great Divide:
Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Theories of Representation and Difference
series (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 94–114.
8. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, trans. As-
senka Oksiloff, Politics History, and Social Change series (Philadelphia: Temple Univer-
sity Press, 2006). See also the nuanced account of memory and globalization in Andreas
Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Cultural Memory in
the Present series (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
9. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory, Essays on Human Rights
Series (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); Jeffrey C. Alexander,
“On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The ‘Holocaust’ from War Crime to
Trauma Drama,” in Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate, by Jeffrey C. Alexander, with
Martin Jay, Bernhard Giesen, Michael Rothberg, Robert Manne, Nathan Glazer, Elihu
Katz, and Ruth Katz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–102.
10. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002), 80.
11. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of De-
colonization, Cultural Memory in the Present series (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009).
12. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., New York: Schocken, 2004).
13. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (1972; repr., New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2000); French original Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Réclame,
1950).
14. Paul Gilroy, “‘Not a Story to Pass On’: Living Memory and the Slave Sublime,” in The
Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993), 187–223; and Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond
the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
15. A. Dirk Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Cen-
tury’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust,” Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 4
(2002): 7–36.
INTRODUCTION 521
16. Dan Stone, “The Historiography of Genocide: Beyond ‘Uniqueness’ and Ethnic Compe-
tition,” Rethinking History 8, no. 1 (2004): 127–42.
17. Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” in Present Pasts (see note 8),
11–29.
18. Miriam Hansen, “Schindler’s List Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular
Modernism, and Public Memory,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 2 (1996): 292–312.
19. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
20. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in
the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).