Why Remember Hitler?

The NYTimes ran a couple of op-eds today reflecting on the 75th anniversary of Hitler's rise to power in Germany. They are, to varying degrees, less reflections on the past than the present. While each make important points, they nonetheless put on display a kind of humanitarian sentimentalism that disturbs me, mainly for its political implications. The first, by Susan Neiman, assesses whether Holocaust memorials should remember the Holocaust's victims or its heroes. Since memorials are for the living as much as the dead, she proposes "we restrain our attention to the suffering of the victims of those crimes and turn to the courage of those who worked to stop the criminals." The reason being that she thinks the emphasis on the victims is socially and politically enervating. It does not, in fact, inspire to resist new evils as they arise. Focusing the heroes shifts emphasis "on what you’ve done to the world, not what the world did to you."

This seems to me a perfectly sound argument - why emphasize hopelessness and loss in the face of evil, rather than put forward the possibility of resistance? What bothers me, though, is that it is far too vague and bland in its generality, to the point of being apolitical. The problem, after all, in using the Holocaust as a source of inspiration is that it is not really the victim-consciousness that stands in the way of action. The aggressive humanitarianism of our time has not really been paralyzed by a sense of hopelessness. The problem, rather, has to do with the way we think of evil as self-evident, while the great powers compete to tramp around saving others to whom they have attributed victim-status. In this, the general formula of bravery and action over passivity and victimization fails. Neiman ends her op-ed "After all these years, isn’t it time to send a message to Germany’s children — and everyone else’s — that will help them to stand up against present evils as well as mourning past ones?" But this was never the issue. The real political issue s have been, which evil, and whose responsibility? These are questions that cannot be answered if a situation is reduced to a confrontation between Good and Evil, in which the evil-doer is self-evident, and in which the only question is, who has the will and the power to act. If the lesson of the Holocaust is that it was a great evil, which should inspire us to present similar ones, we lose any sense of the political texture of the present, and how this intense moralization of politics can be counterproductive and its own cover for sheer violent domination. Indeed, one would think the Iraq War would have sucked some of the confidence out of this highly stylized way of thinking.

Ian Kershaw, one of the most famous historians of Hitler and the Nazis, also wrote an op-ed, which initially promises to present us with a more politically nuanced comparison of 1933 Germany and the present day. He lists a whole host of present day leaders who have been compared to Hitler - Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Robert Mugabe, Pervez Musharraf, European neo-fascists - and notes that "None of these examples, however, poses a close parallel to what happened in Germany in 1933." Kershaw specifies "neither in their acquisition of power nor in their use of it do modern authoritarian rulers much resemble Hitler." The value of reflecting upon and remembering the Holocaust is to emphasize the difference, the tremendous political gap between now and then. Thinking politically and carefully about the two periods, rather than through the flimsy dichotomies of good and evil, reveals the 20th century to be a complex series of political struggles and conflicts, rather than a timeless struggle against 'fascism.' The thrust, it seems, of Kershaw's point is not just to clarify that the present requires real thinking about the present, but also that the past, too, was more complex. Although he doesn't mention it, one thinks of the fact that the 'good v. evil' narrative of the Holocaust has led many to believe that from the very beginning it was about exterminating the Jews, when in fact the first groups to be targeted for political repression and assassination were union leaders, left-wing political activists, and leading figures in the Communist and Socialist parties. This is the kind of knowledge about the past that disappears when it is filtered through humanitarian sentimentalism.

But Kershaw, too, can't resist closing the gap between the past and present in a flim-flam way. Despite the fact that "what happened in Germany in 1933, and its aftermath, will remain a uniquely terrible episode in history" it nonetheless "reminds us — if such a reminder is necessary — of the need for international cooperation to restrain potential “mad dogs” in world politics before they are dangerous enough to bite." Here again, a free-floating, highly impressionistic view of the world based on a superficial comparison with the past - 'mad dogs' running wild on the global stage - is the lesson derived. One doubts that Kershaw supported Bush's invasion of Iraq, but one struggles to find the difference in their relation to world politics. Even if Kershaw's practical judgment about Iraq, or Bosnia, or whichever recent conflict, was different, it is precisely this view of the globe, as populated with 'mad dogs', vaguely-Hitler like in their potentiality, that creates the climate within which such ill-advised adventures like the Iraq War take place. It is never good when an opponent has been turned either into the incarnation of the Devil, or into a crazed mad man. This is simply preparation for the exercise of power, not an assessment of the other side's political and social circumstances. If anything, once we turn others into these symbols of Evils past reincarnated, it is we who go mad.