The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

106 essentializing difference
If National Socialist Germany’s “origin myth” was consciously modeled after a
hero tale metanarrative, as I am suggesting here, it also was logically unable to cope
with defeat. As Gellner has argued, “[T]he Nazi salvation was selective, it was reserved
for the strong and victorious, and when they lost, there was no logical bolthole”
(1994:147). Protagonists of hero-tales don’t need boltholes, because their narratives
have happy endings by definition. This may be why defeat in 1945 seems to
have been especially traumatic in the discipline of prehistoric archaeology, which
has maintained a kind of collective amnesia for more than fifty years on the subject
of its role in the construction of the National Socialist metanarrative (Arnold
1990; Arnold and Hassmann 1995; but see Halle and Schmidt 1999). Other compromised
academic disciplines eventually went through a self-critical and selfreflexive
phase, the timing of which varied depending on the extent of their involvement.
The fact that German prehistoric archaeology is only now beginning
to come to terms with its past is, I believe, testimony to its involvement in the construction
of the hero-tale that went so horribly wrong, and the degree to which it
owed its existence as a legitimate discipline to the National Socialist state.
ARCHAEOLOGY AS THE HANDMAIDEN OF NATIONALISM
The mutability of archaeological approaches to ethnicity and the construction of
nationalist narrative can be seen in the shifting focus on different ethnic groups by
European nations in the twentieth century. For example, the Germanic tribes were
manipulated for the purposes of political propaganda at least as early as Julius Caesar,
who clearly had ulterior motives for the ethnic distinctions he made between
the “barbarian” populations on the left (“Celtic”) and right (“Germanic”) banks
of the Rhine. Tacitus’s depiction of the Germanic character as the polar opposite
of his dissolute and debauched Roman contemporaries has already been mentioned.
The creation by the National Socialists of the myth of Germanic racial
superiority is a more recent application of the archaeology of ethnicity to a political
agenda that included the systematic extinction of whole segments of the population.
George Andreopoulos argues that the “fiction of the nation-state often contains
a prescription for the cultural destruction of a people through state policies
of more or less compulsory assimilation and, at the limit, for genocide” (1994:6).
He cites the example of the Belgian state: “Much as the colonial Gold Coast invented
a 1000-year old historical pedigree by renaming itself Ghana, Belgian historians
seek their roots in Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. Never mind that Caesar’s Belgae
had only the most tenuous connection with today’s Belgians” (ibid.:7–8).
Nazi Germany is by no means the only example of the use and abuse of the
past by genocidal regimes, though it may be one of the most extreme. Another
much-studied example comes from the United States. In the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries the European population of the United States was engaged
in displacing, physically eliminating, or culturally assimilating indigenous popula-