The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

230 genocide’s wake
terror of language,...as if the gestures of speech were those of a barely controlled
bodily violence” (1969:91–92). Traumatized historical consciousness is housed in
memory icons of the human body, and these images are in turn connected to cultural
agency and political practice. In this chapter, in short, I examine how a specific
form of “catastrophic nationalism” (Geyer 2001), which culminated in global war
and genocide, reverberates in German body memory.
BODY MEMORY AND THE GERMAN NATION
German nation-building after 1945 was driven by the formative power of a public
imaginary that sought to anesthetize the trauma of war and violence. Indeed, postwar
nationhood was dramatically confronted with the aftermath of the Third
Reich: with the reality of wounded bodies, ruined landscapes, and mountains of
corpses (Barnouw 1996). But in the complex attempts at national reconstruction,
the gaze of ordinary Germans turned away from the past: the “powerfully visible
enormity of the atrocities and the burden of their responsibility for these acts”
(ibid.:xiv). The postwar experience, marked by mass dislocation, urban devastation,
and political uncertainty, produced an overwhelming sense of victimization:
Germans came to see themselves as victims of war, not as perpetrators of Judeocide
(Bartov 1998). Moreover, with the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials, which
led to the execution of prominent Nazi officials, the West German parliament began
to pursue a “politics of the past” that was to impose a further closure of history:
former Nazi civil servants, including judges, bureaucrats, and teachers, were
exonerated by an act of amnesty (Frei 1997). Such procedures of postwar state formation
were synchronized with the recuperation of a retrograde archaism of national
state culture: older sediments of a cultural aesthetic of state violence were
transposed in the remetaphorization of the political landscape. The deforming
effects of historical trauma were thus domesticated by implanting into the political
vernacular of everyday life residual memories of national belonging: ethnic
Germanness, organic (blood) unity, and a racial logic of citizenship.
Seeing nationalism as a generalized condition of the modern political world,
Liisa Malkki suggests “that the widely held common sense assumptions linking people
to place, and nation to territory, are not simply territorializing but deeply metaphysical”
(1996:437). My analysis of the politics of German memory offers a
schematic exploration of further aspects of this metaphysics. In postwar West Germany,
national identity came to be dissociated from the very fixities of place that are
normally associated with the spatial confines of the modern nation-state. The formation
of German nationhood was complicated by a corporeal imaginary: blood,
bodies, genealogies. German images of “the national order of things” (Malkki 1995b)
seem to rest on metaphors of the human organism and the body. Among the potent
metaphors is blood (Brubaker 1992; Borneman 1992b). Nationality is imagined
as a “flow of blood,” a unity of substance (Linke 1999a). Such metaphors are thought
to “denote something to which one is naturally tied” (Anderson 1983:131). Think-