The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

the holocaust and german politics of memory 233
assumed existence of an array of new enemies, foreign and domestic, visible and elusive.
Assertions of victimhood had the added benefit of suggesting parallels between
the Germans and their own victims. Thus, if the Nazis strove to ensure the health
and prosperity of the nation by eliminating the Jews, postwar Germany strove to neutralize
the memory of the Jews’ destruction so as to ensure its own physical and psychological
restoration. (Bartov 1998:788)
Any attempt to tackle this denial of history on the part of the postwar generation
(that is, the sons and daughters of those who had known or played a part in
Nazism) was countered with silence (Moeller 1996, 1997; Naumann 1996; Markovits
and Reich 1997). 2 Collective shame became a central issue for these younger Germans,
who refused responsibility for the atrocities committed by their elders. The
Holocaust was defined as an event carried out by others: the Nazis, members of
another generation, one’s parents or grandparents. 3 While refuting accountability
for the horrors of the past, in particular for the murder of the Jews, these younger
Germans experienced their own suffering and shame very keenly. As individuals,
and as a group, they began to identify with the fate of the Jews insofar as both
were victimized, although in different ways, by Nazism: “In this manner, the perpetrators
of genocide were associated with the destroyers of Germany, while the
Jewish victims were associated with German victims, without, however, creating
the same kind of empathy” (Bartov 1998:790). Opposition to and rebellion against
a murderous past were used by these young Germans as organizing tropes in their
ongoing battles with identity and memory.
In postwar West Germany, intergenerational frictions over issues of morality,
body, and sex were appropriated as “sites” where such battles could be waged,
both in public and in private, and at which younger Germans “worked through
their anxieties about their [specific] relationship to the mass murder in the nation’s
recent past” (Herzog 1998:442). Interestingly, in the experience of many young
Germans, the entry into adulthood was somehow linked to their access to forbidden
knowledge, their induction into the repressed memories of genocide. In the
following example, Barbara Köster, a leftist 1968er activist, remembers “her own
and her generation’s coming-of-age” (ibid.:442) as a rite of passage, staged by detour
to the past:
I was raised in the Adenauer years, a time dominated by a horrible moral conformism,
against which we naturally rebelled. We wanted to flee from the white Sunday gloves,
to run from the way one had to hide the fingernails behind the back if they weren’t
above reproach. Finally then we threw away our bras as well. . . . For a long time I had
severe altercations with my parents and fought against the fascist heritage they forced
on me. At first I rejected their authoritarian and puritanical conception of childrearing,
but soon we came into conflict over a more serious topic: the persecution of
the Jews. I identified with the Jews, because I felt myself to be persecuted by my family.
(Köster 1987:244) 4