The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

the holocaust and german politics of memory 255
foreign. This leftist graffiti is an attempt at demonization, accomplished by a disturbing
reliance on race-based iconographic markers. Such a depiction of evil,
which envisions “Nazis” as an Asiatic threat that must be stopped, expunged, or
driven out, entails an unsettling confusion between the perpetrators of genocide
and their victims. As Omer Bartov (1998) observed:
West German representations of the past have often included the figure of “the Nazi.”
This elusive type, rarely presented with any degree of sympathy, retains a complex
relationship with its predecessor, “the Jew.” Serving as a metaphor for “the Nazi in
us,” it inverts the discredited notion of “the Jew in us” [a racist axiom propagated by
National Socialists]....Simultaneously, it presents “the Nazi” as the paradigmatic
other, just as “the Jew” had been in the past....The new enemy of postwar Germany,
“the Nazi,” is thus both everywhere and nowhere. On the one hand, “he” lurks in
everyone and, in this sense, can never be ferreted out. On the other hand, “he” is essentially
so different from “us” that he can be said never to have existed in the first
place in any sense that would be historically meaningful or significant for...contemporary
Germany [or] the vast majority of individual Germans....Hence “we”
cannot be held responsible for “his” misdeeds. Just like the Devil, “the Nazi” penetrates
the world from another sphere and must be exorcized. (pp. 792–94)
For the New Left, “the Nazi” is a metaphor of the satanic element in postwar
German society: a legacy of the Holocaust. The spray-painted portrait of “the
Nazi” reveals deep-seated anxieties about the ubiquity of evil—an elusive threat
that is rendered tangible through images of racial difference. Such a representation
of Nazis as Asian ( Jewish) other serves two purposes. It distances leftist Germans
from the past and acquits them of their sense of guilt by placing Nazis into
a separate, race-marked category. Moreover, their conflation of the Nazi threat with
“the Asian/Jewish menace” (a postulate of the Third Reich that is rehabilitated
by unthinking anti-Semitism) also greatly facilitates the New Left’s sense of martyrdom
and victimhood.
Another text, painted across the facade of a university building in West Berlin
(see Figure 9.8), demands the expulsion of Nazis, while opposing the extradition
of non-Germans:
Nazis get out!
Drive the Nazis away! Foreigners stay!
(Nazis raus!
Nazis vertreiben! Ausländerinnen bleiben! )
Written as a political protest, these antifascist slogans advocate tolerance of ethnic
diversity. But the chosen language of expulsion (raus, “get out”; vertreiben, “drive away”)
and emplacement (bleiben, “stay”) operates from assumptions of a “pure” nation, and
taps into postwar memory formations of blood, history, and homeland. The German
term vertreiben (“expulsion”) refers to the forced removal or extradition of people from
a national domain: it conjures images of territorial dislocation or displacement. Un