2–9 November The Future of Memory

scholar-in-residence
“Holocaust memory
is being relied on
to counter antisemitism,
racism, and struggles
for community safety
in our present”
“Does the world know what happened to us?”, survivors of
Buchenwald are recalled asking, on the day US troops entered the
camp in April 1945 (Fox 2013). How all the more unspeakable,
then, that among the dead of Buchenwald was Maurice Halbwachs,
the French sociologist whose signal contribution was giving life
to the concept of “collective memory,” by which he meant the
social process of witnessing, remembering, and commemorating
the past (Halbwachs 1950). One of Halbwachs’s core ideas is that
collective memory is something we must engage in actively, to
build connections that bridge the past with the present.
This year’s Holocaust Education Week focuses on “the future of
memory.” This is a particularly poignant year to be asking this
question, as we collectively reel from the death of Elie Wiesel.
Wiesel, himself a survivor of Buchenwald, represented the moral
imperative of Holocaust memory: “I have tried to keep memory
alive,” Wiesel explained in his Nobel Acceptance Speech, “[b]ecause
if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices” (Wiesel 1986).
How, we are now being asked, will the Holocaust be remembered
in the future? How will the Holocaust be recalled in popular
culture, in artistic practice, in memorials, or in academic research?
And, I would add—following Halbwachs—how is Holocaust memory
reflected and made collective in our present?
Take the recent genocide trial, in France, of a Rwandan national
Pascal Simbikangwa, who had been captain of the Presidential
Guard in Rwanda. Simbikangwa was convicted in 2014 by the
cour d’assises in Paris for his complicity in the Rwandan genocide.
The very fact of this trial stems from a legal path that includes
the Eichmann trial in the District Court of Jerusalem. Yet the
Holocaust also figures more expressly: lawyer David Reingewirtz’s
court pleadings that opened by discussing Joseph Kessel, a founding
member of the International League against Racism and
Anti-Semitism, who reported for France Soir during the Nuremberg
Trial; and most vividly, the presence in the trial audience of
Holocaust survivors such as the now deceased Léon Zyguel (who
had earlier testified in the Papon trial about the camps), representatives
of the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from
France, and representatives of the association Buchenwald, all of
whom attended this trial at the Boulevard du Palais in solidarity
for the victims of the Rwandan genocide. The point here is that
the memory of the Shoah was vivid in the proceedings, whether
through legal precedent, the oral pleadings, or through individuals
in their attendance at trial.
Or take the Swiss Bank Holocaust-era litigation, a class action
lawsuit that began in the US Federal Courts in 1996. Much of
this famous litigation turned on locating owners and claims to
redress. But there was another dimension to this litigation that
gained less attention: submissions from civil society organizations
worldwide to a “residual fund” available from the litigation. The
Court decided to rely on these funds for the neediest of Holocaust
survivors: yet what is also crucial about these submissions is
that they provide insight into another dimension of the future of
memory. Since these submissions were not based on the historical
record of ownership, they proposed uses of these funds for projects—for
survivors, for their heirs, for ravaged communities, and
for memorial and educational opportunities. As a result, these
10 Neuberger Holocaust Education Week