(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

192
MARC DE WILDE
that is, their participation in KFOR, the NATO-led intervention force
in Kosovo. Although Fischer’s plea for military intervention was, in fact,
highly controversial, bringing him to the verge of his downfall as a political
leader of the Green Party, it proved to be effective in that the decision
to deploy German troops to Kosovo was eventually supported by a
majority in parliament.
This controversy raises the question whether the impact of the
imperative “nie wieder Auschwitz” on German foreign policy satisfies the
demands of Benjamin’s politics of remembrance. I believe it does not.
In this context, Fischer’s redefinition of the imperative is particularly
revealing: Auschwitz is cited in order to make Germany’s participation
in KFOR acceptable to the German public and, more particularly, to the
Green Party’s electorate. Benjamin’s politics of remembrance, by contrast,
focuses on an image of the past that resists instrumentalization for
present political purposes. It is therefore useless to ideological modes of
thinking. To put it more precisely: the memory image guiding Benjamin’s
politics of remembrance cannot serve to justify present political positions
but rather serves to disrupt them. It is an “unsettling image” not only in
that it literally “unsettles” us, as we cannot come to terms with it, unable
to appropriate and instrumentalize it in a concept, but also in that it challenges
our “settled” opinions about history and politics.
Interestingly, the image of Auschwitz to which Fischer appeals is
potentially precisely such an unsettling image — it is, perhaps, even the
unsettling image par excellence. But the way it is cited in this instance,
isolated from its original context and inserted into a political program,
it has lost its capacity to unsettle. Fischer’s Auschwitz is a monumentalized
Ausch witz. It is a reified image of suffering, in which suffering
has acquired a universal significance, such that a distinction between the
Albanian minority in Kosovo and the Jews in the concentration camps can
no longer be made. Yet, here as well, memory has resisted its instrumentalization.
This becomes clear in light of the protests voiced by survivors
of the Shoah and relatives of the victims against what they see as Fischer’s
“misuse of the dead of Auschwitz” to justify Germany’s involvement in
the bombings of Serbia. 17 Here Auschwitz has once again become an
unsettling image, calling into question the way in which present political
positions are legitimized.
Although one certainly does not need to call on Benjamin’s theories
in order to criticize Fischer, the confrontation between the two might
help us to distinguish between different ways of engaging with the past.
More particularly, I propose to distinguish between two divergent positions:
on the one hand, there is a Benjaminian “politics of remembrance,”
which focuses on images of the past that can be neither appropriated, nor
translated into a political program, but that remain unsettling and disrupt
political positions wherever they threaten to become dogmatic. And, on