A Review of ‘Memorialising the Holocaust in Human Rights Museums’ by Katrin Antweiler, Berlin, ISBN 9783110787979
Review by Lea David, University College, Dublin
‘The horror of falling into utter oblivion is not necessarily the fear of what will happen to us after death but of what it says about our relationships now’ (Margalit 2004, 94)
Avishai Margalit (2004), a prominent Israeli philosopher and a child of Holocaust survivors, wrote the influential book, The Ethics of Memory, which takes up the question of the duties of memory and remembrance. He tried to grapple with an intimate dilemma: both of his parents lost family members in the Holocaust and yet, they had very different views on how to cope. His mother’s position was that the Jews were irretrievably destroyed, therefore, for her, the only moral option was to forge communities of memory. In contrast to that, his father was convinced that ‘we should create a community that thinks predominantly about the future, not a community that is governed from mass graves’ (Margalit 2004, vii – ix).
The very grain of this idea, that the memory of the Holocaust should be utilised in bettering our future, is at the core of Katrin Antweiler’s analysis of the Holocaust-human rights nexus, where ‘global Holocaust education is seen as an important pedagogical tool for shaping future generations into ‘global citizens’ (2).
Over the last four decades, governments around the globe have become increasingly invested in Holocaust memory education as a source of shaping liberal political efforts to produce engaged, human rights-oriented citizenry to fight xenophobia and intolerance. Antweiler’s book demonstrates that precisely this form of liberal governmentality, created by the Holocaust-human rights nexus, ‘aims to emotionally bind the individual to the project of (neo)liberal democracy and therefore enhance both its willingness to conform the democracy’s laws and values and also its motivation to become actively involved in safeguarding the system itself’ (24).
She sets the goal of learning ‘about the different ways in which memory education conducted on the ground contributes to the broader exercise of citizenship education’ (81), asking ‘how memory is utilised as a tool of government’ (53). Antweiler, however, goes further, arguing that putting Euro-modernity in the singular and focusing solely on the Holocaust legitimises ‘only one modernity, history becomes the history of the coloniser’ (40). Therefore, she also engages in a decolonial analysis of public memory from a perspective of global governmentality, which should safeguard us from falling ‘into the many traps of a ‘single story” (56). Hence, the book aims to provide an analytical tool to understand ‘the relationship between memory politics and the politics of citizenship, as well as their impact on coloniality’ (15).
The book brings lengthy theoretical overviews from a number of perspectives – governmentality, coloniality and public memorialisation – to show how the memory of the Holocaust has become increasingly designed to foster the core values of liberal democracy as the guiding principles of ‘lessons for humanity’ (3). Antweiler suggests that we should understand public memory ‘as a discourse of knowledge, meaning discourse that shapes, regulates, limits and produces a certain knowledge’ (49), where history often acts as a clear indicator of what is right and what is wrong.
The idea is that ‘by thinking about the past, [it] seems to unfold as a unidirectional chain that allows us to use history to guide actions in the present’ (51), which is precisely how the soft power of governmentality works. The governmentality approach, she suggests, has embedded the idea that the memory of the Holocaust has an ability to shape, guide and thus govern modern subjects (3). The Holocaust, as the most heinous crime ‘will teach us everything we need to know in order to build a better future’ (164), where its memory is understood not as a concrete event, but as a panacea and a remedy that can ‘contribute to historical dialogue and mediate possible conflicts’ (166).
She builds her theoretical frame around the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, which refers to a political discourse that is largely non-legal and addresses the power that governs human conduct – ‘the ensemble of powers which circulate within and are utilized by society to control the population’ (21). The main idea behind this approach is that, in liberal forms of governmentality, regulation comes from inside, from the subjects themselves. The emergence of the Holocaust-human rights nexus, as an attempt to incorporate memorialisation processes and Holocaust education as an integral part of the human rights agenda and to move from ‘duty to remember’ as a moral instance to the policy-oriented ‘proper way to remember’ (David 2017, 2020), has become the main tool in the global political endeavour to shape a desired citizen-subject.
To demonstrate the global governmentality project of the Holocaust-human rights nexus as a force behind the promotion of ‘historically aware human rights activists’, Katrin turns to human rights museums – a synergy of memorial museums and idea museums that focus on past wrong-doings, in particular, the Holocaust. Human rights museums, whose vision is to propagate ideas of tolerance, equality and human rights, are dedicated to commemorating mass human rights abuses and promoting the human rights memorialisation agenda, most often (but not always) by advocating human rights via Holocaust education.
Three such museums are analysed here:
The Memoriam Nuremberg Trials in Nuremberg, which emphasises the rule of law (Ch. 5);
The Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg, Canada, which aims to establish a global human rights culture (Ch. 6); and
The Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa, which aims to safeguard democracy (Ch. 7).
The case studies are utilised to demonstrate ‘that a public memory which is conditioned by the Holocaust-human rights nexus has become a technique of government that produces a certain type of citizen-subject and aims to disseminate this ideal globally’, which she calls ‘the historically aware human rights advocate’ (159).
Antweiler masterfully demonstrates that the interplay of Holocaust museums and human rights museology has engaged in Holocaust educational programmes that ‘have become intrinsically linked to the goal of cautioning people across the globe (. . .) and raising awareness of human rights’ (74) as an antidote to ‘intolerance and ignorance’ (158). Human rights museums, she argues, utilise ‘the past as a pedagogical device for the production of citizenry’ (160).
According to the author, human rights museology, as opposed to history textbooks and commemorations, adds an ‘emotive approach’ (170), where ‘moral sentiments have become a central pillar of current memory politics’ that are utilised to harvest an ideal citizen-subject. In that sense, ‘feelings of empathy and compassion are commodified and can become a source of profit for those demonstrating empathy and compassion towards other’ (172). This ethical duty to act in order to lessen the suffering of others, as Sznaider pointed out (1998), across spatial and temporal dimensions, became possible only in the intersection between ‘humanitarianism’ and the emergence of liberal society, with its distinctive features of capitalism (the market) and democracy (civic equality and citizenship).
While Antweiler establishes the governmentality approach to force us to think about the global emergence of Holocaust education as a way of producing human rights oriented citizenry, she also identifies the core paradox: namely, the double erasure of both the plurality of histories as well as of time itself has an impact on how we think about the past and how it is most often represented, that is, as a closed entity different to our present future. (162).
The shortcomings of such an approach, adopted at the global polity level, where the Holocaust is detached and decontextualised and Holocaust education is reduced to a set of universally applicable human rights abuses, are best seen in the current Israeli-Gaza war. Conceptualising the Holocaust as an event in the past without accounting for its broad consequences – from mass migration of Holocaust survivors and the establishment of Israel as an independent state (1948), to the expulsion of the Palestinians (Nakba) and the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian land and people – reduces the meaning of the Holocaust to a bare signifier of evil, discrimination and mass destruction and strips away the complexities of its aftermath. In other words, by focusing on the event itself as (human rights) ‘lessons for the future’ without providing knowledge on the mechanisms that have enabled continuous human rights abuses post-Holocaust, distorts not only the reality but also the value of human rights.
Freezing the Holocaust in the past and classifying people according to a simplified matrix of ‘victims’, ‘perpetrators’, ‘bystanders’ or ‘upstanders’, obscures the most important ‘lesson’. One can be a victim under certain circumstances, but a perpetrator or bystander in others. Hence, though we see engaged citizens around the globe, either as pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli activists, a testimony to the wide spread in global governmentality within the Holocaust-human rights nexus, their activism is a clear response to how they align towards this nexus but also a reaction to what is being omitted.
This is precisely what Baer and Sznaider (2017) call ‘situated ethics’ of never again, and reveals ‘complex acts of solidarity’ (Rothberg 2009, 21). On the one hand, the memory of the Holocaust has become a top-down meta-narrative of our times and a measure for human rights in institutionalised democracies. On the other hand, the Palestinian Nakba has become a worldwide symbol and a recruiting force for many people around the world for fighting historical injustice and institutionalised democracies from the bottom-up (David 2020).
This is to point out what is largely missing in this, otherwise, well thought-out, meticulous and theoretically-inspiring book – the notion of agency. The author tends to present the emergence of the Holocaust-human rights nexus as something that simply happened, largely ignoring that political actors (states, organisations and individuals) had very distinct and often contradictory interests in merging the Holocaust and human rights – but to what end?
Neither Israel, nor the United States, nor Germany, for example, had the same political agenda in doing this, as Levy and Sznaider (2002) brilliantly pointed out. This is crucial as, at the end of the day, it defines what kind of citizen-subject this form of governmentality produces on the ground.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
References
Baer, A., and N. Sznaider. 2017. Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era: The Ethics of Never Again. London:
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
David, L. 2017. “Against Standardization of Memory.” Human Rights Quarterly 39 (2): 296–318. https://doi.org/10.
1353/hrq.2017.0019.
David, L. 2020. The Past Can’t Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levy, D., and N. Sznaider. 2002. “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory.”
European Journal of Social Theory 5 (1): 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310222225315.
Margalit, A. 2004. The Ethics of MeR. Cambridge, Mass. London: Harvard University Press.
Rothberg, M. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Sznaider, N. 1998. “The Sociology of Compassion: A Study in the Sociology of Morals.” Cultural Values 2 (1):
117–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/14797589809359290.
