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Rapid Review

THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 183-186
© 2001 National Communication Association

Memories of the Holocaust

Amos Kiewe

Caroline Wiedmer. The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. x + 207 pages.  Notes and index.  $39.95.

The author of this volume took upon herself a challenging task and produced a first-rate scholarly documentation of the struggle to remember the Holocaust in France and Germany.  The author presents meticulous research, well versed in cutting-edge scholarship in the narrative of memory and the rhetoric of the public sphere.  With factual information and an objective analysis of the controversies surrounding differing precepts of memory, the author brings to fore the political, historical, and social influences that together combine to shaping the memories of the Holocaust.

Wiedmer selected to ground her research in the narrative of the cartoon series Maus by Art Spiegelman.  A son of Holocaust survivors, Art Spiegelman is detached yet profound.  The narrative Spiegelman produces depends on the oral history of his father’s tales and the tales of other survivors as authenticated history.  Maus, however, is not a historical account, but the account of individual voices confronting the complex nature of memory.  With this case study highlighting the inherent dilemma of memory and remembrance, Wiedmer questions how memory of the Holocaust took shape and still is taking shape, in two countries: Germany, for seeking to repress memory, and France for its extensive willingness to go along with the similar sentiments and for trying to ignore its past.

In post-War France, de Gaulle set the tone for many years—declaring the Vichy regime null and void.  Any responsibility for the treatment of Jews was attributed to others, no longer here.  Collaborators with the Nazis were deemed traitors and thus went into amnesia while the Resistance was promoted as France’s salvation.  In seeking to erase the troubling period, France felt no obligation to take responsibility for what really took place, if only the myth succeeded.  No significant effort to officially memorialize French Jews took place.  Thus, for example, the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation (1962) is not clearly visible and not uniquely dedicated to Jewish deportees.  The public debate, however, changed in the 1970s and the 1980s.  The impetus for the change was the result of movies such as Le Chagrin et la pitie, the series Holocaust, the movie Shoah, as well as the tireless efforts of Serge Klarsfeld.

Wiedmer analyzes two primary memorials—the first one at The Velodrome d’Hiver—the roundup place of Paris’ Jews.  De Gaulle commemorated the location in 1949 with minimal factual information about thirty thousand Jews deported to concentration camps in Germany. Mayor Chirac replaced it in 1986, with a new plaque with more accurate information, and with special mentioning of the number of children, confined “under inhuman conditions.”  The memorial thanks “those who tried to come to their aid,” and ends with a request: “Passer-by remember!”  But the improved memorial too was short on the truth.  The plaque identifies “the police of the Vichy government” as responsible for rounding up Jews.  The truth, however, is that the Paris Police Force was responsible for the rounding up.  Only in 1993 was France under Mitterrand willing to issue a proclamation that de facto identified the “Government of the French State” as responsible for “Racist and Anti-Semitic Persecutions.”  A bronze memorial was finally erected in 1994 in the round-ups location.  A significant turning point occurred in 1995 when Premier Chirac, in a speech commemorating the round-ups at Veldrome d’Hiver, stated that France owes its deported Jews “a debt without statute of limitations.”  The second memorial is in Drancy—a town north of Paris where Jews were interned awaiting deportation to Germany.  There, the call by French Jews to build a monument was well received, and following an international competition, a monument was built in 1973.  Yet, it took time for France to accept responsibility and acknowledge its own culpability.

In Germany, the sentiment after World War II was to repress any thought of the war years.  Only after the student revolt of 1968 did a change occur and as in France, the TV series Holocaust began a debate among Germans.  Wiedmer describes the various movements in Germany and the historical argument each sought to present.  She also accounts for the nature of memory in East Germany prior to 1989, patterned more after the anti-fascist resistance.  Wiedmer selects several key developments to assess Germany’s ability to deal with its past.  She begins with an analysis of the film The Nasty Girl, which opened the door to local histories of examining the past.  While attempts are made to take responsibility, they are often clouded by less than candid soul searching.  Next, she forwards an extensive description of the plans for a memorial in the Bavarian Quarter in Berlin, home to many Jewish residents before the war.  She unearths the origin of the quest for a memorial and the many turns in the turbulent way to finalizing a memorial.  At each step, she observes how differing agendas are brought forward and how collectively, they make slow progress yet carry an inability to fully understand what happened to German Jews and what is the proper way to memorialize them.  Of particular interest is the memorial of “sign language.”  Signs posted in various locations in the neighborhood that depict official Anti-Semitic edicts.

Wiedmer describes the memorial to “the victims of war and tyranny,” inaugurated by Chancellor Kohl in 1993.  Kohl selected the site and the statue therein.  Yet, the vagueness of the memorial created a major protest.  The obvious lack of Jewish references in the memorial, and threats by Jewish leaders to boycott the inauguration, forced Kohl to modify the monument as well as to promise a separate memorial to Jewish victims.  What is evident in the German response is “a tactic of avoidance of mourning.”  One thorny issue is whether to commemorate Jews separately or to create a collective monument to all victims.  A case in point is the Jewish Museum in Berlin as an extension of the Berlin Museum and the controversies regarding its appointed head, funding, dismissal and reversal of objectives as indicative of the politics of memorializing and the inherent disagreement over the narrative of memory. 

Similar issues were brought to the plan to build a memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, initiated in 1988.  The site was controversial as well as the decision as to which victim group was to be commemorated, why, by whom, and what form should the memorial take.  Those who opposed an exclusively Jewish memorial could not bring themselves to acknowledge that Anti-Semitism was central to Hitler’s program.  The selection of two finalists presented additional controversies with the design.  The chosen design by Jackob-Marks had several tough issues to solve, including the engraving of about four and half million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Kohl vetoed the design and with the change of power in Germany the memorial’s future is uncertain.

In an insightful case study, Wiedmer analyzes the design titled “Bus Stop.”  This design would have red buses driving through Berlin with their destination clearly marked as Sachsenhousen and Ravensbruk concentration camps, thus functioning as mobile monuments.  A special bus terminal would serve as a waiting place for the buses, an educational location with access to names of victims, and with information about the “vast network of National Socialist power.”  Wiedmer hints perhaps that a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust today and for the future, like “Bus Stop,” should emphasize educational objectives and ought to function in a way that allows visitors to relate, albeit in a distant way, to the horrors of a past time.  Wiedmer acknowledges that controversies would continue to plague the memory of the Holocaust and that the core issues would remain as to whether this horror, which targeted Jews in a particular and vicious way, should dictate future memorials, and as to what is to be memorialized. Jewish losses? German or French losses? And who is mourning whom?

This is a fascinating book for those contemplating or involved in the quest for an honest account of the Holocaust and its horrors.