(Author: Leah Nasson, Vol. 68, No. 3, Chanukah 2013)
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” says Mirek, a character in Milan Kundera’s 1978 novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. He says this, Kundera writes, “to justify what his friends call carelessness: meticulously keeping a diary, preserving his correspondence, compiling the minutes of all the meetings where they discuss the situation and ponder what to do […] to hide and feel guilty would be the beginning of defeat”.1What the fictional character does to fight both the pernicious tide of future amnesia as well as to escape the insidious, omnipresent tentacles of the communist Czechoslovakian state is central to our understanding of memory as a political and social force. Mirek’s commitment to recording his present, however politically dangerous it may prove to be, demonstrates a key facet of the debate over using History teaching as a vehicle through which the principles of citizenship and social justice can be conveyed. In other words, Mirek’s statement shows that remembering is not a passive act; rather, it requires an active engagement with one’s present as well as one’s past, coupled with conscious, voluntary participation in the collective process of constructing memory. However naïve it may sound, it is perhaps only through this binary attachment to both the present and the past that we can imagine a future in which the oft-repeated declaration “never again” holds true. One need only glance at some of the horrifying, large-scale human rights abuses of the past two decades, from the Balkans and Rwanda to Darfur and beyond, to see that prejudice and persecution remain ubiquitous in our societies. The question, therefore, is how the act of remembering can be used as a tool in a responsible manner, such that the themes of social justice and citizenship exist in equilibrium with a critical understanding and interpretation of the past.
In transposing this somewhat nebulous area of contested memory and meaning onto a blank canvas of a History classroom, there are multiple challenges that emerge for educators. Most pertinently, there is the challenge of finding a balance between promoting a deep understanding of historical context while also exploring ways in which prejudice, discrimination and bigotry have led to gross violations of human rights. In doing so, the principal intention in teaching the Holocaust seems to be to incite young people to reflect on the choices they make in their present2. These choices, to be clear, can stretch from deciding to stand up against discrimination in their school environment – whether in the form of bullying, peer pressure or name-calling – to choosing to become young activists for broader socio-political, cultural or environmental causes. Through looking at the present through the relatively transpicuous lenses of the past (and vice versa), one hopes that young people learn how to engage with their immediate milieu on a more meaningful level; that, in effect, they learn to make conscious decisions to resist oppression, to stand up for the principles of a free and democratic society, to recognise their own prejudices, and to take active responsibility for their role as citizens in society. In short, human rights education through the historical study of racism and genocide challenges student “to become more competent at understanding the complex world before them and to see themselves as participants in a global community […] to develop greater empathy for the suffering of their neighbours and to be courageous enough to stand up for the common good”.3
In classrooms worldwide, the watershed historical period encompassing Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is used as a case study for exploring themes of moral and ethical turpitude, of unimaginable – Yet very real – human rights abuses, and of the complex relationship between perpetrator, victim and bystander. Not only does the state-sponsored mass-murder and persecution lend itself to detailed study, given that it is exceptionally well-documented, but it also embodies the full spectrum of choices in human behaviour. As such, its issues defy simplification or superficial treatment4 and resonate deeply at the crux of human conscience and consciousness. In essence, while fixed in set historical circumstances, the lessons of the Holocaust and universal, crossing national, cultural, religious, linguistic, political and socio-economic frontiers. It is for this reason, inter alia, that in more recent decades and in many school curricula the study of the Holocaust has extended beyond merely concentrating on an examination of its legacy for the purpose of remembering those who perished at the hands of the Nazis. Indeed, explicit links have been draw between the past and the present and the study of the Holocaust “has often been a critical catalyst in the further development of teaching and learning about human rights. As students and teachers understand the significance of knowing the pattern of the Nazi genocide, they begin to think about methods for prevention before oppression reaches genocide proportions in the present and future [own italics]”.5
Here, one must on course be wary of falling into the restrictive and reductive trap reflected by the pervasive aphorism (or rather, cliché) that “History repeats itself”, which tends to constrain the discussion to rather populist lines. In saying that “History repeats itself”, one effectively negates the role of the individual in resisting, perpetrating or simply resigning him/herself to the status quo. Ultimately, it denies the presence of choice6. In effect, in seeing History or historical events as existing apart from us, or beyond our control, we are absolving ourselves of a collective duty to protect and actively defend the human rights of our fellow global citizens. Within the ambit of human rights education, it is hence essential that we be guided away from apathy and powerlessness towards reflecting upon what forms our actions, and that we inculcate in students a profound sense of what is a morally and ethically sound response to any form of discrimination. The act of remembering the Holocaust and the study of genocide in the classroom forces students to grapple with issues related to “ethnocentrism, relativism, universalism, responsibility, conflict and justice”.7 However, simply grappling with these issues does not necessarily lead to recognition that prejudice, bigotry and acts of bias, however “trivial” they may first appear to the student (jokes, stereotyping, name-calling and the like), can form the foundation for more severe, formalised systems of oppression and persecution. It is for this reason, therefore that the pyramid of hate is often used as an effective pedagogical tool in studying the Holocaust.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] The visual impact of the pyramid of hate forms an apposite point of departure for a deeper exploration into the Holocaust and human behaviour. It is, no doubt, most effective when used in conjunction with a visit to a Holocaust museum or memorial, such as the Cape Town Holocaust Centre, where one is immediately faced with the harrowing consequences of systematic persecution and discrimination. The interactive nature of the museum facilitates the shift from abstract historical information and impersonal statistics to the realities of human experience8. In doing so, it counters the danger of students perceiving the genocide solely in terms of black and white print on school textbooks, as “just another event to study”. The multifaceted educational value of the Cape Town Holocaust Centre is embedded in the vision it presents to the visitor: it is a vision that consciously moves beyond memorialisation in its objectives, and opens up the critical debate on how and why people behaved in the way in which they did. Moreover, the permanent exhibition urges us to reflect on South Africa’s own iniquitous policies of segregation under the apartheid regime, so preventing a perception that the seeds of hatred at the heart of Holocaust could only have been sown in Nazi-ruled Germany. Those seeds, in many ways, continue to germinate in South Africa’s adolescent democracy. A visit to the museum, therefore, has the obvious potential to frame our response to current popular socio-political and cultural discourse. That said, however, one needs to be cautious with the manner in which the material is presented, interpreted and explored. In other words, one has to be open to analysing all sources (oral, written and visual; primary and secondary), and further encourage the critical thinking that is so central to historical enquiry. For example, we enter potentially dangerous territory when broad and often vague comparisons between apartheid and the Holocaust are drawn, which seems to be somewhat de rigueur in public discourse. While conceptually, it is a useful link to make when teaching South African students, it is equally important that the crucial differences between the two historical events are underlined. Apartheid was not genocide, and to draw on circumstantial similarities between apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany undoubtedly denies the complexities of both state-mandated systems of mass persecution. Indeed, Alice Perrigrew argues, one needs to be wary of over-simplifying a discussion on the pyramid of hate and hence removing the Holocaust from the political and socio-economic conditions of Nazi Germany. In looking at the escalation of antisemitic sentiment in Germany, students should be made aware that of course bullying, stereotyping and name-calling do not necessarily lead to genocide. The boundaries are not as blurred as some may like to think they are. She states that: […] it is important that students are offered a framework from which they can act and arguably the micro-level of school-based bullying offers an instructive and empowering opportunity for students to feel able to ‘make a difference’ […] Perhaps the lesson that ‘it all starts with bullying’ […] fails adequately to engage with all the many times throughout history that expressions of prejudice and discrimination have not led to extreme, state-sponsored violence or genocide. More importantly, it detracts from the particular social, economic and political context of Nazi Germany, and the wider context of a modern Europe and its long and convoluted histories of antisemitism and racialization, in which the Holocaust did in fact take place.9 What emerges through Perrigrew’s extract is that the study of the Holocaust requires not one, but multiples lenses of analysis. On one hand, the act of remembering certainly has the potential to instil a sense of active citizenship in students – that they may feel able to ‘make a difference’ – and as such, it empowers individuals to stand up against any form of prejudice. On the other hand, there nevertheless remain questions as to the extent to which this pedagogical framework deprives students of a properly contextualised historical analysis. Teaching the Holocaust hence requires maintaining a fine balance between recognising and exploring its uniqueness, such that it is not simply seen as an adjunct to the Second World War,10 while examining significant broader and complex historical context with a critical eye. As Perrigrew continues to argue, the salient moral and ethical lessons that emerge from teaching the Holocaust cannot be packaged easily as fixed, uncontested and resolved, but rather from part of the deep and complex fabric of our present and past society. She notes that in using contained, straight-forward and seemingly uncontentious ‘lessons’ such as ‘racism is dangerous’ and ‘prejudice is wrong’, there emerges a risk that “teachers and their students may be encouraged to distance themselves or deny the inevitable and on-going challenges and potential tensions that a twenty-first multicultural democracy necessarily entails”.11 Thus, it is evident that there are multiple layers to the debate over the extent to which using the act of memory as a safeguard against human rights violations, and that the question cannot be simplified into neat, ‘safe’ packages for transmission. Before concluding, there is one more dimension to the debate that is briefly worth mentioning: that of the contested nature of memory, which is frequently used as a socio-cultural or political tool for nefarious ends. Often disguised in a seemingly anodyne veil of a proto-nationalist folk song or carefully-selected source material in a museum, the act of remembering can also prove to be divisive. The resurgence in recent years of extreme right-wing groups in Europe, for example, is often coupled with an over-emphasis (or rather, distortion) of the past in order to buttress neo-Fascist or neo-Nazi ideological ends. Habitually well-versed in emotive language of nostalgia, these groups, whether formally recognised as political parties or marginalised on the fringes of society, recognise the potential of appealing to memory – collective or otherwise – to promote (and not prevent) discrimination and prejudice. Moreover, as Davies and Brown note, in recent decades there has been extensive research into the nature of historical objectivity, and that “history has been characterised as being concerned with the promotion of doubt. If this is appropriate, then it is possible, unless firm moral frameworks are established, for inappropriate revisionism to take place unchecked [italics added]”.12 In conclusion, there is a certain opacity to a discussion on the potential of historical memory to safeguard against human rights violations, and it is clear that there are manifold (and often contentious) threads of interpretation that should inform our response to this debate. Its seemingly straightforward appearance betrays its fundamentally complex form and substance. This is not, however, to argue that the human rights angle should be removed from the study of the Holocaust, but rather that it needs to be carefully deconstructed and clearly rooted in its historical context. When using historical events to demonstrate the contemporary relevance within the sphere of social justice, one should be specifically cautious to not blur the boundaries between the “then” and the “now”. The lessons of the “then” can certainly inform our reactions to the “now”, but the two are not one and the same. Within this context, perhaps the most valuable prism through which to view the act of remembering as a tool for safeguarding against human rights violations is to explore the roles of perpetrators, victims and bystanders. Indeed, arguably it is the seemingly innocuous and often ambivalent role of the “bystander” – whether individuals, nations or even the UN – that most needs to be explored and contested in History classrooms, such that future generations may see no need to look back on gross human rights violations, and think “How could we have let this happen?” As we continue today to be flooded by images of Syria, where civilians are increasingly pounded by the ruthless state-sponsored terror of al-Assad’s regime, this should resonate deeply within our collective conscience. Ultimately, it is in moments such as these that the act of remembering as means of safeguarding against human rights violations becomes particularly poignant and pertinent. Because, put quite simply, we cannot afford to forget.13 Leah Nasson holds BA (Hons) in Italian and History, an MA in Italian and a PGCE. She currently teaches History at Chesterhouse International School in Cape Town. The above essay received, in 2012, the inaugural Marlene Silbert Prize for Holocaust and Human Rights Education, awarded to a post graduate student from the educational faculties of the Universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch and the Western Cape and the Cape Town Holocaust Centre. NOTES
