Attendees of the ‘Transitions’ Conference were privileged to listen to ARNO LUSTIGER (Frankfurt am Main), Holocaust survivor and eminent historian of Jewish resistance, recount his personal experience of Nazi persecution and its interaction with his pioneering research. The latter he conceived as a corrective to the then prevalent historiographical tendency to downplay and even dismiss Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, particularly in the influential work of the late Raul Hilberg. Lustiger, born in 1924, recounted vividly the harrowing experience of his own Bedzin Jewish community in Poland, which orchestrated an armed resistance to their deportation to Auschwitz in which 400 members were killed. His father and brother were murdered in Auschwitz; the other 3 of his immediate family escaped the genocide when his uncle bribed the SS to have them transferred to a forced labour camp. Lustiger survived murderous transfers between numerous camps, eventually escaping a death march from Buchenwald despite the gunfire of an SS sentry. He then volunteered to assist the US Army as a translator. Unable to emigrate to Palestine with his family due to his sister’s tuberculosis, the family were forced to remain in Germany. Hilberg, evidently unaware of this fact, subsequently criticised Lustiger’s decision to remain in Germany, the country of the perpetrators. Lustiger himself was barely able to speak of his experiences until questioned by his grandchildren in 1984. This prompted him to begin researching the broader Jewish experience, to begin the work of replacing facile clichés of passivity with empirical, robust and textured historical research into Jewish resistance. His conversation with Professor Fulbrook stimulated an active and sustained exchange among participants on the complexity of the European memory landscape of the Holocaust and Jewish resistance.
Two stimulating papers explored differing yet complementary case studies of the archaeology of European memory of crimes in World War II. BILL NIVEN (Nottingham) noted that the conventional view of antisemitism and the Holocaust in GDR memory - that it had been subsumed within a monolithic narrative of capitalist plundering and heroic Communist resistance – did not reflect nuanced cultural interpretations in films, novels, museums and memorial sites, particularly Buchenwald. Generational and regional differences interacted with a political memory that was by no means as static and hegemonious as has been assumed.
Similarly, JOHN FOOT (London) explored the vicissitudes of contested memory of a massacre in the church of the Tuscan village of Civitella. A split within the community between holding Italian partisans responsibe for provoking the Wehrmacht or demonising the latter was further complicated by evidence of American shell fragments in the church, adding ‘friendly fire’ to the equation. Thus various local, generational, religious and Cold War geopolitical positions have forged a highly complex and contested memory of the event: an embracing of a degree of divison, Foot noted, proved essential to maintaining a stable community identity.
LARA SILBERKLANG (London) explored the liberation of concentration camp prisoners as a profound and complex transition. Previously the reason for living, the experience itself was often traumatic, anti-climactic, impossible to assimilate: identities had to be renegotiated afresh, to the burden of the witness was added incommunicability of experience. The DP camps too were a traumatic site of transition with crucial divisions of background, demography and religion exposed afresh.
The transition from war to peace was also interrogated by BENJAMIN ZIEMANN (Sheffield), through the prism of the European peace movements. With specific reference to the German case, he argued that, while aiming for a vision of world peace, post-war peace movements in Europe were commonly preoccupied instead with issues of transition in national identity, illustrating his case with examples drawn from propaganda and publicity material. The CND’s 1980 poster “Den Frieden sichern”, for example, contrasted pictures of a young man killed in each of the first and second world wars with that of his present day German counterpart, a gentle amiable teenager with long hair who is “aktiv für Abrüstung”. Thus, Ziemann showed, were signifiers of male German youth used simultaneously to assert and construct a redeemed, enlightened German national identity.
The second day of the conference commenced with AARON JACOBSON (London). He focused upon the numerous transitions in the identities of German former expellees and refugees who settled in the GDR after the Second World War, while emphasising the diversity of the group under study. Highlighting the flaws of the existing literature, he argued for the need for an approach more centred on the social history of these individuals, focusing on their everyday life and experiences. The central focus of his research – namely, why these individuals chose to stay in the GDR, and their life in East Germany after their resettlement – was emphasised. Jacobson presented evidence from extensive oral history interviews, outlined his methodology, and discussed the problems such sources entail.
JULIE DEERING (London) then presented a case study of the NDPD, part of a wider project on the survival of National Socialist ideology, in both the public and the private spheres, in the Soviet Zone and the early GDR in 1945-1953. Drawing upon reports from regional sections of the party, NDPD congresses, and the party’s official newspaper, she discussed the difficult transition party members experienced from the Nazi past, and the complexity of reconciling conflicting ideologies, particularly problematic in the case of the 17 June uprising. The party’s effort to combine its nationalist agenda with the official socialist rhetoric of the state was presented as indicative of the complexity of the ideological currents found in the early years of the GDR, replaced however by increasing uniformity by the early 1950s. National Socialism and the Second World War were however to remain important ideological reference points for many NDPD members and other GDR citizens alike.
CHRISTIANE WINKLER (London) examined the subject of German soldiers who experienced captivity in the Soviet Union, and then return to Germany, and how the experience translated into public and private memory in the two post-war German states. With a focus on those converted to “anti-fascism” while held prisoner, she demonstrated how this transition was accepted as a central narrative in the DDR, but rejected in the BRD, where “anti-fascist returnees” were regarded as traitors. She argued that with the reunification of Germany came a marginalisation of the anti-fascist returnee narrative, despite some underlying continuities.
TIM BEASLEY-MURRAY (London) then argued for a new understanding of the Prague Spring and the ideology of its progenitors, contending that traditional approaches, which regard it as either an attempt to dismantle the Marxist-Leninist system from within or as the search for a “third way” between capitalism and “really existing socialism”, fail to take the “Action Progamme” seriously. He argued that this programme, with its decentralizing, pluralistic and reformist agenda, should be regarded as truly revolutionary and not anti-Marxist but instead ultra-Marxist, and ultra-democratic. Beasley-Murray illuminated this concept of the ideology of the reform movement with reference to the writings of Marx, Schmitt and Benjamin.
HELEN WHATMORE (London) presented case studies of three concentration camps (Neuengamme, Natzweiler-Struthof, and Vught) in order to engage critically with the concept of the “bystander”. Highlighting the difficulties of a precise definition of the bystander, and the problems of the concept as it is employed in the literature to date, she argued for the need for a new vocabulary to adequately take into account the plurality of behaviour and motivations involved in coexisting with a concentration camp. She stressed that “bystanding” is not solely passive observation, but can encompass also more active (non-) involvement.
WENDY BURKE (London) analysed the films De Overval (1962), Als twee druppels water (1963), Soldaat van Oranje (1977), and Pastorale 1943 (1978). She examined these with specific regard to their representations of four key themes: the image of the enemy; Dutch identity; family life under occupation; and images of resistance and collaboration. Focusing in particular on the last of these themes, she interrogated the films as cultural texts and a form of “cultural coping”, as the reality that very few Dutch people actively resisted the construction of more reassuring myths. She noted a growing complexity over time, as the later films acknowledged moral grey areas lacking in the more simplistic depictions of heroism and patriotism in the earlier films.
JULIA WAGNER (London) presented a paper on the search for Adolf Eichmann, part of a wider project on “Nazi hunters”. Drawing upon the memoirs of four key figures in the immediate post-war search for Eichmann (Simon Wiesenthal, Tuviah Friedman, Marcus Diamant, and Asher Ben Natan), she presented winter 1945/46 as a transition period for these individuals, as they came to terms with the post-war reality, experienced emigration, and also made the transition from victims of Nazi perpetrators to their active hunters. Thus did the search for National Socialist perpetrators coincide with personal transformations for the “hunters”.
NICK TERRY (London) outlined recent cases of Holocaust denial, and argued that the phenomenon is now inextricably linked with the memory of the Holocaust itself, and that, seemingly in contrast with the aims of deniers, Holocaust denial has increased discussion of the Holocaust. Holocaust denial forms a discourse of anti-memory, a group contesting an established memory, often by means of relativisation. He also noted the decline of Holocaust denial in recent years, attributable in part to the end of the Cold War, in part to the loss of its former shock value, and also due to the increased danger of prosecution.
MARY FULBROOK (London) led a stimulating concluding discussion by highlighting the plurality of meanings of transition addressed in the conference papers, and drawing the themes of the conference together with reference to each of the speakers. She raised issues regarding communities of experience and memory, and their common expectations and worldviews, as well as the issue of divided memories, in Germany and elsewhere. She furthermore drew attention to the question of those memories which fall off the agenda if they fail to fit into societal meta-narratives, and how the narrative of memory is constructed across transitions in personal experience. Other commentators raised the methodological difficulties of dealing with memory, as well as the issue of the extent to which historians should apply moral and ethical criteria when dealing with such topics. The central issue running through the entire conference, of the plurality of public and private memories, their shifting nature over time, and their close interaction with transitions in experience and identity, was discussed by all participants, drawing proceedings to a satisfying conclusion. The usefulness of transitions as a mode of analysis in the study of memory emerged as the key outcome of this stimulating conference.
Conference Overview:
Session 1:
ARNO LUSTIGER in conversation with Mary Fulbrook
Session 2:
BILL NIVEN: “Memory of the Holocaust in the GDR”
JOHN FOOT: “Divided Memory in Italy. World War II massacres, public and private memories”
Session 3:
LARA SILBERKLANG: “The Anguish of Liberation and the Reality of Displacement. Displaced People after WW II”
BENJAMIN ZIEMANN: “Life against Death. Peace Movements in postwar Europe”
Session 4:
AARON JACOBSON: “Representations of flight and resettlement among former refugees and expellees in the GDR: the evidence of oral history interviews”
JULIE DEERING: “The post-1945 transition in East Germany and the legacy of National Socialism in the early years of the GDR: A Case Study of the National Democratic Party”
Session 5:
CHRISTIANE WINKLER: “The memory of “antifascist returnees” in divided and reunited Germany”
TIM BEASLEY-MURRAY: “Imagining Transition through the Normal and the Exceptional: Carl Schmitt, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin and Czechoslovakia 1968”
Session 6:
HELEN WHATMORE: “Bystanders: Accommodation and Resistance”
WENDY BURKE: “Myth, memory and re-writing the past in film: The shifting image of resistance and collaboration in Dutch films about World War Two from the 1960s and 1970s”
Session 7:
JULIA WAGNER: “ “And I will find him” – “Nazi hunters” and the search for Adolf Eichmann”
NICK TERRY: “ “Auschwitz deniers” as a community of anti-memory”
Session 8:
Concluding discussion chaired by MARY FULBROOK