This bilingual workshop hosted at the Jena Center for 20th Century history was assembled to celebrate the eminent Holocaust historian Saul Friedländer's receipt of the prestigious Balzan Prize. Simultaneously the workshop served to launch the project funded by the Balzan Prize under direction of Christina Morina, the Chair of Contemporary History at Bielefeld University, with advisement from Norbert Frei. The project, entitled “Bystanding and the Holocaust in Europe: Experiences, Ramifications, Representations, 1933 to the Present” seeks to systematically examine the role of Holocaust bystanding in Germany, Austria, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States by focusing on diaries written by Jews and non-Jews. The workshop featured diverging approaches to the concept of bystanding, which remains one of the most controversial concepts in the study of the Holocaust and genocide.

In the opening discussion, CHRISTINA MORINA (Bielefeld) laid out the ambitious scope of the Balzan project, which is conceptualized in part as a continuation of Friedländer’s lifelong project to produce a comprehensive history of the Holocaust. In a discussion with Morina and NORBERT FREI (Jena) focusing on dilemmas in the research on bystanders, SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER (Los Angeles, CA, participating by zoom) described how he regards the examination of the bystander – the tricky third category in Raul Hilberg’s triad of victims, perpetrators and bystanders – as an underrepresented aspect of his own Holocaust histories. To address this underrepresentation, Morina’s research team will focus on bystanding as a process and as a “heuristic device” and not as a distinct category of individuals. Morina thus stresses the verbal form of bystanding as a process over the focus on a group of people called bystanders. In conversation with Frei and Friedländer, Morina described how the project participants will examine a vast body of ego-documents to reconstruct the semantic responses to mass violence in order to determine the complex ways in which both Jews and non-Jews perceived, discussed, or avoided discussing their experiences of the persecution and mass murder of Jews. Morina’s own subproject will focus on a comparative analysis of bystanding in Germany and the occupied Netherlands to understand how perceptions of Jews influenced bystanders and how the Dutch self-perception as a country of “hapless bystanders” shaped debates about the past after 1945.

Over the course of the day’s rich discussions, the workshop’s speakers suggested a number of alternative terms to supplement, compliment or even replace the concept of the bystander. Compromised identities (Mary Fulbrook), accomplices (Omer Bartov), implicated subjects, and onlookers (Wulf Kansteiner) were all explored as potential alternatives. There was a general consensus about the unsatisfactory nature of the two most common German translations for “bystander”: Zuschauer and Mitläufer. Despite Kansteiner’s plea to abandon the term bystander altogether in favor of Michael Rothberg’s concept of “implicated subjects,” the overall discussion reinforced the central terminological necessity of the concepts of bystanders and bystanding. The scholars researching occupied portions of Eastern Europe with greater proximity to the sites of mass killing (Jan Grabowski and Bartov), however, stressed the instability of all subject positions in the spaces permeated with violence. Morina’s opening remarks described her own methodological approach: she intends to work with a flexible concept of bystanding in order to open the space to examine the types of behaviors, attitudes, and semantic registers employed by actors with varying degrees of distance from the actual exercise of violence.

The first panel discussion focused on majority societies and the Holocaust, with each scholar reflecting on the place of the bystander in their research. SUSANNA HEIM (Freiburg) discussed the necessity to dismantle post-war myths employed in Germany as self-serving justifications to distance a complicit society from its own entanglements in mass violence. Far from being an indifferent “majority society,” Heim portrayed a social space infused with antisemitic resentment among a population who regarded the Nazi persecution of Jews as a just punishment meted out to a minority group who – so the justification goes – “deserved what they got.” Bystanders, according to Heim, are figures who facilitated perpetration and thus in some form complicit.

Focusing her remarks on her forthcoming book entitled “Bystander Society,” MARY FULBROOK (London) discussed bystanding, with a primary focus on Germany, through the concepts of ignorance, indifference, and impotence. She stressed that the label of bystander cannot simply be assigned to individual discrete actors, but instead to the overall social space of Nazi Germany, which sanctioned and promoted certain attitudes towards mass violence. The majority society’s indifference to the suffering of Jews produced an intentional ignorance. This, according to Fulbrook, is not an ignorance based on a lack of potential awareness of the situation, but instead an ignorance built on a laborious effort to try not to be aware. A sense of impotence or powerlessness in turn reinforced bystanders’ inactivity, which “actively sustained violence.”

JAN GRABOWSKI (Ottawa) argued that bystanding operated in a fundamentally different way in occupied Poland, which was a space of “danger” and “terror.” Countering the Polish national myth of a predominately indifferent and passive population of captive onlookers, he stressed that the dismal survival rate of Polish Jews (1–1.5 percent) indicates the existence of a complex social space suffused with antisemitism and a general willingness among the non-Jewish population to tolerate or contribute to the murder of Jews. Stressing that “everything is very public,” Grabowski cited the work of Elzbieta Janicka, who describes mass violence in occupied Poland through the concept of “participating observers.” While, in Grabowski’s words, many non-Jewish Poles “did not want to kill you,” they were in his assessment nonetheless content to facilitate – with different degrees of direct participation – the elimination of Jews from Polish society.

If Grabowski pointed to the messiness of bystanding positions in occupied Poland, in the second panel dedicated to exploring bystanders after the fact, OMER BARTOV (Providence, RI) described an even more complex space of nearly uncategorizable shifting subject positions in Buczacz (located today in Ukraine), the primary research site detailed in his 2018 book “Anatomy of Genocide”. Based on his examination of mass killing in this space, Bartov spoke of a “communal genocide” carried out by agents inhabiting shifting and instable subject positions across a shift spectrum ranging from victim to perpetrator. Bartov repeatedly stated that, within this process of communal genocide, there “no one is a bystander,” it is “impossible to be a bystander,” and, ultimately, “there is no such animal as a bystander.” Yet in his descriptions of communal genocide, a terminological gap remained and, while every alternative term introduced by the speakers addressed some aspect of the complexity of these shifting roles, each term also proved lacking in its own ways. Reformulating Fulbrook’s triad of ignorance, indifference and impotence, Bartov described communal genocide through intimacy, resentment, and choice. In a space of constant violence, actors of all kinds constantly made decisions and the outcome of these decisions were often at odds with fixed expectations of perpetrators and victims. Bartov portrayed a space so thoroughly saturated with violence that, aside from certain extremes of victimhood and perpetrator, no clean lines can be drawn.

From the perspective of a scholar of media and memory studies, WULF KANSTEINER (Aarhus) made the strongest plea to dispose with the category of the bystander altogether in favor of Rothberg’s notion of the implicated subject. Shifting the analysis from the execution of violence during the Holocaust, he analyzed the manipulation of narratives about bystanding in post-war Germany. Bystanding, he claimed, is “looking at the events from the perspective of self-justification of one’s own neutrality.” Reinforced by dominant media technologies, especially the visual media of film and television, Kansteiner asserted that the concept of bystanding only sustains “fantasies of non-involvement.” In this post-war imaginary, the bystander served as a tool of absolution.

In his response, Norbert Frei stressed the political importance of these fantasies as a national myth that enabled Nazi functional elites to seamlessly transition into similar positions in the early German Federal Republic. If denazification failed to adequately address perpetrators’ complicity after 1945, the panel showed, it did not even come close to providing adequate responses to the dense layer of individuals who might be labelled as bystanders to the Holocaust. The bystander thus remains an indispensable conceptual category for exploring the lines of complicity that exist in genocidal societies even if a large terminological apparatus is necessary to address the spectrum of bystanding positions.

From accomplice, implication, compromised identities, participant observer, Zuschauer, Mitläufer, and onlooker, among other terms, the workshop’s participants explored a broad vocabulary of different possible terms to describe a messy entanglement of subject positions with different degrees of proximity to and responsibility for mass violence. The vibrant discussion heralded a promising start to an ambitious long-term project that will synthesize a broad range of material to help illuminate a historically fraught concept. The workshop resonated with many open questions and offered a preview of the rich rewards that the Balzan project promises to produce: the re-examination of an indispensable concept that seemingly will not let go of us.

Conference overview:

Welcome Greetings

Walter Rosenthal (Jena) / Norbert Frei (Jena)

Introductory Discussion

Christina Morina (Bielefeld): Bystanding im Holocaust: Geschichte und Nachgeschichte in europäischer Perspektive

Saul Friedländer (Los Angeles, CA) / Norbert Frei (Jena) / Christina Morina (Bielefeld): Some dilemmas in the research on bystanders to the Holocaust

Panel 1

Susanne Heim (Freiburg) / Mary Fulbrook (London) / Jan Grabowski (Ottawa): Bystander im Holocaust. Europas Mehrheitsgesellschaften und die Judenverfolgung

Moderation: Christina Morina (Bielefeld)

Panel 2

Omer Bartov (Providence, RI) / Wulf Kansteiner (Aarhus): Bystander nach der Tat. Verdrängung, Verantwortung, Vergegenwärtigung

Moderation: Norbert Frei (Jena)