Simone Gigliotti

Unspeakable Pasts as Limit Events: The Holocaust, Genocide, and the Stolen Generations

This article examines the role of testimony in the production of the memory of the Holocaust and the practice of forcible removals in Australia as “limit events”. A “limit event” is an event or practice of such magnitude and profound violence that its effects rupture the otherwise normative foundations of legitimacy and so-called civilising tendencies that underlie the constitution of political and moral community. The references are the stories of removal collated in Bringing Them Home, and eyewitness testimonies from the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. By situating the stolen generations and the Eichmann trial as limit events, I argue that the effects of witnessing and story-telling exposed a cultural semantics of what was speakable and unspeakable in the narratives of judging historical injustice and remembering past traumas.

The memorialization of genocide

The origin of this special issue, ‘The memorialization of genocide’, emerged from a Journal of Genocide Research workshop held at the Wiener Library, London, in November 2012. The journal editors invited scholars whose research explores the practices, places and politics of genocide memorialization in Europe, Africa, Latin America and South-East Asia. The articles published in this issue represent a selection of those papers (Rebecca Jinks, Tom Lawson, Michelle Kelso and Rafael Alarcón Medina) and also commissioned new articles (Andrea Hepworth). A few presenters took on co-authors to develop their papers into research articles (Kelso and Alarcón Medina). Not all case studies presented in this issue might be considered ‘clear cut’ cases of genocide. Indeed, perhaps residually significant issues relate to violence and the emotional and social claims and investments in mourning it, and forgetting it. Related, too, is the unsettlement that comes with labouring over personal memory and its transformations into concrete form, or its humble markings in landscapes, hills and buildings. As these articles suggest, there are few clearer markers of the politicization of the past than in memorial building, shifting and dismantling. In ‘Thinking comparatively about genocide memorialization’, Rebecca Jinks offers a cogent outline of the evolution of memorialization practices as a comparative phenomenon, drawing examples from the Holocaust, Rwanda, Armenia and Cambodia. In line with recent scholarship to question the importance of the Holocaust as a paradigmatic marker of genocide, her article works as a foundation for rethinking the local histories and geographies of genocide memorialization in museum and public sites. The positive touristic and human rights outcomes associated with the increase in memorial building are increasingly promoted as evidence of governments’ and other stakeholder groups’ achievements in stabilizing extreme narratives of violence in post-conflict and post-genocide societies. Tom Lawson’s ‘Memorializing colonial genocide in Britain: the case of Tasmania’ offers an engaging interpretation of the British Empire looking back at its dark past, not flinching at its role in commissioning atrocities and genocide in Journal of Genocide Research, 2014 Vol. 16, No. 4, 421–422, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2014.975944

Cultures in Refuge: Seeking Sanctuary in Modern Australia

however, the apparent failure of the Amerindians to assimilate—to Catholicism and to French civility—was blamed on their ‘nature’. Belmessous argues that a racial discourse of differentiation thus came to fill the void left by the failed project of assimilation. The second section moves the narrative to the nineteenth-century British Empire, particularly to Australia, and concentrates on the actions and beliefs of one man, Saxe Bannister. Often overlooked by historians, Bannister, in his role as a lawyer, the first attorney general of New South Wales, and as one of the founders of the Aboriginal Protection Society, lobbied for a legal system capable of assimilating Aboriginal peoples in British colonies. In his view, and in contrast to earlier French attitudes to Amerindians, it was the colonisers who had failed the imperial project by operating illegally and in uncivilised ways. Bannister was optimistic about the potential of all humans to achieve a uniform perfection, which could be facilitated through the law. Belmessous ends this section by posing the contentious question of whether Aboriginal self-determination might actually be dependent on assimilation. Such a question, she argues, highlights the difficulty but also the necessity of thinking and acting outside a teleological historical discourse of progress towards Western ideals of civilisation. The third and final section shifts back to the French empire but this time with an emphasis on how the ‘colonised’ themselves, in this case French-educated Muslims in Algeria after the First World War, could use the ideology of assimilation to attempt to negotiate social and political equality. The rejection of their efforts to assimilate led to the violent severing of the colonial tie. This lengthy section of the book includes complex discussions of the nature of nationality and citizenship, which may not be suitable reading for undergraduates but which will be stimulating for postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers. The need for comparative histories of empire is more often asserted than achieved, given the challenges of working across place and time. Although ultimately weighted towards the French empire, this book is one of the few to consistently bring the French and British imperial projects into genuine conversation. The author clearly brings significant historical and linguistic expertise to the topic, with the bibliography revealing an impressive range of primary and secondary research across English and French language materials. Belmessous conceptualises assimilation not just as an ideology of domination but—and this is a crucial distinction—as a utopian vision of perfection for both coloniser and colonised. The focus of sections two and three on rather exceptional figures (Bannister and a select group of Muslims in Algeria) raises questions regarding the broader applicability of the conclusions drawn, but Belmessous has certainly opened up a fascinating strand of enquiry. Despite the broad geographical and chronological scope, there is a strong narrative and conceptual thread through each section and between sections. The legal application and implications of assimilation can, however, make for rather dry reading at times. Assimilation and Empire is a timely study of a dangerous imperial ideology that has survived into a supposedly postcolonial age. Policies of multiculturalism adopted by some states after the Second World War, which at least made some attempt at the acceptance of difference, have collapsed under the pressure towards uniformity since 9/11. As Belmessous demonstrates, the pursuit of homogenous ‘perfection’ through assimilation, and the attendant belief in the trajectory of human history towards a Western ideal of civilisation, has been fatally flawed.

‘Acapulco in the Atlantic’: Revisiting Sosúa, a Jewish Refugee Colony in the Caribbean

This article examines the foundation objectives, settlement history and ethnic relations of the tiny but idyllic Sosúa in the Dominican Republic. Sosúa was established in 1940 as the first and only Jewish agricultural colony resulting from discussions at the 1938 Evian conference in France, which unsuccessfully addressed the growing refugee displacement produced by Nazi Germanys relentless persecution of Jews and other minorities. Fleeing from the grasp of one dictator to the ostensible embrace of Hitlers Caribbean counterpart, Rafael Trujillo, Jews in the tropical settlement were celebrated as the solution to this underdeveloped, peasant-populated, mainly agricultural northern region. Yet, the lack of international, institutional and financial commitment, settler apathy for intensive labour, and feelings of cultural displacement meant that the colony never reached Trujillos desired yet wildly unrealistic projection of 100,000 settlers. Instead, no more than 500 settlers passed through Sosúa from 1940 to 1947. Today, the town thrives as a transnational site of displaced settlers, sex tourism and itinerant labour, with its markers of Jewish ethnic and settlement history barely visible.

Alon Confino, Foundational pasts: the Holocaust as historical understanding (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and A world without Jews: the Nazi imagination from persecution to genocide (Yale University Press, 2014)

A world without Jews is to my mind one of the most important books on the Holocaust to be published in recent years; it constitutes both a methodological and a historical breakthrough. Undoubtedly, it has its flaws and shortcomings like any other book, but its novelties are much more important. Hence, in the following paragraphs, I will focus on some of its innovations and some of the important issues it raises. I leave the critique for others. I will situate this book in relation to major trends in Holocaust historiography while showing the importance of employing a cultural history theoretical perspective, namely placing special emphasis on fantasy and temporality. Confino, a prominent cultural historian of modern Germany, is principally known for his analysis of the multifaceted metaphor of the ‘Heimat’ and its prominence in modern German national consciousness. Additionally, his analysis of the relations between history and memory in modern European history and culture is recognized as of great importance. In A world without Jews, Confino employs the notions he previously developed regarding these two subjects, applying them to better understand the Nazi persecution and execution of the Jews. It should be noted that this study like any other cannot exhaust such understanding because the ‘final solution’ is an extremely complex and multifaceted event, but it surely adds a new and very important layer of understanding that has been largely overlooked. Confino is obviously not the first historian to apply cultural-historical tools to understand the Holocaust. Dan Michman, Claudia Kunz, Dan Stone, Geoff Eley and others have all done so in the past. However, Confino succeeds in articulating the cultural shift most sharply and demonstrating its radical implications. As a cultural historian, his major concern is not to depict what actually happened but rather what the major protagonist of this historical drama, namely the Germans (but at certain points also the Jews), thought they were doing and what was happening. He is interested in what he calls the set of images, stories, dreams and fantasies that constructed the world as it was understood

From Europe to the Antipodes: Acculturation and Identity of the Deckston Children and Kindertransport Children in New Zealand

This study concentrates on oral history interviews with the Deckston children – 20 orphans brought to New Zealand from Bialystok in 1935 and 1937, and Kindertransportees, who emigrated from Britain to New Zealand in 1939-40 and 1946. Whilst the backgrounds of these children differ considerably, they all battled on their antipodean journey with the experience of cultural alienation in a colonial Anglophone setting. The analysis of central themes in identity articulation, such as the role of familial or group-centred socialisation, of religion, education, social advancement and engagement with the community, enables a differentiated view of issues related to exile and belonging.

Review: Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 2004; 364 pp.; 0199265933, £58/

Lastly, the lack of a cultural-historical perspective results in a somewhat monotone picture of post-Smuta Russia. According to Dunning, the Russian economy was backward and Russian society and culture xenophobic and chauvinistic. Hardly anyone would argue that seventeenth-century Russia was a liberal and cosmopolitan place. Nevertheless, the seventeenth century constituted a very complex, transitional period, witnessing diverse social and cultural developments that resulted in Peter I’s reforms. In this respect, the impact of the Smuta on Russia was more diverse and complex than Dunning indicates. There is no doubt that non-specialist readers, primarily undergraduates, will be grateful to Dunning for this useful and insightful introduction to the history of the Time of Troubles in Russia. They would have been even more grateful if the book had included bibliographical references and suggestions for further reading.

99 (hbk)

These words, signifying a shift from the conditional survival of the Jews to their physical death, were pronounced by an exasperated Kenneth Branagh in Conspiracy, the 2001 HBO dramatisation of the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942. It was this performance, as Reinhard Heydrich, that gave the thespian Branagh the most difficult acting experience of his 20-year career. He remarked that ‘in 20 years of acting, I’ve never been involved with a character so disturbing to my own peace of mind’.1 This disturbance of mind was, presumably, absent for Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), when he invited 15 men representing the civil service, the SS and the Party to an imposing villa in a Berlin suburb of Wannsee. They were summoned to discuss, in the words of the Protocol, the only surviving transcript of the meeting at Wannsee, the ‘organizational, policy and technical prerequisites for the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question’ and to ‘ensure in advance that the central organizations involved be brought together and their policies properly coordinated’.2 This meeting has been recently characterised as the ‘most infamous in history’.3