Concluding Thoughts 2 - The Will to Remember

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Please excuse the delay in posting this, and its length. As you can imagine, it involved a lot of reflection and a lot of work. I hope it is worth your time reading it, it was definitely worth my time writing it.

Remembering a thing like the Shoah, or the genocide of American Indians, requires a decision (or a series of decisions) not to turn away, not to retreat to a less disturbing narrative that omits or glosses over the really hard parts. That is, in fact, forgetting, erasing the parts of the story that are too painful or too challenging. Erase enough parts, often enough and for long enough, and the whole story changes, becomes a different story. At the heart of remembering is the conviction that it is better to know the truth, however ugly or painful, however much it forces us to rewrite our own narratives.

Remembering is much more than recalling. Recalling seems to be more casual or superficial, bringing to mind people or events from the past. Remembering, in this context, is more complex and dynamic, bringing things recalled into the present where we can reflect on their significance both then and now, bringing them back to life so that they may help us make a better future.

Remembering is about not losing the essence of something that has come and gone. Recalling is about the incidentals, things of no particular consequence. It is like visiting the Little Fortress in Terezín as one more 18th century fort that became a police station. Interesting. A tourist attraction.

Remembering the book-burnings of May, 1933, is more than bringing to mind the specifics of what transpired on the Bebelplatz and elsewhere in Germany that night. Remembering requires that we imagine the flames and the heat, and the raucous, atavistic celebration that accompanied the burning of the works of Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Victor Hugo, as well Hemingway, Kafka, London, Sinclair, Hellen Keller, Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Tolstoy, Gorky, and hundreds of other Jews, pacifists, socialists, and artists. Remembering requires that we recognize the spirit that animated the book-burnings when we hear of libraries or schools removing titles from their shelves and curricula. Remembering requires that we guard against it repetition.

Remembering is both an individual and a group act. Americans remember the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We remember the assassinations of President Kennedy and Dr. King. We remember the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle and the felling of the World Trade Center. This remembering involves more than names and dates. I remember the uncertainty and then fear when the Headmaster of my high school broke the news that the President had been shot and the subdued mood as I rode the subway home. I remember the eerie quiet of the streets during the lockdown and manhunt that followed the Marathon bombings in Boston. When these events come up in a group, everyone has his or her own story with its own details but these usually dovetail somehow with everyone else’s story. With the passage of time, the shared parts of these stories become condensed and a penumbra of recollections, rumors, theories and falsehoods forms. Think - the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, the attacks of 9/11.

When the event or person(s) involved is of considerable historical significance, especially when participants are seen as winners or losers, victims or perpetrators, the shared elements of the story can all but disappear, replaced by two (or more) competing stories, each with its own set of facts and interpretations and its own partisans.

The Allies and the German leadership that emerged after World War Two seem to have been determined to avoid what has happened with the American Civil War, two profoundly different and mutually contradictory accounts, and a conflict that shows no sign of ending. In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, the war crimes trials and denazification were meant to declare, unequivocally, that what was done was wrong and has no place in a civilized society. It is perhaps why there is no Hermann Göringstraße or Goebbels statue in Germany, but over 20 monuments, statues and public facilities and 10 elementary or middle schools named for Jefferson Davis and numerous other monuments and memorials to Robert E. Lee and other Confederate heros. (This recent NY Times article describes the same problem “Are the Lessons of Srebrenica Being Forgotten?” Edward Joseph, 10 July 2016.)

In Munich, Nürnberg, and Berlin, we saw evidence of active remembering. Although I cannot rule out the motivation to “make a buck” off the tourists, there were lots of tours, lots of plaques and signs pointing out places of note for the history of National Socialism and Germany, and lots of school groups, mostly high school-age, but younger too, being led or guided through museums and memorials that provide a pretty unvarnished account of the rise of Hitler and National Socialism and its consequences for Germany and the world. The Documentation Center in Nürnberg provides a comprehensive accounting of the rise and fall of National Socialism. The exhibit concludes on a balcony high above the floor of the shell of the Kongresshalle, perhaps an ideal metaphor for the grandiosity and colossal failure of Hitler’s vision. The tour ends with a long, slow walk down a glass corridor, a stake (?) driven through the heart of the Nazi project.

Although I am sure there were elisions and omissions a more careful reading by a better-informed visitor would see, but an attentive student or other viewer comes away with a candid and unflattering account of the absurdities, brutalities and crimes perpetrated by Germany and its leaders from the early 1930s through the surrender in May of 1945. The exhibits at the Dokuzentrum in Nürnberg and the Topographie des Terrors in Berlin are numbing in their detail and horrifying in the diligence and deliberateness they portray.

My reaction, on discovering how little of the National Socialist party rally grounds has been preserved was disappointment. I had hoped to be able to stand in the places made familiar by 1930s newsreels and Riefenstahl’s documentaries, and, in my mind’s eye (and ear), imagine the power captured and then unleashed by the spectacles enacted there. I am not sure how I thought this might increase my insight, perhaps by feeling a bit of the tug of the wave that carried along so many Germans back then.

It is fascinating to me, and I think commendable, that the governments involved (Munich, Bavaria, the Federal Republic) have chosen to preserve the enormous empty shell of the Kongresshalle and to house within the adjoining buildings a symphony orchestra and a series of exhibits, known collectively as “fascination and terror,” on the carefully constructed madness that gripped Germany in the 1930s and 40s. It was also moving to learn that the Czech government and the custodians of the national cemetery at the former Gestapo headquarters in Terezín continue to try to identify those who died and were buried in mass graves there and put names on the individual anonymous graves in which they have been reinterred.

One of the things that stood out most for me, while we were there, and after we had moved on was the candor, seriousness, and courage of the German nation in documenting and owning the savagery and ugliness they had poured out on the world. This is in sharp contrast to the selective and self-congratulatory history that we present in the US.

In Europe we saw three kinds of museums/memorials - documentation centers, unblinking and detailed, multi-dimensional descriptions of the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” of the Nazi horrors. I think of these as “confessional,” this is what these people did in our name.

The second type is the survivors’ reply - museums and memorials, by the Jews of Berlin, or Munich, the Czechs, or the Poles, that emphasize life before and after the emergence of the Third Reich, as well as documenting the specifics of Nazi rule, and memorializing the victims, and the concentration and extermination camps at Terezín and Auschwitz/Birkenau. At Auschwitz, separate barracks with exhibits are maintained by each of the nations and peoples that sent the largest groups of victims to the camp. These tell the stories of the German invasion and occupation from their vantage point, catalogues the toll that took, and memorializes those who suffered or died in the “cleansing” and Germanization of their homeland. They also celebrate resistance by individuals and groups (usually without mention of the anti-semitism and pogroms of their own history).

Third are the proud but modest reminders that not everyone went along and that although the cost could be enormous, there were still those who resisted in ways big and small - the Verzetsmuseum in Amsterdam, the Museum of the History of the City of Kraków/Schindler’s Factory, in Kraków, and the Lieu de Memoire in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Each of these, in its own way, is evidence of the possibilities created by faith and courage.

That Americans in general are afflicted with selective historical amnesia is hardly a new observation. But it does render the German effort to document and convey to current and future generations the particulars of the crimes and atrocities committed by the Third Reich and the German nation all the more impressive.

In order for a society like ours to engage in the kind of confessional remembering that is evident in Germany, three things are necessary. Individuals must be willing to reflect honestly on past actions or policies (in which they or their immediate relatives may or may not have had personal involvement) that had significant adverse effects on individuals and groups often considered “other,” and therefore socially of lower status. There must be a sufficient number of such open and willing individuals in the society to create a receptive audience. There must be a ‘critical mass’ of “cultural gatekeepers” (Malcolm Gladwell) who are also committed to remembering and who have access to sufficient resources and influence to bring a cultural project like a substantial museum or a major shift in school curricula to fruition. In is not clear the extent to which these conditions are present in the United States with regard to the genocide of American Indians, slavery or the imprisonment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans in the 1940s.

The creation of “institutions of memory” - museums, memorials, libraries - is complicated here by the decentralization of culture-transmission. There are over 13,000 more or less independent school boards and hundreds of colleges and universities both public and private. Most of our libraries, including most of our greatest, are owned and operated by municipalities or local consortia or by private foundations and universities. Likewise most of our most important and influential museums were established and maintained through private philanthropy. Federal funding is a significant factor in all of these organizations, but they are all answerable to local, admittedly usually elite, voices and concerns. And they are all subject to “the market,” responsive to the interests and tastes of their donors and their audience. This often means avoiding the controversial, preserving Monticello does not require that we agree or know about the meaning of Jefferson’s legacy. In our democracy, citizens not only consent to be governed but they must consent to be educated, informed, and challenged.

In the US it is often seen by many as unpatriotic, even traitorous, to retell those chapters in our history when we did not live up to our ideals. Insisting on including slave narratives, accounts of genocidal policies and actions against Native Americans, exclusions of Chinese or southern and eastern Europeans, internment of Japanese-Americans (including US citizens), colonial practices in the Philippines, Caribbean, and Latin America, are regarded as slanders on the exceptional character of our people, our country, and its history. President Obama’s early diplomatic initiatives to repair strained relations after two terms of Bush unilateralism were derided by ‘conservatives’ as an “apology tour.” Cruz promised he would “never under any circumstances apologize for America.”

In the United States, we have been extremely slow to acknowledge the very serious ways in which we have not lived up to our own ideals (or preferred reputation). While historical museums usually include references to the dispossession and devastation wrought by European colonists and settlers on the Native peoples of North America, the slave trade and slavery or the “internment” of 110,000 Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor, there is nothing comparable to the Dokuzentrum in Nürnberg or the Topographie des Terrors in Berlin.

To the best of my knowledge, we do not have any notable “confessional” museums. Our museums of history and culture tend to reflect their history as ethnographic “cabinets,” repositories of artifacts and preserved sites that highlight the distinctive culture and mores of the societies of the “other” and celebrate our triumphs over nature, adversity, and those who would do us harm. Allusions to the costs of our “progress” for others are most often footnotes. When I first visited Plimoth Plantation in the early 1960s, outside the stockade and down a small path toward the river was a lone, unoccupied (abandoned) bark-covered Indian dwelling looking neglected and in need of repair. Now, the same Wampanoag ‘homesite’ is peopled with ‘interpreters’, themselves of American Indian ancestry, eager to describe native life in the 17th century. I do not know how ready they are to talk about what happened to their people in the generations that followed the arrival of Europeans.

The only museum I could find focussed on the decimation of Native Americans by white settlers is the tiny, privately-funded (by a member of Pyramid Lake Paiute) American Indian Genocide Museum, founded in 2004 but still only a post office box in Houston. Other museums, often operated by various tribal entities (and funded with casino revenues), aim to highlight Native American accomplishments at least as much as the horrors of the past. The Smithsonian's National Museum of the Native American is a beautiful and extensive but it too is more celebratory than confessional.

In 2001, former Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder proposed a US National Slavery Museum to be located in Richmond. The organization filed for bankruptcy protection in 2011 without ever breaking ground. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, since 2012 part of the Cincinnati Museum Center, opened in 2004, to “reveal stories about freedom’s heroes from the era of the Underground Railroad to contemporary times.” A relocated slave pen, a movie and an exhibit on slavery and the slave trade are among its permanent exhibits. The National Museum of African-American Culture and History, first authorized by Congress in 2003, is due to open this year. Until then, its exhibits are confined to one gallery in the American History Museum. It remains to be seen how much attention will be devoted to slavery. The people of Richmond, VA are currently debating another proposal to build a museum of American slavery, on what was an infamous slave holding and trading site, Lumpkin’s Jail. Standing out among these is the restored and reopened Whitney Plantation in Louisiana which, unlike neighboring plantations, focusses on life in the slave quarters, not the big house. Opened in late 2014, this museum is the project of a wealthy, eccentric, civic-minded attorney from New Orleans who intends the plantation to become a major resource in documenting and educating the public about the realities of American slavery.

The Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles permanent collections include numerous paintings and photographs done by Japanese-American internees documenting their experiences, but the museum’s focus is much broader historically and culturally. The site of the Manzanar concentration camp, over 3 hours from Los Angeles and not far from Death Valley, is maintained by the National Park Service and contains replicas of several of the camp buildings and provides interpretive tours. The Japanese-American Internment Museum, opened in 2013, occupies a renovated railroad depot in the small Arkansas town of McGehee, 17 miles from the Jerome and Rohwer Relocation Centers (about 2 hours drive from Little Rock). The Rohwer site contains a cemetery and the remains of the camp hospital’s chimney.

None of these begins to approach the conspicuous, comprehensive documentation of the crimes committed in our name and that resulted in the deaths of millions and the decimation of whole peoples and cultures. The absence of any meaningful “confession” and the powerful forces that seek to ‘scrub’ from textbooks and school curricula any suggestion that our history has been anything but a steady, onward march to freedom and prosperity for all, leaves us unable as a nation to be honest with ourselves and others.

“Remembering” the decimation of American Indians, and the enslavement of Africans and African Americans seems to be a complicated matter for Americans. Both atrocities occurred over long periods of time and wide expanses of territory. Although various official entities intervened to authorize or facilitate elements of these crimes, neither originated as a master plan engineered by a few, like the gathering of Nazi officials at Wannsee in 1942. Instead they were the result of countless actions by innumerable individuals and groups acting out of ignorance, bigotry and self-interest. Both crystallized into government policy and programs when their advantages to large, concentrated commercial interests (railroads and the exploitation of the American West, and “King Cotton”) became evident.

The forced relocation and imprisonment of 110,000 Japanese Americans was structurally and administratively similar to the German “final solution.” Military and civilian leaders responding to the shock of (and perhaps embarrassment at having failed to foresee and forestall) the attack on Pearl Harbor and the specious threat, based on misperceptions and racism, of sabotage and espionage by citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry, made a policy decision, to move Japanese-Americans away from the West coast and detain them in concentration camps, euphemistically called “relocation centers,” without any regard for civil liberties or property rights. Once the initial decisions were made and cast in legal form, military, law enforcement, and civilian resources were mobilized to collect and transport the internees to the purpose-built camps scattered over the western states.

A society committed to remembering must rely on its schools, museums, and libraries to be honest, comprehensive and impartial, including the unsavory, the disquieting, and the controversial as well as the the beautiful and the generous. Sadly, there is very little trust in these institutions these days. Education officials and school districts in Georgia, Texas, the Carolinas, and Colorado have proposed drastic revisions or dropping all together the AP US History curriculum and test because they ‘emphasize negative aspects’ of American history and do not foster patriotism. Every inch of space, every textbook, and every curriculum has become contested space. Our intolerance as a society for ambiguity, difference, and contradiction seems to have eliminated all nuance from our historical discourse which is at times about as edifying and productive as a schoolyard taunt … “no we didn’t!” “yes we did!”

Also complicating any concerted effort at remembering are the contested narratives surrounding all of these chapters in our history. A robust recounting of the history of slavery in the US undermines the romantic notion of the “noble lost cause” held firmly by many white Southerners and their northern sympathizers. Persistent racism and the bizarre belief among some White supremacists that black people were better off under slavery, all combine to make it very difficult to agree on the past being remembered. (We recently watched Shirley Temple’s Littlest Rebel. What an amazing “whitewash” of slavery.)

Similarly, many ancestors of those who settled the American West recall the “indian wars” as a battle for their own survival, rather than an understandable resistance and reaction by the Indians to the theft of their ancestral heritage and the land needed for the survival of their way of life.

The inhumane and unconstitutional detention and imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s still has its vocal defenders and one-third of Americans polled recently did not know it had happened.

When I think about why we find a full reckoning so difficult, it seems like we are afraid of looking American Indians and African-Americans in the eye, of giving a sympathetic hearing, of what might be required of us; of the enormity of what was done; afraid of having to give up certain comforting narratives.

Perhaps because our own history as a nation and a people is so brief, we fear that a full accounting of our intolerance and bigotry will overshadow whatever good we may have done, our achievements in the arts and sciences and our halting progress toward our hope for “liberty and justice for all.”

For those of us who have grown up fearing or dismissing certain groups as “other,” or have been taught never to appear weak or lose face, acknowledging that some one who is “other” might have the moral upper hand must be very uncomfortable.

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America’s “confessional” museum might take the Documentation Center in Nürnberg as its inspiration (and might avoid some PR nightmares if it used a similar name). Such a museum would document the antecedents, development, mechanisms and legacies of the most wide-scale exercises of American white privilege and impunity - the genocide of American Indians, slavery, American colonial adventures in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific, and the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s.

While the actual design should be in the hands of historians and museum professionals, I would like to sketch out my ideas for the United States Documentation Center. First, it must be conveniently and centrally (whatever that means in a country as big as ours) located. With all due respect to the University of Arkansas, locating the Japanese-American Internment Museum two hours from Little Rock pretty much guarantees that not many people will see it.

At each stage, efforts should be made to personalize the effects of slavery and Indian genocide, etc - slave narratives, Indian narratives, personal effects, paintings and photographs from the relocation centers (as in the Jewish Museum in Berlin), and to avoid caricatures (positive and negative). There is also the need to avoid creating a theme park, “Slave-land”, with reconstructions and recreations and “interpreters” that cannot possibly convey the reality of genocide or slavery. Hannah and I were both struck by the way that many people seemed to be experiencing Auschwitz, the same kind of superficial attention, selfies, photographs of friends and family in front of the most gruesome things, one might see at any other historical or cultural site. Obviously, we cannot control how people experience things and perhaps their apparent superficiality was their way of dealing with the horror of the place, but they did not look distressed.

As important as it is to personalize these atrocities, it is even more important to attempt to convey the scale of the crimes committed. Stone pillars, groves of trees, and empty rooms are all used in the museums we visited in Europe as ways of representing the people who have been killed or otherwise harmed. The same kind of thing should be incorporated in the USDC to represent the Indians killed and displaced, the Africans and African-Americans uprooted, abducted, raped and killed during slavery and its after effects, the local people of Panama sacrificed in the digging of the Panama Canal, and the US citizens and residents imprisoned in concentration camps during World War 2, etc. The vastness of Birkenau will be with me for a long time.

The following is “laundry list” of things I think would need to be ‘documented’:

The beginnings


• European theological and philosophical/scientific texts that functioned to justify viewing people of different races (with darker skin) as inferior and fit objects for enslavement, forced conversion or extermination.
• First stages of European slavery in the New World - Portuguese and Spanish enslavement of indigenous people and abduction and enslavement of Africans. Description of practices, documents authorizing, celebrating, dissenting (maps showing pre-Columbian populations and effects of European settlement and exploitation)
• British (and Dutch) colonial policies and practices - documents (land grants, patents etc), development of triangular trade (maps of African sources, distributions of Indian population at outset of European colonization of North America, effects of European settlement on Indians)
• Literary and religious texts regarding Indians and Africans/slaves;
• Role of religion and religious organizations as partners more often than dissenters in slavery and genocide,


Slavery and Indian policy in new United States (to 1865)


• Variations between States, roles in agriculture, commerce, and industrialization (maps of Indian removals, deaths, extent of slavery)
• Assimilation and its consequences, cooptation of native leadership/ slaves in organizing relocation, as overseers and enforcers (Judenrat, kaposin Nazi practice)
• Literary and religious texts - sermons, denominational policies and practices, newspaper discussions of policies and practices - debate (?) over Indian removal
• Focus on institutions and individuals who profited from slavery or Indian land seizure - recent articles about Georgetown and Harvard re slavery, Brown University and triangular trade, southern plantation farming


Discrimination and Indian policy (to 1965)


• Reconstruction and Jim Crow, lynchings, KKK - evolution of legalized discrimination
• Literary and scientific texts - eugenics, (Hitler’s embrace of Nietzschean philosophy and ‘law of the jungle’ echoes in Trumps, ‘we’re winning, all these people voted for us, we must be right’, American genocide of Indians served as a model for German colonialism in German Southwest Africa and Lebensraum in Poland and Ukraine)
• US colonial policies and practices in Latin America, Caribbean and Pacific - Teddy Roosevelt etc
• Imprisonment of Japanese-Americans - maps, photos, etc, tally of losses by Japanese-Americans (homes, businesses, education, mental health issues)
• Immigration policies and exclusions (implementation of eugenics policies) - anti-semitism, “irish need not apply”
• Assimilation and segregation - Indian boarding schools, separation of Indian children, prohibitions on Indian languages, dress, culture; grossly inferior schools for African-Americans, exclusion from universities and colleges


Contemporary discrimination (1965 to present)


• Policing and criminal justice
• White supremacy and racism
• Manipulation of voting access
• Emergence of Indian gaming
• Reservations and economic opportunity
• Unequal education, healthcare, housing, nutrition, employment
• Overtly racist rhetoric and covertly discriminatory practices
• Literary and visual artifacts that minimize the harms done - “The Littlest Rebel,” Disney’s “Pocahontas,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Dances with Wolves,” “Little Big Man”

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If far-right parties or individuals are getting millions of votes in Germany, France, Italy, Greece, U.S. (Donald Trump got 14 million votes) - have we remembered? Forgotten?.

If we are to atone, what is the sin or crime? Using another as an instrument for our own ends - on an industrial scale?

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Photos

Dokuzentrum Nürnberg
photo by Hannah Forsythe