by Rafaël Newman
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Third Reich, and thus of the industrialized mass murder known as the Holocaust, or Shoah—although 1945 was not the end, according to Timothy Snyder, of World War Two. That conflict, the historian maintains, was pursued by the otherwise victorious imperial powers in their respective independence-minded colonies, and only concluded with those powers’ defeat and withdrawal, or with the substitution of some variety of “post-colonial” economic system (The Commonwealth, La francophonie) for classic empire. To say nothing of the “mercantilist neo-imperialism” currently looming.
In any case, eight decades after 1945, there are fewer and fewer survivors of the Nazi regime still alive—a recent publication, urgently entitled Bevor Erinnerung Geschichte wird (“Before memory becomes history,” 2022), contains interviews with a remaining handful of eyewitnesses to the Shoah. Today, with well-publicized settlements (or at least public investigations) of notorious thefts by the Third Reich such as those involving the “Nazi gold” transports, “dormant” bank accounts, and the Bührle Art Collection in Zurich, literary commemoration of the period has begun to turn from lived human suffering to what has been (or might have been) left to succeeding generations: to what has been materially bequeathed, in distinction from the traumatic psychological legacy of second and third-generation survivors. Increased attention is being paid to the physical estates of the victims of terror and genocide; to the belongings that were stolen from them, lost, or destroyed; to the property that individual members of targeted populations were obliged to leave behind, to sell for a pittance, or to have forcibly auctioned off. As if, having dealt comprehensively with the Third Reich’s violations of the Sixth Commandment—“Thou shalt not kill”—we have moved on to a reckoning with its infringements of the Eighth—“Thou shalt not steal.” Is any form of individual compensation, of making-good-again still possible, now that the physical and mental suffering of the victims has been largely acknowledged, their deaths publicly mourned? What would a literary performance of the acknowledgment of theft, and reparations for it, look like? Read more »