Niemals Vergessen: Politics of Memory
Stephanie Merrill
August 2010
Professor Kathy Stuart
Niemal Vergessen is a slogan regarding one of the most gruesome and calculated acts of violence against mankind. This slogan asks us to never forget. As we never forget, it is important to know what we are not forgetting, and then of course what we are remembering. In this case we are implored to never forget the Holocaust, however, this slogan does not define the exact memories that ought to be remembered or forgotten. Even so memories do not lack in definitions. This is left up to the one remembering to decide. Memory is not merely telling a story because even a story has a moral to it. Memory has a reason. Memory has an agenda. The proof is in the open-ended call to never forget, to remember. Never forgetting or remembering reveals the agenda and the politics of memory through memoirs, memorials, art and history.
The existence of a publication is in essence a call to never forget. Why write for no reason? Is it even possible to write without an agenda? Ruth Kluger, a survivor of the Holocaust, will never forget and encourages readers to do the same with her book Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. Her book does not even attempt to exist without an agenda. This agenda is written clearly in English making it possible for the majority of the world to read. This is the beauty of language. Language makes it possible to communicate thoughts, ideas, politics and agendas. It is clear that Ruth Kluger employs her memories with a political agenda. Even the title has a rhyme and a reason. The title in English, Still Alive, “thumbs its nose at those who wanted Ruth Kluger dead.”[1] This collection of memories celebrates Hitler’s failure because she among other Jews is not dead; she is still alive. However we find that some meaning is lost in translation. The German title Weiter Leben, going on living, expresses the pain and hardship surviving the Holocaust entails. Survival and living again, for Ruth is “a bit of a chore” and this tone is lost in the translation of the title. The Holocaust was not easy and neither should the memory of it be. The purpose of her title and her book is to remember the Holocaust as the gruesome and horrific event that it was. Those who did not experience it must learn about it, without “avoidance,” never forgetting the Holocaust and all its evils.[2] This agenda is revealed before reading past the title and foreword.
Kluger’s agenda is not only revealed in the title but also in her dedication. The dedication is “in memory of my mother Alma Hirschel 1903-2000.” Kluger’s mission to present the Holocaust in all of its unforgivable ugliness is even evident in her memory of her mother; the memory of the holocaust and the memory of her mother cannot be separated. Kluger dedicates Still Alive to her mother, who she detests and loves all in the same instant. Kluger blames her mother for keeping her away from the Kindertransports and instead taking her along to Auschwitz, because a child ought to stay with its mother.[3] Then during escape mother saves her daughter’s life and they survive. Then Kluger’s survival is plagued by her own memories of the Holocaust and being the child of a Holocaust survivor. Each relation to the Holocaust, the survivor and child of survivor, has its own pain and sufferings. Kluger refuses to dilute the post-death camp horrors she survived and then continued to survive even for the sake of the memory of her mother. The holocaust did not only destroy millions of lives, it murdered individuals, destroyed families and family dynamics in addition to affecting the survivor’s quality of living and that of their offspring. The horrors of the Holocaust transcended generations.
To understand the affect of the memory of the survivor and the child of the survivor we must understand the survival. Surviving meant living through a systemized hell of torture and hate. Kluger is determined to present life in the concentration camps, as it was, not as a learning experience because “you learned nothing there, least of all humanity and tolerance.”[4] Terence Des Pres’ study of survivors explores the survivor after experiencing this hell. In The Survivor, Des Pres explores a psychoanalytic approach to the Holocaust and the camp experience, which causes the survivors to regress to “ ‘childlike’ or ‘infantile’ levels of behavior.”[5] This child-like state is attained through the inmates’ preoccupation with food and excrement, like infants, to life’s most basic function and necessity. The inmates in the camps are systematically deprived of life’s most basic functions and regress to the childlike state in order to survive. The conditions of the camps were systems to dehumanize and humiliate the prisoners. They had to be dehumanized to make the SS’ job and totalitarian rule “easier.”[6] Ruth Kluger and her mother among countless others experienced this dehumanizing hell and now live with the affects of what Des Pres calls the symbolism of evil: the hell, the survival and the new life.[7] Survival of the Holocaust is surviving and overcoming a total loss of everything that makes a human, human.[8] These camps systematically taught humans how to not be human.
Des Pres’ study brings us to one of Kluger’s criticisms of memorializing the concentration and death camps. For Kluger many of the death camps have been transformed into museums and tourist attractions with gift shops and holocaust kitsch that leave out and avoid the horrors that occurred there. Fifty years after the liberation of the camps, they have been tidied-up and are now “clean and proper” where in memory the only sense of order was systematic death. The death camps cannot be recreated or conserved to convey the inhumanity that dominated the place because “the missing ingredients are the odor of fear emanating from human bodies, the concentrated aggression, [and] the reduced minds.”[9] Without the reality of the camps, many tourists visit Auschwitz and walk away believing that they have learned something, gained something, or become a better person having cried in a gas chamber. However, according to Kluger Auschwitz was in no way a university, it did not teach the survivor (or the visitor) anything, let alone humanity.[10] Kluger examined knowledge from the camps. While examining the idea of understanding the camps Primo Levi in The Gray Zone asks, “Have we…been able to understand and make others understand our experience?” The answer is no; understanding is merely simplification.[11] Those who have not actually experienced the camp, or survived the camp cannot understand the fear and death that emanated from the camp. Levi warns us that understanding must be acknowledged as a simplification and not as reality.[12] Combining the similar arguments of Kluger and Levi, it is clear that the death camp museums can recall a simplification of memory, but cannot truly convey the reality.
In an attempt to know and understand the death camps many have questioned the conservation of the death camps. Is it necessary to visit a simplification of reality of a camp in order to never forget? One line of thought believes the camps to be tourist attractions that are kitsch and a memorial to death and Hitler’s achievement. Another line of thought believes that the camps are important for the grieving process of loss and that it is important to keep them for others to see and visit as a tool to never forget. What should be done with the camps? Can a simplification of reality be a significant learning experience? If not, what is the correct way to ensure that we never forget?
I visited the Mauthausen camp in Austria during the summer of 2010. The road to the camp is called Erinnerung, which means memory. The camp is at the top of a hill overlooking the town of Mauthausen below. There were a number of buses transporting groups of tourists and/or students like us. Outside the camp there is a cafeteria and a bookstore. A restaurant and a memorial garden are inside the main walls. Inside the inner walls were the prisoner barracks, the decontamination room, the washroom, the kitchen, the hospital, the soccer field, the gas chamber, and the crematorium. There were no prisoners, no SS officers, and no smell of death or fear. I could imagine the death, the fear, the starvation, and the torture but in reality I had a backpack with snacks and an extra shirt in case the weather turned cold. The tour guide taught its listeners about the prisoner barracks while mothers pushed their children in strollers in and out of the former prison. Teenagers texted on their cell phones while groups exited the gas chambers alive from the same doors that thousand of gassed bodies were dragged out of in a tangled mess of corpses. Cyclists wearing their spandex contemplated the crematoriums while their bodies cooled down after a long push up Memory Way. The walls of the buildings had evidence of visitors: graffiti marking the dates of visits, others as a memorial of a former inmate, and then even racist remarks, quite similar to markings in any public bathroom stall in America. For Kluger the camp is not for an afternoon stroll, “it is no place for a pilgrimage,” but should lead to an understanding of the camp’s reality.[13]
Ruth Kluger not only criticizes the concentration camps’ lack of death, but also the way “they don’t take you in, they spit you out. Moreover, they tell you what you ought to think, as no art or science museum ever does.”[14] Adolf Frankl, an artist and a survivor of Auschwitz tries to “present to others the atrocious thoughts which course through my head.”[15] The camp was an abysmal hell and he depicts this hell in wild, vibrant colors that are shockingly horrific. In his painting called Fall into the Abyss Adolf Frankl expressed the realities of the death camps through his art and explained, “There is no more life, only sorrow and misery. Death is the only deliverance from this torture.”[16] Solomon J. Salat, another holocaust survivor said, “When I look through the window of my memories I see nothing but tombstones.”[17] Should visiting a death camp connect the visitors with the realities of fear and death? Or are there other ways of memorializing the Holocaust?
The visitors I encountered as well as myself were far from smelling the death and fear of Kluger’s memory of the camp. Pablo Félix Escribano-Cano a survivor of Mauthausen said, one “cannot imagine what it means, being exposed to this martyrdom, this extermination and to so much suffering.”[18] This quote follows the same views of Kluger and Levi. However, if it is impossible to know the reality of the camps, this argument ignores the fact that remembering the event does not require understanding the complex realities of the Holocaust. Does a lack of reality prove a connection and memory of the camp useless? Or are there other motives for remembering? Another survivor of Mauthausen, Eva Lukash said, “I want to remind one of the harps of dead bodies. They were numerous.”[19] With that said, there are more ways to remind the world of the dead bodies without conserving the actual bodies, without requiring the reality and stench of death. The agenda here is an attempt to remember victims categorically by eliciting a connection to the victims of the Holocaust from surviving individuals, groups and nations, not as recreation of the terror.
In order to remember the hordes of bodies, individuals have set up memorials of their murdered and remembered loved ones outside the crematorium, the last place their bodies laid. In addition, at the entrance of the prison, the Klagemauer, the Wailing Wall, which is the location of the dreaded roll calls, the victims have been memorialized as well. This wall, lined with barbed wire is where prisoners were forced under threat of death to line up for hours or days. Now in the same place of such inhumane practices, a number of plaques in remembrance of all the people who were murdered line the wall. However, the victims are remembered different here than in the crematorium, instead of remembering individual names, the victims have been categorized.
On the outside wall of the Klagemaur where the Nazi Officers’ barracks use to stand lays the entrance to the memorial park. Each one is dedicated not to an individual, nor a certain group, but to a nation because the terror of the Holocaust spread across the map and over boundaries. The monument standing directly opposite the entrance of the prison barracks is dedicated to Israel, as a giant Menorah. Israel as a nation did not exist until after liberation of the camps, however Israel still represents its victimization. There is also another monument for a nation that now exists as two nations—Czechoslovakia—but still stands in commemoration. The Holocaust still affected Israel and Czechoslovakia, therefore, whether in existence or not. It is obvious that the purpose of the memorial is not to make us understand the death and suffering but to remind us of the victimization of the Holocaust and fascism that transcended people, boundaries and even time. These memorials seem to even combat the slogan of the fascist, Adolf Hitler, “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (one people, one empire, one leader).[20] The memorials at Mauthausen are a reminder of the falsities of fascism—there are more than one people, one empire and one leader—Niemals Vergessen.
Remembering the victims is an aspect of the politics of memory. While the memorials help clear up a debate on experiencing death camps, memorials are far from being free from debates themselves. The Gestapo House Memorial on the Schwedenplatz in Vienna, Austria has hosted a number of debates. It is built out of stones extracted from the Mauthausen concentration camp quarry by the prisoners. There is a lone statue of a prisoner emerging from the blocks with Niemals Vergessen etched in the stone with the triangles representing political prisoners (red triangle) and the yellow Jewish Star of David on either side. In front of the monument are stones that originally held an iron bar in memory of another group the Nazis murdered. The site is dedicated to the victims of fascism, however, not all the victims appreciate being remembered together and others feel left out. The iron bar has been removed from the memorial as a form of protest. Each group wants to be remembered separate from the others. Others have debated the lacking representation of female victims. Still others find the construction material offensive, being the result of the labor that killed them. Because each group wants to be remembered, or wants their victimization remembered, they create tension if they are left out, or lumped together like they were left in the tangled mass graves. At Mauthausen each group is remembered on the Wailing Wall and the Memorial Garden monuments. Each group also wants recognition in Vienna as well.[21]
As each group vies for recognition in memory in the form of memorials, even the victims themselves are debated. On the Albertinaplatz in Vienna is a memorial to the victims of war and fascism, built on the location of a bombed apartment where hundreds of Viennese inhabitants died in 1945. This memorial presents Austria “with its myth of innocence and victim hood” in regards to the Holocaust and their suffering through World War II.[22] According to this theory, the Austrian Anschluss, unification with Nazi Germany of 1938 was coerced. However, the “scenes of mass adulation” welcoming Hitler and the Anschluss is evidence mounted against this theory. Even if all of Austria did not support the Anschluss, to their “discredit” it was the “popular pressure in Vienna and the initiative of responsive local Nazis that inspired many of the policies of the Third Reich’s Final Solution.”[23] Kluger notes that Austrian Nazis performed more “gruesome tasks” than the German Nazis.[24] Records show that nearly half of SS personnel were Austrian and that in their service they were responsible of nearly 3 million murdered Jews.[25] These politics of memory blur Austria’s role as victim or perpetrator. Furthermore, it blurs the focus of memory. All want to be the victims and never the perpetrator.
Also on the Albertinaplatz in Vienna is another memorial to the victims of fascism: the monument remembering the Jews. This memorial remembers the Jews as the bearded men forced to mop the streets on their hands and knees under the boot of the fascists. The Jew is covered in barbed wire signifying the oppression and their history in ghettos, death camps and Hitler’s Final Solution. This memorial and its message are also debatable. Here the Jew is remembered and depicted in the manner the Nazis would have them remembered: as the inferior race, only fit to mop the streets, or preferably dead. This monument can easily be perceived as racist and insensitive to the Jewish community. This does not promote the message of tolerance and acceptance, which is imperative in preventing a reoccurrence of the hate and racism that spawned the Holocaust to begin with. Adolf Frankl, an artist and a survivor of Auschwitz, remembers and paints his experience in the Holocaust: “through my paintings I have created a memorial for all nations of the world. No one, regardless of religious or political convictions, should ever again suffer—such or similar—atrocities.”[26] Memory is not to understand the horrors, or merely as a reminder of the victims, but it is to prevent a similar tragedy. This is a message to the bystanders of the Holocaust: never forget.
For the murdered Jews of Austria stands a newer memorial built on the Judenplatz in Vienna in 1996. Rachel Whitereads’s monument, “The Nameless Library,” for “the people of the book,” commemorates the 65,000 murdered Austrian Jews. It is a huge block of 6,500 concrete books on shelves with their spines turned inward, leaving the titles and the stories unreadable and “hints at the Nazi book burnings.”[27] There are doors with no handles: denying entry into the library and denying access to the thousands of murdered Jews whose lives are lost forever. This memorial became host to a number of political, aesthetical and locational debates: it was too ugly, took up too much parking, and covered the remains of Vienna’s destroyed medieval synagogue.[28] According to Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter, “‘This monument shouldn’t be beautiful’…‘it must hurt.’”[29] The Holocaust was ugly and hurt and therefore, the memorials to it should as well. The memorial is for the viewer, the dead cannot respond and they have already experienced the ugliness and the hurt of the Holocaust.
Debates reveal that memorials are not just to remind viewers of the victims, but to illicit a response from the viewer. Ruth Kluger explains it as follows, “we don’t honor the dead with these unattractive remnants of past crimes; we collect and keep them for the satisfaction of our own necrophilic desires.”[30] The memorials therefore connect the viewer to the event and do not necessarily connect the viewer to the victim. The memorial is no longer about victims, but about the viewer. The memorial to the Russian Soldier in Vienna clearly has an agenda of its own. This memorial commemorates the Russians’ liberation of Austria and was built in the Russian sector of post-war Allied-occupied Vienna. However, to the Austrians, the Unknown Soldier is known as the Unknown Rapist and Plunderer.[31] The Russians were not known as liberating heroes but as victimizers who committed atrocious crimes against Austrian citizens. Who defines the monument? If the commissioner defines it, it stands for liberation. If those who remember it define it, it commemorates rape. For a memorial its meaning remains to be defined by the beholder. A memorial is complicated by dual, nearly opposing meanings.
The politics of memory become increasingly complicated as we excavate all the many facets of the Holocaust: the memories of death, the memories of torture and hell. The memories of the victims, the bystanders and the perpetrators—transcends generation, boundaries and time. The memories are owned and denied. The memorials are debated, loved and hated. However heated the debate over the memories, at least we can agree that even through the debates, the Holocaust is not forgotten. May its memory be as persistent as the Angel of Death:
Old Friend, old adversary, most satisfying of lovers,
Lifeguard as I swim my laps and my lungs give out,
As my hair thins out, as I hunt for my glasses,
As the dishes and papers pile up, you sit in my kitchen and classes,
Wearing bright paper wings, and impractical joker, not a fraud[32]
May the politics and agenda of memory, Niemals Vergessen.
Bibliography
Adolf Hitler Perverse Political Genius. http://www.foothilltech.org/rgeib/english/orwell/primary_sources/adolf_hitler.htm
Beller, Steven. A Concise History of Austria. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Des Pres, Terence. The Survivor. HIS 142B Dr. Biale Course reader S2010.
Dr. Brigitte, this information was collected through a guided Jewish Walking Tour in Vienna, August 2010.
Connolly, Kate. “Closed Books and Stilled Lives.” The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/oct/26/kateconnolly.
Frankl, Adolf. Art Against Oblivion. Vienna: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Ruth Kluger. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 2001.
Primo Levi. The Gray Zone. HIS 142B Dr. Biale Course reader S2010
Mauthausen Memorial. Eyewitnesses. http://en.mauthausen-memorial.at/index_open.php.
Parsons, Nicholas. Vienna a Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
[1] Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 2001), 12.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Kluger, Alive, 9.
[4] Kluger, Alive, 65.
[5] Terence Des Pres, The Survivor, course reader, 56.
[6] Des Pres, Survivor, 61.
[7] Des Pres, Survivor, 71.
[8] Des Pres, Survivor, 184
[9] Kluger, Alive, 67.
[10] Kluger, Alive, 65.
[11] Primo Levi, The Gray Zone, 36.
[12] Levi, Gray Zone, 37.
[13] Kluger, Still Alive, 111.
[14] Kluger, Still Alive, 198.
[15] Adolf Frankl, Art Against Oblivion (Vienna: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn), 14.
[16] Frankl, Art, 55.
[17] Mauthausen Memorial, Eyewitnesses, http://en.mauthausen-memorial.at/index_open.php.
[18] Mauthausen Memorial, Eyewitnesses, http://en.mauthausen-memorial.at/index_open.php.
[19] ibid.
[20] Adolf Hitler Perverse Political Genius, http://www.foothilltech.org/rgeib/english/orwell/primary_sources/adolf_hitler.htm
[21] Dr. Brigitte, this information was collected through a guided Jewish Walking Tour in Vienna, August 2010.
[22] Steven Beller, A Concise History of Austria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 257
[23] Beller, Concise History, 235
[24] Kluger, Still Alive, 59.
[25] Beller Concise History, 236.
[26] Adolf Frankl, Art, 5.
[27] Nicholas Parsons, Vienna a Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 130.
[28] Kate Connolly, “Closed Books and Stilled Lives,” The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/oct/26/kateconnolly.
[29] Simon Wiesenthal quoted in Kate Connolly, “Closed books,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/oct/26/kateconnolly
[30] Kluger, Still Alive, 64.
[31] Parsons, Cultural History, 251.
[32] Kluger, Alive, 210.
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