ARTICLES–STUDIES
B e r n h a r d F o r c h t n e rHumboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE IN POST-HEROIC
PUBLIC SPHERES
1ABSTRACT
Th is paper derives from an interest in theorizing the increasing number of public admis-sions of wrongdoing by various civil society actors as well as state offi cials over the past decades. It therefore introduces the idea of “grammars” underlying particular debates in the public sphere and suggests a partial shift from a heroic to a post-heroic grammar. It is such a wider societal development that enables concrete, self-critical narratives, and per-formances concerning the aforementioned admissions of past wrongdoing. I illustrate this development by reviewing the case of Germany and, generally, welcome this development. However, I also conceptualize one misuse of apologetic practices. Following Camus’ novel,
Th e Fall, I label this phenomenon judge-penitence;: instead of narrating the self as glorious
or heroic, it is, through admissions of wrongdoing, constructed as guilty. Th is is then self-righteously turned against others in order to construct them as morally inferior. In conclu-sion, I argue that, although recent changes in remembrance-culture should be welcomed, counterintuitive misuses – although unlikely to be widespread – are possible and, thus, self-complacency should be avoided.
1 I am thankful to Irit Dekel, Andrew Sayer, and Ruth Wodak for comments on an earlier version
Key words:
collective memory, (cultural) trauma, Holocaust, judge-penitence, political apologies, post-heroism, public sphere
1. Introduction
Th e construction of individual as well as collective identities has always been a se-lective process of narrating a positive self-image and the negative representation of an “other”2. Pride in an imagined heroic past has served as a particularly sig-nifi cant resource justifying a demarcation based on prejudice against external “oth-ers”. Nowhere is this better summarized than in one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms: “I have done that, says my memory. I cannot have done that – says my pride, and remains adamant. At last – memory yields”3. In recent European history, this has been particularly visible in Nazi occupied countries where glorifying national re-sistance-movements was central for post-war self-images, which sometimes also enabled the silencing of collaboration with National Socialist Germany4. Not sur-prisingly, this mechanism worked diff erently in Germany, where the search for a usable past was severely hampered. Nevertheless, also in Germany, public debates aft er 1945 were soon dominated again by positive self-representations, e.g. narra-tives of self-victimization combined with prejudice against others such as Jews or Soviets.
However, in particular since the loss of anti-communism as a means of legiti-mization and as a source of orientation between good and evil in 1989/91, this heroic pattern has been weakened. Instead, societies have thematised themselves more and more self-critically. Th at is, the suff ering of “the other” has been admit-ted and the harm infl icadmit-ted on “the other” has become a focus of public debates. “[P]ublic rituals of confession of guilt”5 and the construction of “a bitter past”6, thus substantially diff er from traditional positive self-representations, of how the 2 S. Benhabib, Introduction. Th e Democratic Moment and the Problem of Diff erence [in:] Democ-racy and Diff erence. Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, S. Benhabib (ed.), Princeton 1996,
p. 3.
3 F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, London 1973, § 68. 4 T. Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London 2006, p. 803–831.
5 B. Giesen, Triumph and Trauma, London 2004, p. 152.
6 K. Eder, Europe’s Borders: Th e Narrative Construction of the Boundaries of Europe, “European
past is “read” (i.e. selected) and “written” (i.e. constructed). Although the past is still read in order to construct a positive self-image, this does not solely depend on an external “other”. Rather, through admitting one’s own wrongdoing, the in-group’s past becomes the evil “other”. I will argue that such new ways of making sense of the past should not simply be understood in terms of narratives but con-ceptualized on two levels: what we (a) specifi cally narrate depends on (b) wider societal developments, what one might refer to as a deep structure7. Th us, under-lying collective memories, i.e. public narratives of the past, is a grammar, which sets up a horizon that delineates a possible past and future, i.e. constrains the emer-gence of particular narratives.
What I label as a post-heroic grammar does not simply replace heroic structures of thinking about the past. Instead, grammars are abstractions that are only real-ized in mixed forms, i.e. to various degrees. And although (Western) publics show a tendency to adopt a more post-heroic grammar, chauvinistic national pride, rac-ism, or anti-Semitic discourses persist. In the following, however, I do not focus on such identities. Neither do I discuss cynical misuses of “public rituals of confes-sion of guilt”. Instead, I ask if even a normatively desirable post-heroic grammar and subsequent narrations of a “bitter past” enable regressive and subtle rhetoric of pride and prejudice. Th e purpose of this study is thus to question the intuitive assumption that self-critical narratives, which can enable more egalitarian and inclusive modes of interaction, necessarily immunise communities against self-complacent modes of identity construction. Th is interest emerged in the course of research on how claims for “having learnt the lessons” are rhetorically applied in public debates8. Stumbling over an argumentative form that consists both of ad-missions of wrongdoing as well as resentful “othering”, I draw on Camus’ novel Th e Fall in which a “judge-penitent” claims, “Th e more I accuse myself, the more I have the right to judge” others in order to conceptualize this phenomenon9. Th us, the title of this paper; against the background of a post-heroic grammar, self-righteous
7 I have to omit a discussion of diff erences and similarities with the concept of political or civic
culture, cf. G.A. Almond, S. Verba, Th e Civic Culture, Boston 1965.
8 B. Forchtner, Rhetorics of Judge-Penitence. How Moral Superiority is Publicly Constructed through Admissions of Wrongdoing, Unpublished PhD thesis, Lancaster University 2011; B. Forchtner, Nazi-collaboration, Acknowledgements of Wrongdoing and the Legitimation of the Iraq War in Den-mark: A Judge Penitent Perspective [in:] Analyzing Genres in Political Communication: Th eory and Practice, P. Cap, U. Okulska (eds.), Amsterdam forthcoming 2012; B. Forchtner, C. Kølvraa, Narrat-ing a “New Europe”: From “Bitter Past” to Triumphalism?, “Discourse & Society”, under review.
9 A. Camus, Th e Fall, London 2000, p. 88. It is important to note that this paper does only aim
for a conceptualization of this (counterintuitive) argumentative form. In the context of this article, no further claims, e.g. with regards to the signifi cance of judge-penitence in public debates are made.
feelings of pride in admissions of wrongdoing might emerge and, subsequently, prejudice towards “others” as morally inferior are possible.
Following this introduction, section two elaborates on the idea of grammar underlying collective memory in terms of (post-)heroism and locates the (re)pro-duction of collective memory in modern societies explicitly in the public sphere. Th e third section introduces the German historical context as the paradigmatic example of this shift from collectives imagining themselves in primarily heroic terms towards more post-heroic self-representations. In section four, I introduce judge-penitence – including a necessarily brief example – which becomes possible only due to a, generally welcome, change in the grammar underlying public debates. Finally, I summarize my fi ndings, claiming that even against the background of normatively desirable admissions of wrongdoing, regressive patterns of demarcat-ing the in-group from an out-group via narratives of judge-penitence are possible.
2.
Structures of collective memory? Heroic and post-heroic
grammars in the public-sphere
Th e following section deals with collective memory and the public sphere, as well as their connection to heroic and post-heroic grammars. I start by linking collec-tive memory with the public. I then outline the meaning of heroic and post-hero-ic grammars and describe them as diff erent ways of societal self-refl ection in the public sphere.
2.1. The collective memory and public sphere
Neither modern societies nor what is remembered is homogeneous. Instead, var-ious social groups, e.g. civil society actors and political parties, put forward dy-namic and functional constructions of the past in order to create continuities with the present. It is through such struggles in the public sphere that dominant collec-tive memories, i.e. socially shared and framing memories, emerge. Th e public is understood here in terms of Habermas’ conception, i.e. as being situated between the “sphere of public authority” and the “private realm”, as a sphere of reasoning and (potentially) rational, collective self-education and self-determination10. As 10 J. Habermas, Th e Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge 1989, p. 30.
such, the public is “a network for communicating information and points of view (i.e., opinions, expressing affi rmative or negative attitudes); the streams of com-munication are, in the process, fi ltered and synthesized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specifi ed public opinion”11. Halbwachs’ idea that individual recollections of memory rely on social frameworks links to this notion of the public sphere as it is through the public that a social framework is consti-tuted12. Th e way in which societies thematise themselves, the particular streams of communication and the way they are “fi ltered and synthesized”, i.e. structured, is what I understand by the concept of a grammar. Such grammars are abstractions or ideal types. To that extent, they overlap or, pursuing the grammar metaphor, the space between ideal typical grammars underlying the public sphere is fi lled with dialects and grammar shades. Th is structure aff ects the way the public reads and writes the past so that the emergence of various simultaneously existing narratives, which share basic features, such as in the construction of a “bitter past” and judge penitence, is always constrained and enabled by a grammar. However, the relation between grammars and their narrative “output” is a mutual one in which it is ulti-mately through narratives that the former might evolve.
Such an explicit focus on discourses in the public does also help to avoid prob-lematic explanations of the emergence of memory-narratives, e.g. by relying on psychoanalytical vocabulary. Firstly – and unfortunately – Freud himself saw the same dynamics operating in individuals and societies, e.g. individual and collective neurosis. Th is is expressed most clearly in his belief in the biological inheritance of memory traces: “[i]f we assume the survival of these memory traces in the ar-chaic heritage, we have bridged the gulf between individual and group psychology: we can deal with peoples as we do with an individual neurotic”13. Secondly, such analogies concerning a “return of the repressed” seem to derive from a desirable moral impetus, i.e. a therapeutic Freudian position in which traumata are seen as authentic memories, as the historic truth, which might break through so that
jus-11 J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Th eory of Law and De-mocracy, Cambridge 1997, p. 360. Emphasizing a Habermasian concept of the public sphere enables
evaluations of particular grammars or narratives, e.g. admissions of wrongdoing, as normatively desirable due to their egalitarian and universal restructuring of the moral boundaries of a commu-nity. Cf. J. Habermas, Können komplexe Gesellschaft en eine vernünft ige Identität ausbilden? [Can Complex Societies Develop a Rational Identity?] [in:] Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen
Material-ismus [Towards a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism], Frankfurt/Main 1976; J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Th eory of Law and Democracy,
Cam-bridge 1997, p. 287–387.
12 M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Chicago 1992. 13 S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, New York 1967, p. 128.
tice can prevail. Th is, however, ignores the societal construction of memories; as if the past speaks for itself so that individuals and groups are “simply” faced with the task of learning to listen14.
It is certainly tempting to adopt psychoanalytical vocabulary in order to explain collective phenomena. However, this neglects the fundamentally diff erent mecha-nisms at work. For example, the way Germany has dealt with the Holocaust (see below) is frequently explained by describing the killing of Jews as a traumatic event, which was long repressed and could only be worked through aft er a period of latency. But how should a society – which has neither a brain nor a nervous system – repress past events? Instead, what societies might do via the public sphere is silencing the narratives of victims and past wrongdoing. Th at is, these narratives are not repressed but discursively silenced. Similarly, collectively shared narratives about one’s own past wrongdoing, what Alexander calls “cultural trauma”, are pro-duced in the public sphere – a process which is power dependent, i.e. depends on coding, weighting, and narrating by carrier groups – and relies on individual ex-periences and motivation (and arguably is connected, more or less, to the referent of these narratives)15.
2.2. From heroic to post-heroic grammars of public debate
In recent decades, what has become visible, in particular in continental European states, is the diminishing relevance attached to warrior virtues, such as blind dis-cipline, national honor, and a military ethos. Previously, war was “deeply inscribed
on the genetic code of the European states” (italics added)16. Today, the willingness to sacrifi ce oneself for the glory of the collective – the basis of heroic societies – has lost much of its attraction. Consequently, calls for warrior virtues like in the
Dec-14 Such references to traumata rest on the early Freud’s questionable “seduction theory” in which
a real event (sexual abuse) causes traumata – while little signifi cance is given to discourses. S. Freud,
Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses [in:] Th e Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. III, J. Strachey (ed.), London 1962, p. 143–156. Notice that for the
mature Freud, traumata are due to repressed “fantasies” (discourses) – originating not from “mate-rial reality” but “psychical reality”. S. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Part III [in:] Th e Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XVI, J. Strachey (ed.),
London 1963, p. 368.
15 J.C. Alexander, Toward a Th eory of Cultural Trauma [in:] Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, J.C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N.J. Smelser, P. Sztompka (eds.), Berkeley 2004,
p. 10–24.
16 J.J. Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? Th e Transformation of Modern Europe, New
laration of German University Professors of October 1914, supporting German war
eff orts do not seem attractive anymore: “army service trains the youth to self-de-nying duty and loyalty, and endows them with that self-awareness and sense of honor of the genuinely free man who willingly subordinates himself to the com-munity as a whole. […] Indeed, it is our conviction that the salvation of the entire culture of Europe depends on the victory that German “militarism” will eventu-ally wring [sic], the consequence of the manly discipline, the loyalty, the sense of self-sacrifi ce of a peaceable free nation”17.
Instead, post-heroic values like welfare have become increasingly important. Sheehan notes that European states “are now dominated by civilian institutions, focused on civilian goals […] representing what citizens regard as important: man-aging the currency, promoting economic growth, providing welfare, and protecting people from life’s vicissitudes”18. One of the most (in)famous explanations of this shift is proposed by Kagan, who views it as a function of the lack of power of Eu-ropean states. However, even his argument has a constructivist point when stating, “Europeans over the past half century have developed a genuinely diff erent per-spective that springs directly from their unique historical experience since the end of World War II”19. In a similar vein, Cooper states that Europe is a post-modern state that has lost its “will to power”20. And although the “will to power” is prob-ably not lost – the will to achieve and apply it via militaristic means seems ham-pered. At the same time, it is premature to restrict the emergence of post-heroic attitudes to Europe as Schwartz describes similar patterns when speaking of a “post-heroic era” in America, which is constituted by a lack of epic struggles, and in which greatness erodes21.
As the signifi cance of a heroic logic of sacrifi ce is slowly diminishing, victims’ narratives gain the possibility to be heard. Th is amounts not just to a shift in the content of memory, i.e. of what is remembered via particular narratives. Rather, it seems to be a change in the attitude of how we remember and (want to) see
our-17 J.A. Moses, Th e Mobilisation of the Intellectuals 1914–1915 and the Continuity of German Historical Consciousness, “Australian Journal of Politics and History” 2002, No. 3, Vol. 48, p. 349f.
18 J.J. Sheehan, op.cit., p. 221.
19 R. Kagan, Paradise and Power. America and Europe in the New World Order, London 2003,
p. 55.
20 R. Cooper, Th e Breaking of Nations, London 2003, p. 165. For further possible causes, e.g.
demographic reasons, urbanization, or nuclear arms, cf. H. Münkler, Der Wandel des Krieges. Von
der Symmetrie zur Asymmetrie [Th e Transformation of War. From Symmetry to Asymmetry], Göt-tingen 2006, p. 310–354.
21 B. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era. History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America, Chicago 2008, p. 180–218.
selves, i.e. a shift in the grammar of public self-refl ection. It is in this sense that I separate deep structure (grammar) from its various surface realizations (narra-tives). In this paper, it is against the background of an evolving post-heroic gram-mar that one’s own history is no longer imagined uncritically, e.g. in terms of heroism, innocence, etc. while representing the out-group as guilty, barbaric, etc. Instead, the in-group recognizes the harm done to others, which enables a more inclusive, we. While collective identity has previously been constructed through the demarcation of a negative, external “other”. Th e in-group now demarcates itself from its own, evil past, which can amount to moral-practical learning processes by groups, widening the moral boundaries of their communities and enabling more egalitarian structures of communication. Gibney et al. do even speak of an “age of apology”22 and beyond local apologies and their consequences, various authors have identifi ed the Holocaust as symbol of an emerging trans-national moral23. Accordingly, Giesen describes the German case in terms of a “perpetrator trauma”24, while also noting, “the public confession of guilt for the victims of the past is no longer a special German phenomenon. Today it can be found in many Western societies […]. Aft er the collapse of the great utopias that were at the core of the old missionary universalism of modernity, a new universalism of mourning patterns the public rituals of national identity – the victims assume the position that, before, was the place of heroes”25.
Public apologies by state offi cials or the “Hollywoodization” of atrocities can be misused and it is equally true that they are oft en profaned in, e.g. cinema or TV productions. However, “rituals of confession of guilt” are not just cheap rhetoric. Symbols like Brandt’s kneeling in Warsaw (see below) can become powerful in redrawing the moral boundaries of a community. Th us, instead of celebrating in-group heroes – which are other in-groups’ perpetrators – public apologies “provide the only way of getting the recognition of national identity beyond reclaiming artifi cial primordialities and questionable utopias”26. To that extent, the increasing interconnectedness, i.e. the emergence of a global public sphere, is another reason for the shift towards a post-heroic grammar. In particular through mass media, 22 Th e Age of Apology. Facing up to the Past, M. Gibney, R.E. Howard-Hassmann, J.-M. Coicaud,
N. Steiner (eds.), Philadelphia 2008.
23 D. Levy, N. Sznaider, Th e Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, Philadelphia 2005; J. Olick, Th e Politics of Regret: Analytical Frames [in:] Th e Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and His-torical Responsibility, London 2007, p. 121–138.
24 B. Giesen, Triumph and Trauma, London 2004, p. 109–154. 25 Ibidem, p. 3.
in-groups are increasingly exposed to past suff ering of others for which they are/ were responsible while, at the same time, their self-representation is viewed by their former victims and a wider audience. Heroic self-representation becomes an obstacle to recognition while post-heroic admissions of wrongdoing enable mu-tual recognition.
3. Tracing the evolution of the Holocaust in Germany
I now move to Germany as a case of a changing grammar as well as self-critical narratives by reviewing how the murder of six million Jews was symbolically trans-formed into the Holocaust, “the epoch’s marker, its final and inescapable wellspring”27. Th is, however, does not imply that this article is only relevant with regards to Germany. Rather, Germany is viewed as the paradigmatic example of this development and thus illustrates the latter. In order to capture the most fun-damental developments, I identify three main periods.
3.1. 1945–1960s: Germany as a heroic victim
Contemporaneous appraisals, e.g. by Arendt or Mann, show that the breakdown of 1945 was rarely perceived as being more than a military defeat deep into the 1950’s. Consequently, National Socialism was generally not perceived as a cultural or moral problem. Aft er a short period of denazifi cation, the latter was swift -ly replaced by Germany’s integration into the West and, due to easing US pressure, German politicians increasingly granted amnesties that enabled (former) Nazis to become once again a part of the government and the high bureaucracy. Of similar importance for Germans’ self-understanding as a victim and not as a perpetrator was the issue of prisoners of war. As Moeller states, “[p]ostwar debates over shared fates circumscribed a community of suff ering and empathy among Germans, joined by the common project of distributing the costs of war. Defi ning the just claims and rights to entitlement of some and the moral obligations of others was part of establishing the basis for social solidarity in West Germany. Th e Bonn
27 D. Diner, Beyond the Conceivable. Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust,
Berke-ley 2000, p. 1. I have to omit a discussion of diff erences in the remembrance of (pre-unifi cation) Germany, i.e. the Federal Republic of Germany (FDR) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). For an illuminating discussion, cf. H. Jeff rey, Divided Memory. Th e Nazi Past on Two Germanys,
Republic, a nation of victims, succeeded the terrorist, belligerent, destructive, ab-errant Germany of the Th ird Reich”28.
Th us, it is not surprising that Adenauer, Germany’s fi rst chancellor, knew that too much criticism of Germany’s past, as well as too much support of the State of Israel, might cost him power29. Similarly, in the cultural sphere, Heimatfi lme were vastly popular, portraying German victims and equating National Socialism with the Soviet Union while Germany’s so-called economic miracle, in addition to a lively anticommunism stabilized the early republic further30.
Alternative voices were rare – but they did exist in journals like Merkur and Die
Wandlung. At universities, despite of the fact that many professors were (former)
Nazis, some, e.g. Jaspers, called for “unreserved self-analysis”31. In Frankfurt, the
Institute of Social Research engaged directly in university politics in order to place
friendly scholars in vacant chairs. Due to the (systematic) inactivity of German courts, the Central Offi ce for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigshafen was
founded in 1958 and, following the Reichmann trial in 1961, initiated a series of trials in the 1960s, which generated substantial public debate.
However, both politically and culturally, a self-critical approach towards Ger-many’s past was not possible on a broad scale. Nevertheless, the issue was not “repressed”. Although the subject of German guilt was not addressed, the past was a main public issue, e.g. in terms of externalizing responsibility by blaming a small stratum of NS-elites. To that extent, analogies with individuals, e.g. when diagnos-ing a period of latency in Germany aft er the war, miss the point. Th ere was no latency, but years of public debate pressing for a positive self-image and rejecting responsibility whenever possible.
3.2. 1960s – 1980s: Struggles over how to understand National Socialism
Th e 1960s saw the fi rst post-National Socialism generation, which pushed the debates over National Socialism to the center of German society. With the overtak-ing of government by the Social Democrats (SPD) in 1969, the political scene manifestly changed. In particular, Brandt’s kneeling in Warsaw in 1970 symbolized
28 R.G. Moeller, War Stories. Th e Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany,
Berkeley 2001, p. 49.
29 J. Herf, Divided Memory. Th e Nazi Past on Two Germanys, Cambridge 1997, p. 226. 30 R.G. Moeller, op.cit., p. 123–170.
the uncoupling of guilt from individuals while being connected to the nation. Yet, it was not only Brandt’s performance, but also a wider net of discourses that ena-bled this broader change. Among others, one has to name four parliamentary debates concerning the prescription of murder committed during the National Socialist era in 1960, ’65, ’69, and ’79 in which, especially aft er 1965, moral aspects became important in these debates. Although conservatives still claimed that Ger-man history could not be reduced to 12 years of National Socialism and thus that national honor should still be a source of national identity, alternative voices that argued that such concepts are discredited had become louder. At the same time, the serial Holocaust (1979) marked a crucial point at which the murder of six mil-lion Jews was transformed into a symbol of evil32.
But as the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) experienced the end of the economic miracle in the 1970s, desires for continuity and tradition became appeal-ing again. Exhibitions opened which attracted huge numbers of visitors by castappeal-ing a glance back (for example, in 1977, Zeit der Staufer [Th e Period of the Staufers]; in 1980, Wittelsbach und Bayern [Wittelsbach and Bavaria]; and in 1981 Preußen [Prussia]) A similar drive to legitimacy was observable in the German Demo-cratic Republic (GDR), which stressed the reformist-progressive aspects of Prussia (1978) and Luther (1983). When Helmut Kohl became chancellor of the FRG in 1982, he supported this tendency and called for a “mental-moralist turn”. His neo-nationalistic attempts led to the opening of a Haus der Geschichte [House of His-tory] and the Deutsches Historisches Museum [German Historical Museum]. Sim-ilarly, the Bitburg scandal (a military cemetery where Kohl met Ronald Reagan in 1985 in order to demonstrate the alliance between the US and the FRG. It emerged that members of the Waff en-SS are also buried there) and Kohl’s “grace of a late birth” utterance raised fears regarding the possible collapse of a still evolving post-heroic identity.
Th en-president of the FDR Friedrich von Weizsäcker’s speech Zum 40. Jahrestag
der Beendigung des Krieges in Europa und der nationalsozialistischen Ge-waltherrschaft in Europa [On the 40th anniversary of the End of the War in Europe and the National Socialist Dictatorship in Europe] in the German parliament on 8th May of 1985 was understood as a rejection of such tendencies. Weizsäcker em-phasized Germany’s responsibility, but at the same time also addressed German victims. Dubiel later described the power of his syntheses by its character, being
32 Im Kreuzfeuer: Der Fernsehfi lm <Holocaust>. Eine Nation ist betroff en [Under Crossfi re: Th e
TV-series <Holocaust>. A Nation is Taken Aback], P. Märthesheimer, I. Frenzel (eds.), Frankfurt/ Main 1979.
both a “confession and a sermon”33. Th ese debates formed the background of the
Historikerstreit in 1986/87 in which conservative historians aimed to explain
Auschwitz as a reaction to the Gulag-system. However, in contrast to Kohl’s “mu-seum-politics”, the debate was a public one, transcending the sphere of profes-sional historians and politicians. Th e public did not simply consume memory, but was participating in its creation and, thereby, committed itself to its own cultural creation. Ever since, this repeats itself, e.g. in the Goldhagen debate (1996) or the debate over the fi rst Wehrmacht exhibition (1995–1999).
3.3. 1980s – present: Routinization of the “perpetrator trauma”
At the end of the 1980s, the impact of a cultural shift started to manifest itself. Not only were public debates now common, but had consequences too. For example, in a speech on the 10th of November 1988, Jenninger, the president of the Bun-destag, asked what contemporary Germans would have done in the same situation (the “Kristallnacht”). However, as Jenninger was unable to make clear the dividing line between “hermeneutical understanding” and the justifi cation of the then-bystanders, the cultural power of an emerging “perpetrator trauma” forced him to resign. Th e underlying grammar behind this new public sensitivity became clear in the debate over the Neue Wache, a memorial dedicated to all “Opfer des Krieg-es und der Gewaltherrschaft “ [“Victims/sacrifi ced of war and violent dictator-ship”]. While English separates victims from those who sacrifi ced themselves, Ger-man does not (the GerGer-man Opfer conveys both meanings). Th us, earlier debates could talk about German victims, thereby maintaining face through the ambiva-lence of the term. Th e term has been – implicitly – diff erentiated into victim/sac-rifi ced since the 1960s, but it was primarily over the rededication of the Neue
Wache in 1993 that this diff erence became publicly discussed. Th is discussion ul-timately led to the construction of the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas [Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe] in 2005.
Th e consequence of such a change in the public-cultural tide is illustrated by three recent struggles over the past. Th e fi rst example concerns the conservative-far right party Die Republikaner, which, in 1992 and 1996, had signifi cant elec-toral success in the important Federal State of Baden-Württemberg. However, the leading center-conservative party (CDU) went into an unusual grand coalition 33 H. Dubiel, Niemand ist frei von Geschichte [Nobody is Free from History], München 1999,
with the SPD instead of taking Die Republikaner on board. Political isolation and public pressure proved successful, leading to today’s insignifi cance of Die
Repub-likaner. Secondly, public scandals such as the one surrounding Hohmann and
Günzel in 2003, are equally telling. Hohmann, a member of the conservative wing of the CDU gave a minor speech on German Unifi cation Day in which he declared the joint guilt of Jews, as they were also a “Tätervolk” (“perpetrator people”) by referring to the fact that Jews fought in the Red Army. Günzel, a high-ranking member of the army, supported him publicly. Not even national-conservative parts of the CDU or the Liberals protested signifi cantly when the CDU expelled Hohm-ann, and the defense ministry fi red Günzel. Th irdly, when Filbinger died in 2007, Oettinger, his successor as the head of the Federal State of Baden-Württemberg, held a eulogy in which he described Fillbinger as “An opponent of the Hitler re-gime [who] could fl ee the constraints of the rere-gime as little as a million others”34. Even vast parts of his own party and its conservative wing were unable to follow him in this regard and aft er a week of immense public debate, Oettinger distanced himself from his comment.
While the Hitler Youth generation of the 1930s fought for the recognition of the Holocaust as part of Germany’s tradition, the generation of 1968 pushed this further, enabling a self-critical self-image, even with consensual characteristics. But even if the Holocaust is today seen as an undeniable part of the German pub-lic’s self-understanding, this interpretation of the past is not frozen. However, a radical revision of this past seems unlikely. Rather, the offi cial self-representation will further refer extensively to the Holocaust. Debates over German victims, e.g. German refugees from the East, aerial bombings of German cities, or “good Ger-mans” like in Schindler’s List (1993) have shown that even potentially revisionist debates can only fl ourish if German guilt and the demarcation from the evil Nazi-past is admitted.
34 G.H. Oettinger, Ansprache des baden-württembergischen Ministerpräsidenten Günther H. Oet-tinger anlässlich des Staatsakts zum Tod von Ministerpräsident a. D. Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Hans Filbinger im Freiburger Münster [Address by the Baden-Württemberg Govenor Günther H. Oettinger on the
State Occasion of the Death of Govenor a. D. Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Hans Filbinger in the Freiburger Münster] [in:] Press Release No. 113/2007. 12.04.2007. Filbinger was one of the leading conservative fi gures in the CDU for decades and had been a member of the Nazi party since 1937. During the war, he worked as a judge, decreeing death penalties even in the last days of the Second World War. He infamously stated: “What was right before 1945 cannot be wrong aft er 1945” and, aft er 1945, fre-quently attacked what he viewed as self-critical attitudes towards the German past.
4. Judge-penitence
Although racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic discourses persist, a grammar-shift opens a new continuum for argumentative strategies of self- and other representa-tions, enabling, for example, narratives which admit the in-group’s past wrongdo-ings. However, even such a shift might not be immune to enable self-righteous narratives too.
As mentioned above, this article questions the very assumption that admissions of wrongdoing do necessarily enable more egalitarian and inclusive identities by introducing judge-penitence (again, I do not claim to provide a “representative” survey concerning the prevalence of judge-penitence in, e.g., Germany). My con-ceptualization of judge-penitence is orientated towards Jean-Baptiste Clamance, a fi gure from Camus’ novel Th e Fall who follows the motto; “[t]he more I accuse
myself, the more I have a right to judge you”. Camus presents Clamance’s thesis through a staged dialogue between Clamance and a silent listener. Th e former is a previously successful and altruistic Parisian lawyer. But through a series of inci-dents, most importantly his reluctance to help a probable suicide victim, Clamance recognizes pure vanity behind the facade of altruism and becomes haunted by these memories of his own failure and self-pity. Suddenly, his pride in being an altruistic lawyer seems to him to be solely selfi sh in order to feel good. He therefore concludes that since “one could not condemn others without at the same time judging oneself, one should heap accusations on one’s own head, in order to have the right to judge others. Since every judge eventually becomes a penitent, one had to take the opposite route and be a professional penitent in order to become a judge”35.
Th us, judge-penitence admits a problematic past by confessing wrongdoing in order to enable the construction of the in-group as morally superior; while we learnt the painful lessons from the past, they stubbornly refuse to accept these lessons. Th is represents an instrumentalization based on “pride in atonement”, a “pathology of pride”, as Solomon puts it. Th e latter characterizes Th e Fall as
a “condemnation of resentful pride and superiority, pride that refuses to recognize itself as such and superiority that proves itself only by stealth and subversion”36. It is thereby that pride and prejudice become possible even against the background of a post-heroic grammar. Instead of constant refl ection on the in-group’s
bur-35 A. Camus, Th e Fall, London 2000, p. 88.
36 R.C. Solomon, Pathologies of Pride in Camus’s Th e Fall, “Philosophy and Literature” 2004,
dened past, self-righteousness blocks tendencies inherent in sincere confessions of wrongdoing towards a more inclusive identity. Instead of widening the circle of the we by admitting the harm we have caused to others and thereby transforming the moral boundaries of the community in an egalitarian and universal direction, the process of communicating with “the other” is closed. It becomes an argument about or even against “the other”. Th erefore, the wrongdoing is no longer the pri-mary focus. While “public rituals of confession of guilt” construct the in-group’s own past as the evil “other” from which it has to demarcate itself, judge-penitence constructs the in-group via the exclusion of an external, now morally inferior “other”. As such, judge-penitence cannot be understood in terms of traditional strategies of identity construction, e.g. shift ing blame, as it depends on (implicit) admissions of wrongdoing by the in-group. It is precisely by humbling one, that the agent legitimizes her/himself in order to construct “the other” as morally in-ferior. Mirroring a minor, subtle rhetorical strategy, there is, however, little doubt that narratives of innocence, sacrifi ce, and bravery oft en remain at the core of a community’s self-understanding37. Even in the case of Germany, it is obvious that racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism persist38.
Th e above ideal-typical conceptualization of judge-penitence consists thus of three elements: fi rstly, there has to be an implicit or explicit confession of guilt or at least an inter-textual reference to a self-critical admission of one’s own wrong past. Secondly, there has to be an implicit or explicit claim that “we learnt the les-sons from the past”. Th irdly, an “other” has to be nominated, who has, apparently, not learnt these lessons. And even if a negative evaluation of “the other”, due to one’s own historical experience, is not necessarily a regressive instrumentalization, but justifi able and principled, the discursive realization could still follow the pur-pose of a regressive positive self- and negative other construction. Much depends therefore on how exactly these claims are semiotically realized. In the following, I illustrate this via a brief passage taken from an academic article by the German political scientist and sociologist Massing, a loose proponent of the Critical Th e-ory of the Frankfurt School since the 1960s39.
37 Note however, that rhetorical patterns similar to judge-penitence have been analyzed in
speeches by EU Commissioners, cf. B. Forchtner, C. Kølvraa, Narrating a “New Europe”: From “Bitter
Past” to Self-Righteousness?, “Discourse & Society”, under review.
38 Most recent assessments are collected in W. Heitmeyer, Deutsche Zustände. Folge 8 [German
Conditions. Vol. 8], Frankfurt/Main 2010.
39 O. Massing, Zur politischen Funktion und symbolischen Bedeutung des “8. Mai” [On the
Po-litical Function and Symbolic Meaning of “8. May”] [in:] Gründungsmythen und politische Rituale [Founding Myths and Political Ritual], Baden-Baden 2000, p. 81. My research draws on the meth-odological framework of the discourse-historical approach (DHA) in critical discourse analysis. Due
If all these pasts [National Socialism and the German Democratic Republic] are worked through, even if they should be resolved and overcome to our utmost sat-isfaction, we should not cede to a division of responsibility: on the one hand those responsible for remembering, commemorating, for “cathartic self-refl ection”, on the other hand those who are responsible for dealing with daily business, competent in political building work and economic effi ciency, coping with the present, the cur-rent perpetrators. But who stops the perpetrators, the unscrupulous, unwilling to refl ect, too lazy to remember?
Th e passage appeared at the end of an article under the subheading Epilog:
“Rememberer” and “Perpetrators” – which already indicates a polarization, which
will prove to be central in Massing’s construction. While the article consists of sometimes harsh criticism of the politics of the United States of America, it is in this fi nal passage that the piece becomes more speculative and identity-related, and does seem to adopt judge-penitence. Accordingly, the construction of a self via discursive strategies of predication is not based on a traditional positive self-image, e.g. via reference to heroic acts of resistance to an evil “other”. Instead, one’s own wrongdoing is implicitly admitted; aft er all, why should one otherwise “work through” the past, remember, commemorate, and refl ect on it? Th e nomination of this learning subject is crucial here; it is not a clearly identifi ed group or even an individual who’s success in “learning the lesson” could be rationally debated. In-stead, Massing refers to a homogeneous “we”, arguably committing a fallacy of
hasty generalization. Aft er all, “we” here refers to “the Germans” as the agents of
working through the past, remembrance, commemoration, and self-refl ection. Not only is this a doubtful proposition (What about German revisionists?), but does this nomination also (as well as the formulation “division of responsibility”, italics added) enable a sharp dichotomy between the in-group and the out-group. “Th e other”, in the context of this article, is the USA, which is associated with more profane tasks (“daily business”, “economic effi ciency”). Th is critical representation of a division could be accurate, but the sharp dichotomy followed by the formula-tion “current perpetrators” turns it into a highly problematic passage. By applying temporal deixis (“current”), Massing separates “current” from past wrongdoers
to space restrictions, I cannot elaborate on this methodology here which, however, also provides the analytical categories (discourse, a multidimensional concept of context, discursive strategies, tools taken from argumentation theory and linguistic pragmatics, etc.) utilized in the below example. For a particularly accessible introduction to the DHA, cf. M. Reisigl, R. Wodak, Th e Discourse-Historical Approach [in:] Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Second Edition, R. Wodak, M. Meyer (eds.),
and, following the implicit admission of wrongdoing above, “we” (Germany) do not take the position of “current perpetrators” (Germany already occupies the position of past perpetrators). Th us, it is the USA, which is referred to as “current perpetrators”. In addition, the lexical item “perpetrator” (Täter) is, in German – although not exclusively, but arguably within the context of this article, which deals with the aft ermath of World War II – linked to National Socialism (cf. the use of the term “Tätervolk” in section 3.3). Such an interpretation suggests itself also because of the aforementioned deictic expression, which connects National Social-ist German crimes with “current” US crimes. By opting for this lexical choice, Massing (a) links the USA implicitly to National Socialism and, thus, the worst crimes in history, but also (b) moves from characterizing the USA in profane terms (“daily business”, etc.) to predicating it as criminal. Th is is further intensifi ed through predications such as “unscrupulous” and, arguably worst, “unwilling to refl ect, too lazy to remember”. Crucially, the USA is now not simply described negatively. Rather, through applying an argumentum ad hominem, the USA is not only denied any learning, but the very will or wish to learn. Th rough this “pathol-ogization”, the USA is damaged to a degree that discursively cements its moral inferiority. Nevertheless, even given this harsh construction, this example of judge-penitence does not resemble the ideal-type conceptualized above – no empirical example will ever do so. Still, the example illustrates how foregrounding one’s own wrongdoing, a counterintuitive strategy in presenting the self, can enable a positive self- and negative other representation.
But again, this does not imply that criticism on the basis of “lessons from the past” is problematic per se. What is crucial is how this criticism is presented – it does not need to draw on homogenizing them or us, nor does it require the use of
ad hominem arguments.
5. Summary
In this article, I recapitulated the current tendency in many modern societies to self-critically refl ect on their past, i.e. on themselves. I suggested the concept of a post-heroic grammar that structures, i.e. fi lters and synthesizes, public debates. I claimed that separating a deep structure (grammar) from surface phenomena (narratives) does enable an understanding of the possibility of diff erent narratives, such as self-critical narratives about a “bitter past” as well as self-righteous judge-penitence, all of which rely on one type of grammar. Certainly, this development has not overcome racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism – nor are “public rituals
of confession of guilt” immune to cynical misuse. However, in an increasingly fragmented public sphere, at least some actors might perform on the basis of such a post-heroic grammar.
Admissions of past wrongdoings are welcome as they enable the recognition of others. However, they apparently enable misuses too, which have attracted little scrutiny so far. To point to this counterintuitive misuse (and to conceptualize it) has been the prime purpose of this article. Th e example analyzed above illustrates that even against the background of a rather post-heroic grammar and self-critical narrations of a “bitter past”, narratives of judge-penitence might emerge, demarcat-ing the in-group from an out-group by means of resentful pride and prejudice. Crucially, this argumentative form is not restricted to a particular in-group (Ger-many), a particular wrongdoing (the Holocaust), or a particular “other” (the USA) but can be applied by various actors, with regards to diff erent pasts and target a variety of “others”. Such self-righteous self-representations should always be viewed with suspicion as they betray the promises inherent in the very act they rest on: admissions of wrongdoing.
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