Holocaust Memory and Restorative Justice: Competition, Friction, and Convergences

Abstract

Holocaust Memory and Restorative JusticeCompetition, Friction, and Convergences Björn Krondorfer (bio) Keywords Holocaust, transitional justice, memory, restorative justice, Jewish and Christian responses, trauma, uniqueness, reconciliation, politics of difference, national entrenchment, dialogical engagement In Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Michael Rothberg argues for the value of overlapping and intersecting Holocaust memory with other collective memories. He traces how the history and memory of the Holocaust have been evoked, adopted, and employed as a way of making sense of political struggles and group identity in various colonial and postcolonial contexts. For Rothberg, the concept of multidirectional memory recognizes that remembrances of cataclysmic events do not cancel each other out but are venues through which meaningful moral and political decisions can be formed in the present. In a time when momentous collective (and often traumatic) memories flow freely and rapidly across national borders, they are often pitted against each other competitively. But, Rothberg argues, the idea of "competitive memory" must be abandoned since it assumes a public sphere that cannot hold "different collective memories"—as if it were "a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources."1 While Rothberg's study largely focuses on how the Holocaust has figured as a political, cultural, and moral trope in negotiating the meaning of the Algerian War (in which Algeria eventually won independence from France), it transcends any specific cultural location. His frame is global in perspective and rests on an ethical foundation that pursues the "notion of transnational, comparative justice."2 Consequently, Rothberg disagrees with claims that view the Holocaust (or any other calamity, for that matter) as a unique and incomparable event. [End Page 373] In this essay, I use Rothberg's critical intervention—multidirectional memory—and its application as a "shared moral and political project"3 to probe the dichotomizing language of uniqueness/universality when applied to memorable events of great harm. By eschewing competition among collective memories, I seek new pathways of justice-oriented, dialogical engagement. I do so by tracing, on the one hand, the rhetorical weight of Holocaust uniqueness claims (particularly in American and occasionally German contexts) and, on the other, the universalist claims of transitional justice as they evolved after 1945. I will read uniqueness claims through and against a transitional justice genealogy, eventually arriving at the concept of restorative justice. I will argue that neither uniqueness nor universality is a helpful mechanism for thwarting the entrenchment of partisan political memory. I propose, instead, to speak of "singularity" with respect to the gravity of each injurious history and collective memory. Creating a framework that averts competition among narratives of suffering will be "inevitably dialogical," as Rothberg suggests.4 It supplants the competitive deployment of political memory with an ethical vision of engaged relationality. UNIVERSAL, UNIQUE, SINGULAR: PRELIMINARY CLARIFICATIONS "The question of the uniqueness and universality of the Holocaust," writes Michael Berenbaum, "is being considered with increasing frequency not only in scholarly quarters with a focus on historiography but also in communities throughout the United States where Holocaust memorials and commemorative services raise a consciousness of the Holocaust."5 Berenbaum wrote those lines before the 1993 opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, at a time when Jewish American and Israeli scholars were debating the place of the Holocaust along the oppositional poles of uniqueness and universality. In his 1981 essay, Berenbaum briefly reviewed the positions of some of the major participants in the debate, including Yehuda Bauer, Lucy Dawidowicz, Emil Fackenheim, Elie Wiesel, Richard Rubenstein, Ismar Schorsch, Eliezer Berkovits, Robert Alter, and Henry Feingold. Berenbaum, who had been a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, sided with a restrained embrace of the uniqueness claim, arguing that neither the perceived threat of a so-called Americanization of the [End Page 374] Holocaust nor the attempt to compare Jewish victims to other victim groups or other genocides would diminish the historical uniqueness for the Jewish community. To Americanize the Holocaust, he suggested, is just a way of telling "the story . . . in such a way that it resonates" with an American audience; to compare the Holocaust to other events, he continued, is no cause for fear since they are "analogous...