Tales of Affect, ‘Thick’ and ‘Thin’: On Distantiation in Holocaust Historiography

Abstract

The problem of emotional and spatiotemporal distantiation in Holocaust historiography is approached through an elaboration on ‘affect’ broadly defined as differing intensities of intra- and intersubjective reactivity to an ideational or external source. Within this schema, ‘thick’ or ‘visceral’ affect designates a charged identification with past violences as though they were still actively present, in contrast to ‘thin’ or ‘rarefied’ affect, which refers to an apparent absence of this charge. This distinction is theorised with reference to Sigmund Freud’s ‘Introductory Lecture’ from 1916–17 on ‘Anxiety’ and his ‘New Introductory Lecture’ from 1932–36 on ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’. Reading between these lectures highlights the intimate relationship between anxiety and affect in Freudian psychoanalysis. By extension, the distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ affect is determined by the relative presence or absence of lifepreservative stress, which endows an affect with its intensity. The key claim is that while anxiety alone suffices to give an affect its intensity, traumatic episodes trigger a heightened sense of vulnerability and potentially leave behind a toxic confluence of humiliation, shame, paranoia, and ressentiment. Flagrant betrayals of a naively presumed survival consensus plant the social-psychological seeds of ‘visceral’ affect, which magnetises contemporary slights that fuel cycles of retaliatory brutality among subsequent generations during periods of instability. Conversely, ‘thin’ or ‘rarefied’ affect (affect under erasure) refers to variably motivated distantiating reactions: on the one hand, in situations punctuated by widespread atrocities, the perpetrator’s disavowal of the crimes he or she ordered or committed transpires as a defensive tendency to deflect critical judgements of his or her own actions and belittle or blame the victim; on the other hand, in ordinary circumstances, absorption in day-to-day survival might impel bystanders at various removes to disregard suffering, even in their immediate midst. In both cases, thin affect manifests itself as an apparent evacuation of compassionate identification with those in dire circumstances; it signals an economy in which people who might otherwise feel guilty or ashamed, manage, through a variety of psychic mechanisms, to disassociate, forget or even justify persecution or profound inequity. Illustrations of thick affect in bystander testimony draw upon John-Paul Himka’s review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost and Jan Gross’s Neighbors, two discussions that showcase instances of shocking brutality in atrocities committed against Ukrainian and Polish Jews, respectively. To elucidate thin affect, the analysis returns to Martin Broszat’s 1988 exchange of letters with the Jewish historian Saul Friedländer, where the German Second-World-War-generation historian repeatedly demeaned an ‘adamant’, ‘mythical’, ‘accusatory’, ‘insistent’, and ‘contrary’ Jewish memory for ‘coarsening’ historical understanding. Consulting Nicolas Berg’s Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker sheds light on Broszat’s background with the Institute for Contemporary History, which was involved in suppressing the Jewish survivor Joseph Wulf’s evidence against Dr Wilhelm Hagen. The essay concludes with a reflection on the biopolitical implications of a ‘dialectics’ between thick and thin affect, which suggests that a contemporaryhistoriographic construction of ‘normalcy’ as an appearance or perception of continuity privileges the standpoint of a subject who disavows his or her implication in the violence and crises that sentence others to destruction.